Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

Old English weorðan and its replacement in Middle English 29
pregnant’ ( 7 occurrences versus two elsewhere). Leaving out these two outliers
produces the development represented by the bottom dotted line (D). Of all possible
data selections, the one represented by this line provides the most realistic
frequency history, and this corroborates the hypothesis that early ME is mainly a
continuation from the OE Anglian dialect.
Unfortunately, using only Anglian texts for OE results in a corpus whose size
is simply too small (see Figure for respective corpus sizes). Therefore, the text
sample we will use for this paper is a compromise between dialectical homogeneity
and size. This sample (labelled ‘(B) Present sample’ in Figure ) consists of
all the material which is not purely WS, as well as a small number of WS texts in
the period 05 – 50 to increase its sample size. In Figure , no frequency information
is provided with (B) for the period 750–950 because this period is not
discussed any further in this paper, which concentrates on the transition from late
OE to early ME.
2. The OE network of copula-constructions
In order to account for the disappearance of weorðan in OE and the emergence
of becuman as an alternative, we will make use of the Construction Grammar
framework (see Goldberg 995, 2006; Kay & Fillmore 999 & Croft 200 ). A basic
notion in this framework is that of construction, a non-compositional combination
of form (the syntactic component) and meaning (the semantic component)
(Goldberg 995: 4). As such, constructions constitute a language-specific subset
of what in cognitive science are called schemas, cognitive devices that capture
the commonalities within a group of similar occurrences (Taylor 999: 35).
Furthermore, related constructions form a taxonomic network with different
levels of abstraction: less schematic (or low-level) constructions are connected
to each other by means of a more schematic (or high-level) construction (Croft
200 : 6–29).
An important assumption of Croft’s construction grammar (Croft 2000) is
that there are no atomic (i.e., which “cannot be broken down into smaller parts in
the theory”; Croft 2000: 47) primitive units. More specifically, syntactic categories
such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives are not the basic, primitive units of syntactic
representation, and neither are copulas. While in the traditional view, then, copulas
have been defined as an atomic word class whose members are semantically
empty, and which always co-occur with lexemes functioning as their predicate
nucleus (Pustet 200 : 5), in a constructional view, verbs are considered copulas
only in a derived way, as a class of fillers in a particular role in a copula-construction
(whose form and meaning are discussed in detail below) – note that, although