The attrition of the DEONTIC NCI construction in Late Modern English: A cognitive phenomenon?

Abstract

Discussions of modality in grammars of present-day English often mention a handful of patterns like BE ALLOWED TO, BE BOUND TO, BE EXPECTED TO, BE MEANT TO, BE OBLIGED TO and BE SUPPOSED TO. Such forms may be called “nominative-and-infinitives”, or “NCIs”, and as expressions of various sorts of what for convenience may be termed “deontic” modal meanings, they can in construction grammatical terms all be considered to be instantiations of a schematic DEONTIC NCI construction. This schema is more productive today than what is listed in grammar books (not usually included, for instance, are BE COMPELLED TO, BE ENTITLED TO, BE FORBIDDEN TO, BE REQUIRED TO), but the results of a search in the quotation database of the OED suggest that its type frequency must have been even higher a few centuries ago (Noël 2017). Disney (2016) proposes that the constructionalization of the DEONTIC NCI can be situated in the 18th century, on the strength of a comparison of counts in a late-17th and a late-18th century corpus which shows a drastic increase in both type and token frequency, but he also makes the observation that the construction now has a much lower frequency. Tying in with this, the present paper will offer detailed documentation of its development in the intervening centuries, as a further illustration of the phenomenon of “constructional attrition” (Colleman and Noël 2012). It will trace the evolution of the frequency of around 80 [BE Ven to] patterns in the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMET3.0) and show that while there is a significant overall drop in the token frequency of the schema in the course of the (long) 19th century, this is due in huge part to a steep fall of the highest frequency “microconstructions” (BE OBLIGED TO, BE FORCED TO, BE PERMITTED TO, BE ORDERED TO, BE SUFFERED TO), the effect of which on the attrition of the schema was attenuated by a strong rise of other types (BE ALLOWED TO, BE BOUND TO, BE EXPECTED TO, BE ENTITLED TO, BE ASKED TO, BE TOLD TO). Addressing Hilpert’s (2018) “open question” of the cognitive relevance of constructional changes, the paper advances a perspective on this development which is consistent with a “radically usage-based” diachronic construction grammar (Noël 2016). References: Colleman, T., & Noël, D. 2012. The Dutch evidential NCI: A case of constructional attrition. Journal of historical pragmatics, 13(1), 1–28. Disney, S. 2016. Another visit to BE supposed to from a diachronic constructionist perspective. English studies 97(8), 892–916. Hilpert, M. 2018. Three open questions in Diachronic Construction Grammar. In E. Coussé, P. Andersson, & J. Olofsson (Eds.), Grammaticalization meets Construction Grammar (21–39). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Noël, D. 2016. For a radically usage-based diachronic construction grammar. Belgian journal of linguistics, 30, 39–53. Noël, D. 2017. The development of non-deontic be bound to in a radically usage-based diachronic construction grammar perspective. Lingua, 199, 72–93.