From constructional expansion to constructional explosion: the case of transparent free relatives

From constructional expansion to constructional explosion: the case of transparent free relatives In their outline of the English NP, Payne & Huddleston (2002:436-439) distinguish a slot for what they call peripheral modifiers. This slot hosts adverbial modifiers, such as focus particles, attached to the NP. An example is given in (1). (1) And so it has gone on, although by the end of the 1980s it was evident that the patience of even a government as dedicated to the eventual triumph of nuclear power as Mrs Thatcher's was showing signs of severe strain. (BNC) The slot for peripheral modifiers is a Modern English innovation, and during the course of the past few centuries underwent a rapid expansion (Van de Velde 2011). The culmination point of this rapid expansion is the integration of what has in formal theories of synchronic grammar been called transparent free relatives (see Wilder 1999), a specific kind of syntactic amalgam, to use Lakoff’s (1988[1974]:25) term. In Van de Velde (2007, 2009, 2011) and De Smet & Van de Velde (2013) it is argued that these transparent free relatives can function as peripheral modifiers in cases like (2), where what is known as is in the same slot as even in (1). (2) On this account, therefore, it was determined that the balloon should be fitted with what is known as a solid or rending valve (…) (Clmet – 1902) On the basis of corpus data drawn from the Clmet Corpus, the rise of the construction in Modern English will be traced. It will be argued that the last centuries have witnessed an increase in complexity in the lexical realisation of these amalgams, giving new momentum to the expansion of the peripheral modifier slot. On the theoretical side, it will be argued that the process described here calls for a constructional approach to syntactic change. References BNC: Davies, M. (2004-) BYU-BNC: The British National Corpus. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc. CLMET: see De Smet, H. (2005). ‘A corpus of Late Modern English’. ICAME-Journal 29: 69-82. De Smet, H., Van de Velde, F. (In press, 2013). ‘Serving two masters: form-function friction in syntactic amalgams’. Studies in Language 37(3): 534-565. Lakoff, George. 1988 [1974]. ‘Syntactic amalgams’. In: E. Schiller, B. Need, D. Varley & W.H. Eilfort (eds.), The best of CLS: a selection of out-of-print papers from 1968 to 1975, 25-45. Chicago: The Chicago Linguistic Society. Payne, J. & R.D. Huddleston (2002). ‘Nouns and noun phrases’. In: R.D. Huddleston & G.K. Pullum (eds.). The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 423-523. Van de Velde, F. (2007). ‘Interpersonal modification in the English noun phrase’. Functions of Language 14.2: 203-230. Van de Velde, F. (2009). De nominale constituent: structuur en geschiedenis. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Van de Velde, F. (2011). ‘Left-peripheral expansion of the English NP’. English Language and Linguistics 15(2): 387-415. Wilder, C. (1999). ‘Transparent free relatives’. In: K. Shahin, S. Blake & E.-S. Kim (eds.), Proceedings of the Seventeenth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 685-699.status: publishe