Abstract
Many grammaticalization pathways recur across languages. A prominent explanation for this is that the properties of lexical items determine their developmental pathways. However, it is unclear why these pathways do not always occur. In this article, we ask why English did not undergo a cross-linguistically common grammaticalization pathway, finish > anterior. We operationalize this question by testing a theory proposed on results regarding a language that did undergo this change, Spanish, on corpus and experimental data. While English finish constructions are associated with some of the distributional properties of Early Spanish finish, speakers do not show evidence of conventionally associating finish constructions with a particular type of inference crucial for the grammaticalization of the Spanish anterior. We propose that the non-conventionality of this inference blocks the grammaticalization of finish constructions in English, demonstrating that some of the black box of language change currently attributed to chance can be explored empirically.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the reviewers for the constructive and helpful comments, as well as Haim Dubossarsky, Uta Reinöhl, Shira Tal and Freek van de Velde for detailed comments on earlier drafts and to José Andrés Alonso de la Fuente' for comments on a later draft. We are also grateful to the audiences at the workshop ‘Beyond Time’ (Brussels, Belgium, 7 February 2020), the Academia Grammaticorum Salensis Septima Decima (Salos, Lithuania, 28 July 2020) and the Center for the Study of Language and Society (Bern, Switzerland, 28 October 2020), for their valuable feedback. Malte Rosemeyer thanks Albert Wall for his help with the implementation of the experimental paradigm. Eitan Grossman thanks the Mandel Scholion Research Center of the Hebrew University for its support of the Historical Linguistics and Formal Semantics research group, as well as the members and guests of the group, in particular Omri Amiraz, Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, Noa Bassel, Nora Boneh, and Shira Tal, for many hours of inspiring discussions.
Dependent variable: Gerund_bin | |
---|---|
After | 1.170 (0.760) |
Determinationindef | 0.003 (1.601) |
Determinationnone | 3.001** (1.398) |
Determinationposs | 2.798*** (0.999) |
PMI_FinishObj | −0.290*** (0.103) |
AfterTRUE:Determinationindef | 2.445 (3.239) |
AfterTRUE:Determinationnone | −5.261*** (1.871) |
AfterTRUE:Determinationposs | −4.538*** (1.334) |
AfterTRUE:PMI_FinishObj | −0.134 (0.176) |
Determinationindef:PMI_FinishObj | −0.123 (0.377) |
Determinationnone:PMI_FinishObj | −0.583** (0.271) |
Determinationposs:PMI_FinishObj | −0.867*** (0.241) |
AfterTRUE:Determinationindef:PMI_FinishObj | −0.803 (0.809) |
AfterTRUE:Determinationnone:PMI_FinishObj | 0.973*** (0.361) |
AfterTRUE:Determinationposs:PMI_FinishObj | 0.957*** (0.310) |
Constant | 0.990** (0.439) |
Observations | 660 |
Log Likelihood | −352.647 |
Akaike inf. crit. | 739.293 |
Bayesian inf. crit. | 815.661 |
-
Note: *p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01.
Dependent variable: RT | |
---|---|
GerundInformativeGerund | 34.178** (15.871) |
GerundUninformativeGerund | 32.941** (15.494) |
SubordinationAwa | −2.573 (15.838) |
Age | 28.350* (16.569) |
Sexmale | −62.572 (40.205) |
WordFreq | −15.799*** (4.714) |
Trial | −45.004*** (4.431) |
GerundInformativeGerund:SubordinationAwa | 1.896 (22.555) |
GerundUninformativeGerund:SubordinationAwa | −12.735 (21.982) |
Constant | 458.906*** (37.072) |
Observations | 848 |
Log likelihood | −5,336.686 |
Akaike inf. crit. | 10,699.370 |
Bayesian inf. crit. | 10,761.030 |
-
Note: *p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01.
References
Andersen, Henning (ed.). 2001. Actualization: Linguistic change in progress. In Papers from a workshop held at the 14th international conference on historical linguistics, Vancouver, B.C., 14 August 1999. Amsterdam: Benjamins.10.1075/cilt.219Search in Google Scholar
Ansaldo, Umberto & Lisa Lim. 2004. Phonetic absence as syntactic prominence: Grammaticalization in isolating tonal languages. In Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon (eds.), Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization, 345–362. Amsterdam: John Benjamin.10.1075/tsl.59.18ansSearch in Google Scholar
Ariel, Mira. 2008. Pragmatics and grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511791314Search in Google Scholar
Bar-Asher Siegal, Elitzur A. 2020. A formal approach to reanalysis: The case of a negative counterfactual marker. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 5(2). 34–50. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v5i2.4792. In Formal approaches to grammaticalization.Search in Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Martin Mächler, Bolker Ben & Steve Walker. 2015. Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1). 1–48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01.Search in Google Scholar
Bickel, Balthasar. 2015. Distributional typology: Statistical inquiries into the dynamics of linguistic diversity. In Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis, 2nd edn. 901–923. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Bickel, Balthasar. 2017. Areas and universals. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of areal linguistics, 40–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781107279872.004Search in Google Scholar
Blaette, Andreas. 2020. polmineR: Verbs and nouns for corpus analysis. R package version 0.8.2.Search in Google Scholar
Burridge, Kathryn. 2006. Language contact and convergence in Pennsylvania German. In Robert M. W. Dixon & Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (eds.), Grammars in contact. A cross-linguistic typology, 179–200. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins & William Pagliuca. 1994. The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2017a. British national corpus (BNC). https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/ (accessed 13 May 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2017b. Corpus of contemporary American English (COCA). https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/ (accessed 13 May 2019).Search in Google Scholar
de Smet, Hendrik. 2012. The course of actualization. Language 88(3). 601–633. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2012.0056.Search in Google Scholar
De Smet, Hendrik & Freek Van de Velde. 2013. Serving two masters: Form-function friction in language change. Studies in Language 371(3). 534–565. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.37.3.04des.Search in Google Scholar
De Smet, Hendrik & Freek Van de Velde. 2017. Experimenting on the past: A case study on changing analysability in English ly-adverbs. English Language and Linguistics 21. 317–340. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1360674317000168.Search in Google Scholar
De Vogelaer, Gunther. 2010. Morphological change in continental West Germanic: Towards an analogical map. Diachronica 27(1). 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.27.1.01dev.Search in Google Scholar
Detges, Ulrich & Richard Waltereit. 2002. Grammaticalization vs. reanalysis: A semantic-pragmatic account of functional change in grammar. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 21(2). 151–195. https://doi.org/10.1515/zfsw.2002.21.2.151.Search in Google Scholar
Drinka, Bridget. 2017. Language contact in Europe: The periphrastic perfect through history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781139027694Search in Google Scholar
Drummond, Alex. 2020. Ibex. Internet based experiments. https://spellout.net/ibexfarm/ (accessed 24 June 2020).Search in Google Scholar
Eckardt, Regina. 2006. Meaning change in grammaticalization. An enquiry into semantic reanalysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199262601.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Eckardt, Regina. 2009. APO: Avoid pragmatic overload. In Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen & Jacqueline Visconti (eds.), Current trends in diachronic semantics and pragmatics, 21–41. Bingley: Emerald.10.1163/9789004253216_003Search in Google Scholar
Ehmer, Oliver & Malte Rosemeyer. 2018. Inferences in interaction and language change. Open Linguistics 4. 536–551. https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2018-0026.Search in Google Scholar
Enfield, Nicholas J. 1994. Linguistic epidemiology: Semantics and grammar of language contact in mainland Southeast Asia. London: Routledge Curzon.Search in Google Scholar
Fischer, Olga. 1997. The grammaticalisation of infinitival to in English compared with German and Dutch. In Raymond Hickey & Stanislav Puppel (eds.), Language history and linguistic modelling, a Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60th birthday, 265–280. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110820751.265Search in Google Scholar
Fischer, Olga. 2007. Morphosyntactic change. Functional and formal perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Fox, John and Sanford Weisberg. 2019. An R companion to applied regression, 3rd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. http://tinyurl.com/carbook (accessed 31 August 2020).Search in Google Scholar
Gafter, Roey J., Spicer Scott & Mira Ariel. 2019. How does bring (not) change to give? Folia Linguistica 53(2). 443–477. https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2019-2017.Search in Google Scholar
Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics: Vol. 3: Speech acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.10.1163/9789004368811_003Search in Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Thomas. 2009. Quantitative corpus linguistics with R. A practical introduction. New York, London: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Thomas. 2015. The most under-used statistical method in corpus linguistics: Multi-level (and mixed-effects) models. Corpora 10(1). 95–125. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2015.0068.Search in Google Scholar
Grossman, Eitan & Ira Noveck. 2015. What can historical linguistics and experimental pragmatics offer each other? Linguistics Vanguard 1(1). 145–153. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2015-1005.Search in Google Scholar
Grossman, Eitan & Stéphane Polis. 2014. On the pragmatics of subjectification: The grammaticalization of verbless allative futures (with a case study in Ancient Egyptian). Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 46(1). 1–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/03740463.2014.956007.Search in Google Scholar
Grupo Gramática y Diacronía. 2015. Corpus GRADIA. http://gradiadiacronia.wixsite.com/gradia/corpus-gradia (accessed 18 September 2016).Search in Google Scholar
Hagoort, Peter, Lea Hald, Marcel Bastiaansen & Petersson Karl Magnus. 2004. Integration of word meaning and world knowledge in language comprehension. Science 304(5669). 438–441. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1095455.Search in Google Scholar
Hale, Mark. 1998. Diachronic syntax. Syntax 1. 1–18.10.1111/1467-9612.00001Search in Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva. 2005. Language contact and grammatical change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511614132Search in Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin. 2014. Collostructional analysis. Measuring associations between constructions and lexical elements. In Dylan Glynn & Justyna A. Robinson (eds.), Corpus methods for semantics: Quantitative studies in polysemy and synonymy, 391–404. Amsterdam: Benjamins.10.1075/hcp.43.15hilSearch in Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin & David Correia Saavedra. 2018. The unidirectionality of semantic changes in grammaticalization: An experimental approach to the asymmetric priming hypothesis. English Language and Linguistics 22(3). 357–380. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1360674316000496.Search in Google Scholar
Hlavac, Marek. 2018. Stargazer: Well-formatted regression and summary statistics tables. R package version 5.2.2.Search in Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth C. Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139165525Search in Google Scholar
Huang, Yan. 2011. Types of inference: Entailment, presupposition, and implicature. In Wolfram Bublitz & Neal R. Norrick (eds.), Foundations of pragmatics, 397–421. Berlin: De Gruyter.10.1515/9783110214260.397Search in Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul. 2012. Grammaticalization as optimization. In Dianne Jonas, John Whitman & Andrew Garrett (eds.), Grammatical change: Origins, nature, outcomes, 15–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Kleiber, Georges. 1999. Problèmes de sémantique. La polysémie en questions. Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion.10.4000/books.septentrion.116693Search in Google Scholar
Lauwers, Peter & Dominique Willems. 2011. Coercion: Definition and challenges, current approaches, and new trends. Linguistics 49(6). 1219–1235. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.2011.034.Search in Google Scholar
Manning, Christopher D. & Hinrich Schütze. 1999. Foundations of statistical natural language processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Michaelis, Laura A. 2004. Type shifting in construction grammar: An integrated approach to aspectual coercion. Cognitive Linguistics 15. 1–67. https://doi.org/10.1515/cogl.2004.001.Search in Google Scholar
Oakes, Michael P. 1998. Statistics for corpus linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Pustejovsky, James. 1995. The generative lexicon. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
R Development Core Team. 2019. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. http://www.R-project.org (accessed 15 November 2017).Search in Google Scholar
Roberts, Ian & Roussou Anna. 2003. Syntactic change. A minimalist approach to grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511486326Search in Google Scholar
Rohde, Hannah. 2020. If you don’t have anything nice interesting to say, don’t say anything at all. Talk given at CUNY 2020. https://osf.io/e3dxq/ (accessed 1 September 2020).Search in Google Scholar
Rosemeyer, Malte & Eitan Grossman. 2017. The road to auxiliariness revisited: The grammaticalization of finish anteriors in spanish. Diachronica 34(4). 516–558. https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.16024.ros.Search in Google Scholar
Schneider, Ulrike. 2018. ΔP as a measure of collocation strength. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 16(2). 249–274. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2017-0036.Search in Google Scholar
Schwenter, Scott & Richard Waltereit. 2010. Presupposition accommodation and semantic change. In Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelanotte & Cuyckens Hubert (eds.), Subjectification, intersubjectification, and grammaticalization, 75–102. Berlin: De Gruyter.10.1515/9783110226102.2.75Search in Google Scholar
Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Stefan T. Gries. 2003. Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2). 209–243. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.8.2.03ste.Search in Google Scholar
Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Stefan T. Gries. 2005. Covarying collexemes. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(1). 1–43. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt.2005.1.1.1.Search in Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali. 2012. Variationist sociolinguistics. Change, observation, interpretation. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth & Richard Dasher. 2003. Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C. & König Ekkehard. 1991. The semantics-pragmatics of grammaticalization revisited. In Elizabeth C. Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization, i: Focus on theoretical and methodological issues, 189–218. Amsterdam: John Benjamin.10.1075/tsl.19.1.10cloSearch in Google Scholar
Troyer, Melissa & Marta Kutas. 2018. Harry Potter and the chamber of what?: The impact of what individuals know on word processing during reading. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 35(5). 641–657. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2018.1503309.Search in Google Scholar
van Gelderen, Elly. 2004. Grammaticalization as economy. Amsterdam: Benjamins.10.1075/la.71Search in Google Scholar
Verstraete, Jean-Christophe. 2008. Same source, same target, different paths: From ‘person’ to reflexive in Umpithamu and other Paman languages. Language Sciences 30. 599–620. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2007.03.001.Search in Google Scholar
Veyrat Rigat, Montserrat. 1994. La perífrasis verbal acabar de + infinitivo y la resolución de su ambigüedad. Vox Romanica 53. 238–252.Search in Google Scholar
Walkden, George. 2017. The actuation problem. In Ledgeway Adam & Ian Roberts (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of historical syntax, 403–424. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781107279070.020Search in Google Scholar
Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov & Marvin Herzog. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In Winfred Lehamn & Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Directions for historical linguistics, 95–195. Austin: University of Texas Press.Search in Google Scholar
Wickham, Harald. 2016. ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis. New York: Springer.10.1007/978-3-319-24277-4Search in Google Scholar
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston