“The next Morning I got a Warrant for the Man and his Wife, but he was fled”
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Marianne Hundt
Abstract
This chapter uses data from the Old Bailey Corpus to study the demise of the English BE-perfect between the 1720s and 1910s. The corpus provides ample evidence on the development in the period that saw the transition from BE to HAVE as perfect auxiliary in constructions with mutative verbs (i.e. intransitive verbs referring to a change of state or place); it also makes it possible to gauge the relative importance that social factors (such as speaker SEX, speaker ROLE or socio-economic background) may have played in the loss of one of the perfect variants. The stages for the development are derived from the data in a bottom-up approach using Variability-based Neighbour Clustering (VNC). In a second step, random forests and conditional inference trees are fitted to the data for each stage. The former provide information on the overall relative importance of predictor variables and the latter on interaction of predictor variables. It turns out that while, overall, social predictors play a far less important role in the process of loss than the predictor lexical VERB, they do show significant interaction with this language-internal variable. The speech-based socio-historical data thus add important details to previous studies on the loss of the BE-perfect, not least by lending support to the fact that this change happened largely below the level of speakers’ awareness.
Abstract
This chapter uses data from the Old Bailey Corpus to study the demise of the English BE-perfect between the 1720s and 1910s. The corpus provides ample evidence on the development in the period that saw the transition from BE to HAVE as perfect auxiliary in constructions with mutative verbs (i.e. intransitive verbs referring to a change of state or place); it also makes it possible to gauge the relative importance that social factors (such as speaker SEX, speaker ROLE or socio-economic background) may have played in the loss of one of the perfect variants. The stages for the development are derived from the data in a bottom-up approach using Variability-based Neighbour Clustering (VNC). In a second step, random forests and conditional inference trees are fitted to the data for each stage. The former provide information on the overall relative importance of predictor variables and the latter on interaction of predictor variables. It turns out that while, overall, social predictors play a far less important role in the process of loss than the predictor lexical VERB, they do show significant interaction with this language-internal variable. The speech-based socio-historical data thus add important details to previous studies on the loss of the BE-perfect, not least by lending support to the fact that this change happened largely below the level of speakers’ awareness.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Lost in Change 1
-
Part I. Modelling loss: Description, theory and method
- A typological perspective on the loss of inflection* 21
- So -adj- a construction as a case of obsolescence in progress 51
- The impersonal construction in the texts of Updated Old English 75
- Corpus driven identification of lexical bundle obsolescence in Late Modern English 101
- A constructional account of the loss of the adverse avertive schema in Mandarin Chinese 131
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Part II. Motivations and explanations for loss: Language-internal and external factors
- Loss or variation? Functional load in morpho-syntax – Three case studies 161
- “The next Morning I got a Warrant for the Man and his Wife, but he was fled” 199
- On the waning of forms – A corpus-based analysis of decline and loss in adjective amplification 235
- Decline and loss in the modal domain in recent English* 261
- German so -relatives 291
- Loss of object indexation in verbal paradigms of Koĩc (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal) 333
- Index 363
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Lost in Change 1
-
Part I. Modelling loss: Description, theory and method
- A typological perspective on the loss of inflection* 21
- So -adj- a construction as a case of obsolescence in progress 51
- The impersonal construction in the texts of Updated Old English 75
- Corpus driven identification of lexical bundle obsolescence in Late Modern English 101
- A constructional account of the loss of the adverse avertive schema in Mandarin Chinese 131
-
Part II. Motivations and explanations for loss: Language-internal and external factors
- Loss or variation? Functional load in morpho-syntax – Three case studies 161
- “The next Morning I got a Warrant for the Man and his Wife, but he was fled” 199
- On the waning of forms – A corpus-based analysis of decline and loss in adjective amplification 235
- Decline and loss in the modal domain in recent English* 261
- German so -relatives 291
- Loss of object indexation in verbal paradigms of Koĩc (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal) 333
- Index 363
