Cover not available
Part of
Lost in Change: Causes and processes in the loss of grammatical elements and constructions
Edited by Svenja Kranich and Tine Breban
[Studies in Language Companion Series 218] 2021
► pp. 51–74

So-adj-a construction as a case of obsolescence in progress

editor
| University of Gdańsk
The main focus of this study is the so-adj-a construction seen as an instantiation of grammatical obsolescence in progress. Starting at where Klégr’s (2010) synchronic study of the construction’s local grammar and syntactic functions leaves it, the present work provides a diachronic account of changes in the frequency of use in the last two centuries; their implications; and an overview of possible causes that had led to the situation in which the construction became considerably rare in Present Day English. Methodologically, the paper features quantitative and statistical analyses of corpus data. The work uses the framework for the investigation of grammatical obsolescence designed in the author’s doctoral thesis (Rudnicka 2019). Additionally, the present chapter suggests extravagance as a cognitive motivation behind the emergence of the so-adj-a construction.
Keywords: grammatical obsolescence, so-adj-a construction, big mess construction, syntactic loss, extravagance
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. So-adj-a construction – an example of the Big Mess Construction
    • 2.1Noun phrases with so-adj predeterminers – their characteristics
  • 3.Diachronic account
    • 3.1The construction’s origin: A handy stylistic device from the very beginning?
    • 3.2Frequency of use
      • 3.2.1Methodology
      • 3.2.2Results and discussion
  • 4.Grammatical obsolescence
    • 4.1 Negative correlation between time and the frequency of use
    • 4.2Distributional fragmentation
      • 4.2.1Methodology
      • 4.2.2Results and discussion
    • 4.3Paradigmatic atrophy
    • 4.4Competition on the constructional level
      • 4.4.1 That-adj-a construction
      • 4.4.2Competition with the that-adj-a construction: An explanation
      • 4.4.3 Such-a-adj construction
    • 4.5Larger changes
    • 4.6Summary of the results
  • 5.Conclusions and outlook
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Language corpora
  • Software
  • References
Published online: 16 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.218.02rud
References (36)
Language corpora
Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words, 1990-present. <[URL]>
COHA Davies, Mark. 2010-. The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million words, 1810–2009. <[URL]>
Software
R Core Team. 2013. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.Google Scholar
References
Aniya, Sosei. 2016. The Big Mess Construction straightened out. Studies in Human Sciences Bulletin of the Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Hiroshima University 11, 1–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berman, Arlene. 1974. Adjectives and Adjective Complement Constructions in English. PhD dissertation, Harvard University.
Detges, Ulrich & Waltereit, Richard. 2002. Grammaticalization vs. reanalysis: A semantic-pragmatic account of functional change in grammar. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 21: 151–195.Google Scholar
Fowler, Henry W. & Butterfield, Jeremy (ed.). 2015. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 4th edn. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 1999. Why is grammaticalization irreversible? Linguistics 37: 1043–1068.Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin. 2012. Diachronic collostructional analysis meets the noun phrase. Studying many a noun in COHA. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds), 233–244. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
. 2014. Construction Grammar and its Application to English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne & Leech, Geoffrey. 2012. Small is beautiful: On the value of standard reference corpora for observing recent grammatical change. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds), 175–88. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne. 2014. The demise of the being to V construction. Transactions of the Philological Society 112(2): 167–187. DOI logoGoogle 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. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
Jespersen, Otto. 1933. Essentials of English Grammar. London: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Kay, Paul & Sag, Ivan. 2012. Discontinuous dependencies and complex determiners. In Sign-Based Construction Grammar, Hans Boas & Ivan Sag (eds), 229–256. Stanford CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Kempf, Luise. 2021. German so-relatives: Lost in grammatical, typological, and sociolinguistic change. In Lost in Change. Causes and Processes in the Loss of Grammatical Elements and Constructions [Studies in Language Companion Series 218], Svenja Kranich & Tine Breban (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (This volume) DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Keller, Rudi. 1994. On Language Change: The Invisible Hand in Language. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kim, Jong-Bok & Sells, Peter. 2011. The Big Mess Construction: Interactions between the lexicon and constructions. English Language and Linguistics 15 (2): 335–362. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klégr, Aleš. 2010. Noun phrases with so-adj predeterminers: So complicated a matter. In …for thy speech bewrayeth thee. A Festschrift for Libuše Dušková, Markéta Malá & Pavlína Šaldová (eds), 93–119. Praha: Filozofická Fakulta.Google Scholar
Kranich, Svenja. 2015. The impact of input and output domains: Towards a function-based categorization of types of grammaticalization. In What Happens after Grammaticalization? Secondary Grammaticalization and Other Late Stage Processes in Grammaticalization, Tine Breban & Svenja Kranich (eds.). Special issue of Language Sciences 47(B), 172–187. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lass, Roger. 1997. Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, Hundt, Marianne, Mair, Christian & Smith, Nicholas. 2009. Change in Contemporary English. A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey & Svartnik, Jan. 2013. A Communicative Grammar of English. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mair, Christian. 1998. Corpora and the study of major varieties in English: Issues and results. In The Major Varieties of English: Papers from MAVEN 97, Hans Lindquist, Staffan Klintborg, Magnus Levin & Maria Estling (eds), 139–157. Växjö: Acta Wexionensia.Google Scholar
Osborne, Timothy. 2019. Noun phrases rooted by adjectives: A dependency grammar analysis of the Big Mess Construction. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2019), 49–59. Stroudsburg PA: Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Petré, Peter. 2017. The extravagant progressive: An experimental corpus study on the history of emphatic [BE Ving]. In Cognitive Approaches to the History of English, Thomas Hoffmann & Alexander Bergs (eds). Special issue of English Language & Linguistics 21 (2): 227–250. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rudnicka, Karolina. 2018. Variation of sentence length across time and genre: Influence on the syntactic usage in English. In Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 85], Richard Jason Whitt(ed.), 219–240. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logo
. 2019. The Statistics of Obsolescence: Purpose Subordinators in Late Modern English [NIHIN Studies]. Freiburg: Rombach.Google Scholar
Schustack, Miriam W. 1988. Thinking about causality. In The Psychology of Human Thought, Robert J. Sternberg & Edward E. Smith (eds.), 92–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2013. Collostructional analysis. In The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar , Graeme Trousdale & Thomas Hoffmann (eds), 290–306. Oxford: OUP. DOI logo
Swan, Michael. 2003. Practical English Usage. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
van Eynde, Frank. 2007. The Big Mess Construction. In Proceeding of the 14th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Stefan Müller (ed.), 415–433. Stanford CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Wales, Katie. 2001. A Dictionary of Stylistics, 2nd edn. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Fanego, Teresa
2023.  Tomorrow I’ll go (a) shopping: on the history of the Expeditionary Go construction and its relation to the absentive. Folia Linguistica 57:s44-s1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 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.