Cover not available
Part of
Late Modern English: Novel encounters
Edited by Merja Kytö and Erik Smitterberg
[Studies in Language Companion Series 214] 2020
► pp. 271–293

A far from simple matter revisited

The ongoing grammaticalization of far from

| University of British Columbia
| Seijo University

In Present-day English far from belongs to a class of constructions (close to, near to, next to) which have undergone grammaticalization and/or constructionalization. The present corpus-based, diachronic study shows that the development of far from appears to be a clear case of grammaticalization, with quite significant changes in the Late Modern English period, including the extension of the downtoner to attributive contexts and the development of the emphasizer function. More importantly, the claim that “a well-known trajectory” (Méndez-Naya 2008a: 215) is from degree adjunct to degree modifier is not borne out in this case. What we see here is a change from degree modifier to degree adjunct, a change consistent with Athanasiadou’s (2007) argument for an increase in subjectivity from degree modifier to emphasizer.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Far from in Present-day English
    • 2.1Adverbial far + from X
    • 2.2Downtoner/degree modifier: Far from
    • 2.3Pragmatic marker: Far from it/that
    • 2.4Synchronic analysis
  • 3.Historical development of far from
    • 3.1The development of degree adverbs
    • 3.2History of far from
    • 3.3Timeline
    • 3.4Proposed development
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 18 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.214.12bri
References

Corpora

ARCHER = A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers 3.2
1990–1993/2002/2007/2010/2013 Originally compiled under the supervision of Douglas Biber (Northern Arizona University) and Edward Finegan (University of Southern California); currently managed by a consortium of participants at fourteen universities. See [URL]
CED = A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760
2006 Compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University). Available through the Oxford Text Archive. See [URL]
CEN = The Corpus of English Novels
Compiled by Hendrik De Smet. See [URL]
CLMET3.0 = The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, Version 3.0 (CLMET3.0)
Created by Hendrik De Smet, Hans-Jürgen Diller & Jukka Tyrkkö. See [URL]
COCA = The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 560 Million Words, 1990 – present
2008– Compiled by Mark Davies. Available online at [URL]
COHA = The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 Million Words, 1810–2009
2010– Compiled by Mark Davies. Available online at [URL]
DOEC = Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus
2011 Antonette diPaolo Healey, John Price Wilkin & Xin Xiang (eds). Toronto: University of Toronto. See [URL]
ED = English Drama
1996–2014 John Barnard et al. (eds). Chadwyck-Healey Ltd. (ProQuest Company). See [URL]
EEBO = Early English Books Online
2017 Compiled by Mark Davies. Part of the SAMUELS project. Available online at [URL]
Google Books. Advanced Search
Available online at [URL]
Hansard = Hansard Corpus 1803–2005
2015– Marc Alexander & Mark Davies (comps.). Available online at [URL]
OBC = Old Bailey Corpus, Version 2.0
2013 Compiled by Magnus Huber, Magnus Nissel & Karen Puga. See [URL]
Akimoto, Minoji
2001 How far has far from become grammaticalized? In Historical Linguistics 1999: Selected Papers from the 14th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Vancouver, 9–13 August 1999 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 215], Laurel J. Brinton (ed.), 1–11. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ameka, Felix
1992 Interjections: The universal yet neglected part of speech. Journal of Pragmatics 18: 101–118. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Athanasiadou, Angeliki
2007 On the subjectivity of intensifiers. Language Sciences 29: 554–565. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beaver, David
2003 How far from the madding gerund (100KG). Language Log 5 December 2003 <[URL]> (15 February 2018).
Brinton, Laurel J.
2018 “He loved his father but next to adored his mother”: nigh, near, and next (to) as downtoners. Paper presented at the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics XX, Edinburgh, 27 August.
Burchfield, R. W.
1996 The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Claridge, Claudia & Kytö, Merja
2014a  I had lost sight of them then for a bit, but I went on pretty fast. Two degree modifiers in the Old Bailey Corpus. In Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 243] Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker & Jukka Tuominen (eds), 29–52. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014b ‘You are a bit of a sneak’: Exploring a degree modifier in the Old Bailey Corpus. In Late Modern English Syntax, Marianne Hundt (ed.), 239–268. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Smet, Hendrik
n.d. English far from . Ms, University of Leuven.
2012 The course of actualization. Language 88(3): 601–633. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Smet, Hendrik, D’hoedt, Frauke, Fonteyn, Lauren & Van Goethem, Kristel
2018 The changing functions of competing forms: Attraction and differentiation. Cognitive Linguistics 29(2): 197–234. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fowler, H. W.
1965 A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2nd edn, revised by Sir Ernest Gowers. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Fraser, Bruce
2009 An account of discourse markers. International Review of Pragmatics 1: 293–320. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Inoue, Tohru
2010  Far from ku no goho o megutte (On the usage of far from-phrases). Seijo English Monographs 42: 299–340. The Graduate School of Literature, Seijo University.Google Scholar
Kajita, Masaru
1977 Towards a dynamic model of syntax. Studies in English Linguistics 5: 44–76.Google Scholar
Kurath, Hans & Kuhn, Sherman
(eds) 1952–2001 Middle English Dictionary (MED). Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Part of the Middle English Compendium, Francis McSparran (chief ed.). [URL]
Liberman, Mark
2006 [2003] Far from the madding gerund. In Far from the Madding Gerund and other Dispatches from Language Log, Mark Liberman & Geoffrey K. Pullum, 150–152. Wilsonville, OR: William, James & Co. Also Language Log 5 December 2003, <[URL]> (15 February 2018).
Macmillan Dictionary
. [URL]> (15 February 2018).
McCawley, James D.
1988 The Syntactic Phenomena of English. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Méndez-Naya, Belén
2008a Special issue on English intensifiers. English Language and Linguistics 12(2): 213–219. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008b On the history of downright . English Language and Linguistics 12(2): 267–287. (Special issue on intensifiers) DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu & Rissanen, Matti
2001 Fairly pretty and pretty fair? On the development and grammaticalization of English downtoners. Language Sciences 24: 359–380. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Paradis, Carita
1997 Degree Modifiers of Adjectives in Spoken British English [Lund Studies in English 92]. Lund: Lund University Press.Google Scholar
Peters, Hans
1994 Degree adverbs in Early Modern English. In Studies in Early Modern English, Dieter Kastovsky (ed.), 269–288. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Proffitt, Michael
(ed.) 2000– Oxford English Dictionary (OED). 3rd edn. online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [URL]
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rissanen, Matti
2008 From ‘quickly’ to ‘fairly’: On the history of rather . English Language and Linguistics 12(2): 345–359. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stoffel, C.
1901 Intensifiers and Down-Toners [Anglistische Forschungen I]. Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2006 The semantic development of scalar focus modifiers. In The Handbook of the History of English, Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los (eds), 335–359. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 Grammaticalization, constructions and the incremental development of language: Suggestions from the development of Degree Modifiers in English. In Variation, Selection, Development: Probing the Evolutionary Model of Language Change, Regine Eckardt, Gerhard Jäger & Tonjes Veenstra (eds), 219–250. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
2010 (Inter)subjectivity and (inter)subjectification: A reassessment. In Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization, Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelanotte & Hubert Cuyckens (eds), 29–71. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van Goethem, Kristel, Vanderbauwhede, Gudrun & De Smet, Hendrik
2018 Emergence of a new adverbial downtoner: Constructional change and constructionalization of Dutch [ver van X] and [verre van X] ‘far from X’. In Category Change from a Constructional Perspective [Constructional Approaches to Language 20], Kristel Van Goethem, Muriel Norde, Evie Coussé & Gudrun Vanderbauwhede (eds), 179–206. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Riemsdijk, Henk
2001 A far from simple matter: Syntactic reflexes of syntax-pragmatics misalignments. In Perspectives on Semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse: A Festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 90], István Kenesei & Robert M. Harnish (eds), 21–41. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Brinton, Laurel J.
2021. “He loved his father but next to adored his mother”:Nigh(ly),Near, andNext(To) as Downtoners. Journal of English Linguistics 49:1 ► pp. 39 ff. DOI logo
Herda, Damian
2023.  From space to time and beyond: A corpus inquiry into the grammaticalization patterns of a / one step away from . Studia Neophilologica 95:3 ► pp. 376 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.