Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
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Old English weorðan and its replacement in Middle English 29<br />
pregnant’ ( 7 occurrences versus two elsewhere). Leaving out <strong>the</strong>se two outliers<br />
produces <strong>the</strong> development represented by <strong>the</strong> bottom dotted line (D). Of all possible<br />
data selections, <strong>the</strong> one represented by this line provides <strong>the</strong> most realistic<br />
frequency history, and this corroborates <strong>the</strong> hypo<strong>the</strong>sis that early ME is mainly a<br />
continuation <strong>from</strong> <strong>the</strong> OE Anglian dialect.<br />
Unfortunately, using only Anglian texts for OE results in a corpus whose size<br />
is simply too small (see Figure for respective corpus sizes). Therefore, <strong>the</strong> text<br />
sample we will use for this paper is a compromise between dialectical homogeneity<br />
and size. This sample (labelled ‘(B) Present sample’ in Figure ) consists of<br />
all <strong>the</strong> material which is not purely WS, as well as a small number of WS texts in<br />
<strong>the</strong> period 05 – 50 to increase its sample size. In Figure , no frequency information<br />
is provided with (B) for <strong>the</strong> period 750–950 because this period is not<br />
discussed any fur<strong>the</strong>r in this paper, which concentrates on <strong>the</strong> transition <strong>from</strong> late<br />
OE to early ME.<br />
2. The OE network of copula-constructions<br />
In order to account for <strong>the</strong> disappearance of weorðan in OE and <strong>the</strong> emergence<br />
of becuman as an alternative, we will make use of <strong>the</strong> Construction Grammar<br />
framework (see Goldberg 995, 2006; Kay & Fillmore 999 & Croft 200 ). A basic<br />
notion in this framework is that of construction, a non-compositional combination<br />
of form (<strong>the</strong> syntactic component) and meaning (<strong>the</strong> semantic component)<br />
(Goldberg 995: 4). As such, constructions constitute a language-specific subset<br />
of what in cognitive science are called schemas, cognitive devices that capture<br />
<strong>the</strong> commonalities within a group of similar occurrences (Taylor 999: 35).<br />
Fur<strong>the</strong>rmore, related constructions form a taxonomic network with different<br />
levels of abstraction: less schematic (or low-level) constructions are connected<br />
to each o<strong>the</strong>r by means of a more schematic (or high-level) construction (Croft<br />
200 : 6–29).<br />
An important assumption of Croft’s construction grammar (Croft 2000) is<br />
that <strong>the</strong>re are no atomic (i.e., which “cannot be broken down into smaller parts in<br />
<strong>the</strong> <strong>the</strong>ory”; Croft 2000: 47) primitive units. More specifically, syntactic categories<br />
such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives are not <strong>the</strong> basic, primitive units of syntactic<br />
representation, and nei<strong>the</strong>r are copulas. While in <strong>the</strong> traditional view, <strong>the</strong>n, copulas<br />
have been defined as an atomic word class whose members are semantically<br />
empty, and which always co-occur with lexemes functioning as <strong>the</strong>ir predicate<br />
nucleus (Pustet 200 : 5), in a constructional view, verbs are considered copulas<br />
only in a derived way, as a class of fillers in a particular role in a copula-construction<br />
(whose form and meaning are discussed in detail below) – note that, although