Grammaticalization and Language Change

Book published by John Benjamins (2012)

On ways of being on the way: from complex preposition to aspect marker

in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (2012), 17(2),

This article presents a case study of a set of constructions involving the related way-nouns way, road, track and route, exemplified by (i) on the road to Morocco, (ii) (be) on way to an outstanding ... [more ▼]

This article presents a case study of a set of constructions involving the related way-nouns way, road, track and route, exemplified by (i) on the road to Morocco, (ii) (be) on way to an outstanding English summer with county side Surrey, (iii) (be) on the way to becoming Britain’s No 1 sprinter / on her way to see her boyfriend. These distinct constructions are the synchronically co-existing layers of processes of semantic generalization and grammaticalization, the most important stages of which can be parsed as follows: (i) preposition + complement (way-noun head + of + noun2/postmodifier); (ii) aspectual marker incorporating complex preposition with way-noun + nominal complement; (iii) aspectual marker incorporating complex preposition with way-noun + verbal complement. We will show that the decategorialization approach that has typically been applied to emergent complex prepositions, which are viewed as progressively losing their nominal features such as determiners, makes wrong predictions about degrees of grammaticalization in this case. For this reason, and also to arrive at a more elucidating analysis of the reanalysed layers, we will investigate in what ways their lexicogrammatical features express their constituent functions. We also argue that the emergent layer of aspectual marker + verbal predicate adds complex and fine-grained meanings to the paradigm of English aspectual markers (cf. Diewald 2010), thus enriching the aspectual system. Finally, we show on the basis of the qualitative and quantitative findings of our usage-based study that the variants of the ‘on the way’ expressions display an interesting case of specialization in relation to the four way-nouns. [less ▲]

have/be no need: the interaction between negation and modality in verbonominal pathways of changes

Scientific conference (2011, July)

We investigate how modal meanings can emerge in nominal patterns, an under-researched source construction for modal meanings. We specifically look at how the combination of the noun need/needs with ... [more ▼]

We investigate how modal meanings can emerge in nominal patterns, an under-researched source construction for modal meanings. We specifically look at how the combination of the noun need/needs with negation markers of various kinds leads to such modal meanings related to the deontic and epistemic domain. [less ▲]

Complex subordinators derived from noun complement clauses

in Acta Linguistica Hafniensia : International Journal of Linguistics (2010), 42(2), 101-116

In this article, we investigate the development of complex subordinators from noun complement clauses in English, basing ourselves on the analysis of synchronic data from the COBUILD corpus. We first ... [more ▼]

In this article, we investigate the development of complex subordinators from noun complement clauses in English, basing ourselves on the analysis of synchronic data from the COBUILD corpus. We first present a breadth study of complex subordinators originating in “in þ NP þ that/of-clause”- syntagms and show how these align themselves with oppositions within the causal, temporal and comparative subordinator paradigms. We then offer an in-depth study of the cluster of strings “in (the) hope(s) that/of”, arguing that the subordinators they yield enter as marked members into the subparadigm of purposive conjunctions, which they semantically enrich through lexical and structural persistence. [less ▲]

Type noun uses in the English NP : A case of right to left layering

in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (2008), 13(2), 139-168

Absolute and relative quantification : beyond mutually exclusive word classes.

in Belgian Journal of English Language and Literatures. New Series (2003), 1