Abstract
The topic of the “negative end” of change is, unlike the fields of innovation and emergence, largely under-researched. Yet, it has lately started to increasingly gain attention from language scholars worldwide. The main focus of this article is threefold, namely to discuss (i) the terminology, (ii) the concepts, and (iii) the causes associated with the “negative end” of change in grammar. The article begins with an overview of research conducted on the topic. It then moves to situating phenomena referred to as loss, decline or obsolescence among processes of language change before elaborating on the terminology and concepts behind it. The last part of the paper looks at possible causes for constructions to display a gradual or rapid, but very consistent decrease in the frequency of use over time, which continues until the construction disappears or until there are only residual or fossilised forms left.
References
Ashby, William J. 1981. The loss of the negative particle ne in French: A syntactic change in progress. Language 57(3). 674–687. https://doi.org/10.2307/414345.Search in Google Scholar
Barber, Charles. 1964. Linguistic change in present-day English. London and Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.Search in Google Scholar
Barðdal, Johanna & Spike Gildea. 2015. Diachronic construction grammar: Epistemological context, basic assumptions and historical implications. In Johanna Barðdal, Elena Smirnova, Lotte Sommerer & Spike Gildea (eds.), Diachronic construction grammar, 1–50. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/cal.18.01barSearch in Google Scholar
Blanco-García, Cristina. 2017. Ephemerality in concessive subordinators. Evidence from the history of English. In Sofía Bemposta-Rivas, Carla Bouzada-Jabois, Yolanda Fernández-Pena, Tamara Bouso, J Yolanda, Calvo-Benzies & Iván Tamaredo (eds.), New trends and methodologies in applied English language research III: Synchronic and diachronic studies on discourse, lexis and grammar processing [Linguistic Insights Series], 59–81. Bern: Peter Lang.Search in Google Scholar
De Smet, Hendrik. 2013. Spreading patterns: Diffusional change in the English system of complementation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199812752.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Elsweiler, Christine & Judith Huber. Loss of number in the English second person pronoun: A change for the worse, but due to a change for the better?. In Dankmar Enke, Thilo Weber, Larry Hyman, Johanna Nichols & Guido Seiler (eds.), Language change for the worse [Studies in Diversity Linguistics]. Berlin: Language Science Press, forthcoming. https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/292.Search in Google Scholar
Fritz, Gerd. 2006. Historische Semantik. Stuttgart/Weimar: J.B. Metzler.10.1007/978-3-476-01408-5Search in Google Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1991. The last stages of grammatical elements: Contractive and expansive desemanticization. In Elizabeth Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization, 301–314. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/tsl.19.1.14greSearch in Google Scholar
Hansen, Björn. 2017. What happens after grammaticalization? Post-grammaticalization processes in the area of modality. In Daniel Van Olmen, Hubert Cuyckens & Lobke Ghesquière (eds.), Aspects of grammaticalization: (Inter)subjectification and directionality, 257–280. Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110492347-010Search in Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 2004. On directionality in language change with particular reference to grammaticalization. In Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon (eds.), Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization, 17–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/tsl.59.03hasSearch in Google Scholar
Hickey, Raymond. 2012. Internally and externally motivated language change. In Juan Manuel Hernández-Compoy & Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (eds.), The handbook of historical sociolinguistics, 401–421. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.10.1002/9781118257227.ch21Search in Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin. 2012. Diachronic collostructional analysis meets the noun phrase. Studying many a noun in COHA. In Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of English, 233–244. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199922765.013.0022Search in Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin. 2013. Constructional change in English: Developments in allomorphy, word formation, and syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139004206Search in Google Scholar
Hiltunen, Risto. 1983. The decline of the prefixes and the beginnings of the English phrasal verb. The evidence from some Old and Early Middle English texts. Turku: Turun Yliopisto.Search in Google Scholar
Hiltunen, Turo, Jenni Räikkönen & Jukka Tyrkkö. 2020. Investigating colloquialization in the British parliamentary record in the late 19th and early 20th century. Language Sciences 79(2020). 101270. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2020.101270.Search in Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul. J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139165525Search in Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne. 2014. The demise of the being to V construction. Transactions of the Philological Society 112(2). 167–187. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968x.12035.Search in Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne & Geoffrey Leech. 2012. Small is beautiful: On the value of standard reference corpora for observing recent grammatical change. In Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of English, 175–188. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199922765.013.0017Search in Google Scholar
Imel, Brock. 2019. Sa nature proveir se volt: A new examination of leftward stylistic displacement in Medieval French through textual domain, information structure, and Oral Représenté. Berkeley, CA: University of California PhD dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Kastronic, Laura & Shana Poplack. 2014. The North-American English mandative subjunctive in the 21st century: Revival or remnant? Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 20(2). 71–80.Search in Google Scholar
Kempf, Luise. German so-relatives: Lost in grammatical, typological, and sociolinguistic change. In Svenja Kranich & Tine Breban (eds.), Lost in change: Causes and processes in the loss of grammatical elements and constructions. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, forthcoming. https://www.benjamins.com/catalog/slcs.218.10.1075/slcs.218.10kemSearch in Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd. 1997. Adverbial subordination. A typology and history of adverbial subordinators based on European languages. [Empirical Approaches to Language Typology 18]. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110812428Search in Google Scholar
Kranich, Svenja & Tine Breban. Introduction. In Svenja Kranich & Tine Breban (eds.), Lost in change: Causes and processes in the loss of grammatical elements and constructions. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, forthcoming. https://www.benjamins.com/catalog/slcs.218.10.1163/9789042031449_002Search in Google Scholar
Kuo, Yueh Hsin. A constructional account of the loss of the adverse avertive schema in Mandarin Chinese. In Svenja Kranich & Tine Breban (eds.), Lost in change: Causes and processes in the loss of grammatical elements and constructions. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, forthcoming. https://www.benjamins.com/catalog/slcs.218.10.1075/slcs.218.05kuoSearch in Google Scholar
Lass, Roger. 1990. How to do things with junk: Exaptation in language evolution. Journal of Linguistics 26(1). 79–102. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022226700014432.Search in Google Scholar
Lass, Roger. 1997. Historical linguistics and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511620928Search in Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair & Nicholas Smith. 2009. Change in contemporary English. A grammatical study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511642210Search in Google Scholar
Lorenz, David. 2013. Contractions of English semi-modals: The emancipating effect of frequency. NIHIN Studies. Freiburg: Rombach.Search in Google Scholar
Los, Bettelou. 2005. The rise of the to-infinitive. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199274765.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Mair, Christian. 1998. Corpora and the study of major varieties in English: Issues and results. In Hans Lindquist, Staffan Klintborg, Magnus Levin & Maria Estling (eds.), The major varieties of English: Papers from MAVEN 97, 139–157. VäxjöActa Wexionensia.Search in Google Scholar
Mair, Christian. 2006. Twentieth-century English: History, variation and standardization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511486951Search in Google Scholar
Mair, Christian & Geoffrey Leech. 2006. Current changes in English syntax. In Bas Aarts & April MacMahon (eds.), The handbook of English linguistics, 318–342. Oxford: Blackwell.10.1002/9780470753002.ch14Search in Google Scholar
Norde, Muriel. 2001. Deflexion as a counterdirectional factor in grammatical change. Language Sciences 23(2–3). 231–264.10.1016/S0388-0001(00)00022-XSearch in Google Scholar
Petré, Peter. 2010. The functions of weorðan and its loss in the past tense in Old and Middle English. English Language and Linguistics 14. 457–484. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1360674310000158.Search in Google Scholar
Rissanen, Matti. 2007. From op to till: Early loss of an adverbial subordinator. In Ursula Lenker & Anneli Meurman-Solin (eds.), Connectives in the history of English, 61–77. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/cilt.283.05risSearch in Google Scholar
Rohe, Udo. 2019. The progressive in present-day spoken English: Real-time studies of its spread and functional diversification. NIHIN Studies. Freiburg: Rombach.Search in Google Scholar
Rudnicka, Karolina. 2018. Variation of sentence length across time and genre: Influence on the syntactic usage in English. In Richard Jason Whitt (ed.), Diachronic corpora, genre, and language change, 219–240. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/scl.85.10rudSearch in Google Scholar
Rudnicka, Karolina. 2019. The statistics of obsolescence: Purpose subordinators in Late Modern English. NIHIN: New Ideas in Human Interaction: Studies. Freiburg: Rombach.Search in Google Scholar
Rudnicka, Karolina. So-adj-a construction as a case of obsolescence in progress. In Svenja Kranich & Tine Breban (eds.), Lost in change: Causes and processes in the loss of grammatical elements and constructions. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, forthcoming a. https://www.benjamins.com/catalog/slcs.218.10.1075/slcs.218.02rudSearch in Google Scholar
Rudnicka, Karolina. In order that – a data driven study of symptoms and causes of obsolescence. Linguistics Vanguard. To be published simultaneously with the present paper, forthcoming b. https://www.benjamins.com/catalog/slcs.218.10.1515/lingvan-2020-0092Search in Google Scholar
Schustack, Miriam W. 1988. Thinking about causality. In Robert J. Sternberg & Edward E. Smith (eds.), The psychology of human thought, 92–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Sommerer, Lotte & Klaus Hofmann. 2020. Constructional competition and network reconfiguration: Investigating sum(e) in Old, Middle and Early Modern English. English Language and Linguistics 25(1). 1–33. https://doi.org/10.1017/s136067431900039x.Search in Google Scholar
Tichý, Ondřej. 2018. Lexical obsolescence 1700–2000. In Joanna Kopaczyk & Jukka Tyrkkö (eds.), Patterns in text: Corpus-driven methods and applications, 81–104. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/scl.82.04ticSearch in Google Scholar
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial Note
- Editorial note
- Phonetics & Phonology
- Fast Track: fast (nearly) automatic formant-tracking using Praat
- Acoustic investigation of anticipatory vowel nasalization in a Caribbean and a non-Caribbean dialect of Spanish
- Evidence against a link between learning phonotactics and learning phonological alternations
- The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages
- Morphology & Syntax
- Brand names as multimodal constructions
- NP-internal structure and the distribution of adjectives in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ
- A quantitative investigation of the ellipsis of English relativizers
- Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha: expanding the typology of non-canonical morphotactics
- Semantics & Pragmatics
- Multifactorial Information Management (MIM): summing up the emerging alternative to Information Structure
- Language Documentation & Typology
- Current trends in grammar writing
- Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
- Experimental filler design influences error correction rates in a word restoration paradigm
- Phonological and morphological roles modulate the perception of consonant variants
- Language Acquisition and Language Learning
- Sounds like a dynamic system: a unifying approach to Language
- Sociolinguistics and Anthropological Linguistics
- Using hidden Markov models to find discrete targets in continuous sociophonetic data
- “It’s a Whole Vibe”: testing evaluations of grammatical and ungrammatical AAE on Twitter
- The sociolinguistics of /l/ in Manchester
- Computational & Corpus Linguistics
- An empirical study on the contribution of formal and semantic features to the grammatical gender of nouns
- A computational construction grammar approach to semantic frame extraction
- The “negative end” of change in grammar: terminology, concepts and causes
- In order that – a data-driven study of symptoms and causes of obsolescence
- Cognitive Linguistics
- Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
- Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
- Repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial Note
- Editorial note
- Phonetics & Phonology
- Fast Track: fast (nearly) automatic formant-tracking using Praat
- Acoustic investigation of anticipatory vowel nasalization in a Caribbean and a non-Caribbean dialect of Spanish
- Evidence against a link between learning phonotactics and learning phonological alternations
- The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages
- Morphology & Syntax
- Brand names as multimodal constructions
- NP-internal structure and the distribution of adjectives in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ
- A quantitative investigation of the ellipsis of English relativizers
- Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha: expanding the typology of non-canonical morphotactics
- Semantics & Pragmatics
- Multifactorial Information Management (MIM): summing up the emerging alternative to Information Structure
- Language Documentation & Typology
- Current trends in grammar writing
- Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
- Experimental filler design influences error correction rates in a word restoration paradigm
- Phonological and morphological roles modulate the perception of consonant variants
- Language Acquisition and Language Learning
- Sounds like a dynamic system: a unifying approach to Language
- Sociolinguistics and Anthropological Linguistics
- Using hidden Markov models to find discrete targets in continuous sociophonetic data
- “It’s a Whole Vibe”: testing evaluations of grammatical and ungrammatical AAE on Twitter
- The sociolinguistics of /l/ in Manchester
- Computational & Corpus Linguistics
- An empirical study on the contribution of formal and semantic features to the grammatical gender of nouns
- A computational construction grammar approach to semantic frame extraction
- The “negative end” of change in grammar: terminology, concepts and causes
- In order that – a data-driven study of symptoms and causes of obsolescence
- Cognitive Linguistics
- Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
- Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
- Repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions