Grammaticalisation of the adjective "like": processes and boundaries

4 ABSTRACT This thesis provides a description of the incipient grammaticalization of like between the end of the Old English period and the beginning of the Middle English period. During the examined time period, like was gradually losing the attributes that defined its categorial status as an adjective and began to function as the head of a prepositional phrase. Since the process of grammaticalization is inherently gradual, both the adjectival and the prepositional like were found to coexist as a result of the process of layering. Therefore, 10 parameters were established to determine which instances of like were more adjective-like and which were more preposition- like. The empirical part is based on the analysis of the 371 instances of the OE variants of like found in The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE) and the 232 instances of the ME variants of like found in The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second edition (PPCME2). The sample is examined from the morphological as well as the syntactic point of view. Compared to the YCOE corpus, the findings in the PPCME2 corpus revealed a more advanced stage of grammaticalization. While some of the changes are not specific to like and affected other adjectives as well (the loss of inflectional endings, the fixed..