Volume 21, Issue 1

The present paper focusses on the historical development of the relationship between the English core modals can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might and must and the negator not . It explores whether semantic and morphosyntactic factors, particularly the emergence of do -support in Early Modern English, the increase in the popularity of contracted forms such as won’t in the nineteenth century and the loss of core modals in the twentieth century, had an influence on negation rates. Large-scale empirical analyses of modal use in historical corpora of British prose fiction published between ca. 1500 and 1990 reveal that many modals—particularly high-frequency will, would, can and could —indeed attract not . The establishment of the contractions n’t, ’ll and ’d had the strongest effect on the modal-negation system after 1500. The availability of the contracted modals ’ll and ’d led to a functional split whereby will and would became much more strongly associated with negation while contracted ’ll and ’d repel not -negation.

Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to corpus data to quantify the strength of selection in specific instances of historical language change. We first demonstrate, in the context of English irregular verbs, that this method is more reliable and interpretable than similar methods that have previously been applied. We further extend this study to demonstrate that a bias towards phonological simplicity overrides that favouring grammatical simplicity when these are in conflict. Finally, with reference to Spanish spelling reforms, we show that the method can also detect points in time at which selection strengths change, a feature that is generically expected for socially-motivated language change. Together, these results indicate how hypotheses for mechanisms of language change can be tested quantitatively using historical corpus data.

Despite extensive research on the ba -construction in Chinese, the diachronic change in the alternation between the ba and jiang constructions has received little attention. The present study takes a multifactorial approach to examine the factors that probabilistically condition the alternation based on diachronic data across twelve centuries. The results suggest two general trends. First, the odds of the ba -construction have increased over time at the expense of the jiang -construction. Second, over time, the effect size of the significant preference for the jiang -construction in informal genres has reduced from the 10th to the 19th century, and this preference has disappeared in modern times; accordingly, both informal and formal genres have converged to favor the ba -construction in modern times. Regression modeling also shows that there are both stable linguistic constraints (parallelism/syntactic priming, verb type, NP2 animacy, and NP2 length) and fluid constraints (adjunct semantics, and genre). This study advances our knowledge of the two disposal constructions and their evolution, sheds light on the Principle of No Synonymy (Bolinger, Dwight. 1977. Meaning and form . New York: Longman; Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; Goldberg, Adele E. 2002. Surface generalizations: An alternative to alternations. Cognitive Linguistics 13(4). 327–356), and makes a methodological contribution to the empirical testing of hypotheses. It can also provide insight into grammatical alternations in Mandarin.

Concessive clause positioning as a result of multi-cue competition has been widely examined in L1 and L2 English learners. This study furthers the present research by examining competition patterns among contingency, L1 transfer, and salience factors in concessive clause positioning by Chinese EFL learners. We extracted 1,356 concessive subordinations conjoined by although and though from native and learner argumentative essays, and used multifactorial models to examine the effectiveness, tuning tendency, and power ranking of the cues that tune concessive clause positions. A critical contingency competition was tentatively concluded in concessive clause positioning by Chinese EFL learners. That is, in cue consistency across native and learner datasets, contingency values assume the baseline role, which L1 transfer hinders while salience promotes. In addition, a critical contingency value exists, above which L1 transfer effects are not stronger than contingency and salience effects, so that cue consistency would usually be maintained and vice versa.

Nominal compounds are a structure commonly used in scientific texts. Despite their commonality, very little is known about how they are distributed in scientific articles. Based on the Uniform Information Density hypothesis, which states that speakers communicate information at a constant rate, avoiding peaks and troughs of information transmission, we predict that nominal compounds should cluster toward the end of scientific texts, be preceded by supporting text that facilitates their understanding, and be repeated often after their first use. In this paper, we examine these predictions through a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of a corpus of scientific papers from the fields of Biology, Economics and Linguistics. While our investigation did not reveal definitive findings for the first and third predictions above, it did produce supporting evidence in favor of our second prediction, thus advancing our understanding of NC use and the choices speakers make when transmitting information.

Following Ariel (2021. Why it’s hard to construct ad hoc number concepts. In Caterina Mauri, Ilaria Fiorentini, & Eugenio Goria (eds.), Building categories in interaction: Linguistic resources at work , 439–462. Amsterdam: John Benjamins), we argue that number words manifest distinct distributional patterns from open-class lexical items. When modified, open-class words typically take selectors (as in kinda table ), which select a subset of their potential denotations (e.g., “nonprototypical table”). They are typically not modified by loosening operators (e.g., approximately ), since even if bare, typical lexemes can broaden their interpretation (e.g., table referring to a rock used as a table). Number words, on the other hand, have a single, precise meaning and denotation and cannot take a selector, which would need to select a subset of their (single) denotation (?? kinda seven ). However, they are often overtly broadened ( approximately seven ), creating a range of values around N . First, we extend Ariel’s empirical examination to the larger COCA and to Hebrew (HeTenTen). Second, we propose that open-class and number words belong to sparse versus dense lexical domains, respectively, because the former exhibit prototypicality effects, but the latter do not. Third, we further support the contrast between sparse and dense domains by reference to: synchronic word2vec models of sparse and dense lexemes, which testify to their differential distributions, numeral use in noncounting communities, and different renewal rates for the two lexical types.

Taking a multifactorial approach, this article profiles the formal and semantic changes of Chinese analytic causative construction (CACC for short) and its jiao 1 , jiao 2 , ling , rang and shi micro-constructions. It is found that CACC micro-constructions have undergone two types of formal change. Building on a data-driven periodization of diachronic data, this study analyzes semantic changes of CACC and its micro-constructions from semasiological and onomasiological perspectives and at local constituent and global construction levels. Major findings are as follows: six stages are identified in the semantic development of CACC micro-constructions. Semasiologically, diachronic semantic prototypicality of CACC remains constant while that of its micro-constructions changes with time. A general polysemization route is followed by CACC and its micro-constructions, with the superordinate CACC governing the subordinate micro-constructions in semantic change pathway. Onomasiologically, diachronic semantic division of labor among CACC micro-constructions varies over time. For CACC micro-constructions, semantics of local causer, causee and effected predicate tends to change in concert with global constructional semantics at early and late periods of semantic development, whereas local and global semantic changes during the intermediary stages are usually partially coordinated. This study has demonstrated the application of collostructional analysis in investigating diachronic semantic change of a construction.