Dirk Noël

The Nominative and Infinitive in Late Modern English : A Diachronic Constructionist Approach

The English nominative and infinitive pattern (NCI), consisting of a passive utterance, cognition or perception verb followed by a to-infinitive, is the formal realization of at least three form-meaning pairings (or “constructions”). One of these is simply an instantiation of the passive construction. The other two have a “qualificational” function and are used to offer descriptions or serve as evidentiality markers. Although from a synchronic perspective the “evidential NCI construction” can be construed as a grammaticalization of the passive NCI, no such grammaticalization has taken place in English: Like the passive NCI, the evidential NCI is a borrowing from Latin. From a diachronic construction grammatical perspective, an investigation of the English history of the NCI pattern can still be interesting, however, in that it can reveal changes in the distribution of the pattern over different genres and provide evidence for its growing schematicity. This illustrates the complementarity of grammaticalization theory and diachronic construction grammar.

Diachronic Approaches to Modality in World Englishes: Introduction to the Special Issue

The collection of articles presented in this special issue of the Journal of English Linguistics is the first of its kind as a thematically and methodologically coherent set of contributions dealing with the diachronic dimension of the grammar of postcolonial varieties of English. To date, the bulk of descriptive World Englishes research has consisted of synchronic comparisons of the lexico-grammar of the parent variety and Postcolonial Englishes, often accounting for the present-day differences in contactlinguistic and language-acquisitional terms, or with reference to certain “universals of New Englishes” or “angloversals” (Mair 2003). Barring a number of forerunners (e.g., Fritz 2007; Dollinger 2008; Hundt & Szmrecsanyi 2012; Rossouw & van Rooy 2012), the grammars of contemporary postcolonial varieties have not been considered from a historical linguistic perspective, as stages in their own evolution. Indeed, such a research focus remains unmentioned in Bolton’s (2005) survey article on World Englishes research. Nor is historical linguistics mentioned by Schneider (2003:236) as one of the linguistic subdisciplines that the study of “world-wide Englishes” builds on, in spite of the fact that it “should . . . be most obvious” that “the sociolinguistic and linguistic scenarios in which New Englishes have evolved lend themselves to an investigation of . . . language variation and change” (Schneider 2003:238). While the historical investigation of any sociocultural phenomenon is hardly in need of further justification, the arrival on the scene of World Englishes scholarship of Schneider’s (2003) own “dynamic model” of the emergence of New Englishes has made the need for historical linguistic investigation of such varieties all the more pressing. As a hypothesis of a “diachronic process” (Schneider 2003:235), the model very much remains in need of empirical underpinning, in particular with relation to

The choice between infinitives and that -clauses after believe

Intuitive, sentence-based approaches have so far failed to account conclusively for the choice between a that -complement and an infinitival complement after believe -type verbs, in sentences like I believe something like this to be very much the case (EB2 1297) and I believe that monetary union is political union, and that the creation of a single currency is federalism (HHW 13012). Syntactically, there is no free variation between the two patterns, since there are a number of formal restrictions on the infinitival complements that do not apply to the that -complements. But is there a semantic motivation behind the choice in cases when there are no formal reasons for choosing one or the other? This paper surveys a few earlier suggestions to this effect, but argues that a corpus-based approach unmistakably suggests that factors of a textual nature are at work, rather than purely semantic ones. 2

Revisiting Be Supposed To from a Diachronic Constructionist Perspective

(1) By the time the meeting was over I was in such a state of excitement and fright that I forgot all about the clothing parcel I was supposed to collect. (BNC B0U 2508) (2) Authors are not supposed to avenge themselves in their writings, but they do, and if they were to be prevented, there would be far fewer books. (BNC A05 252) (3) ‘‘It seems that not only are you supposed to enjoy sex, but you’re supposed to talk about how much you enjoy it. That I find tiresome, I must say.’’ Doris Saatchi, art collector (BNC BLW 1798)

Contrastive verb valency and conceptual structures in the verbal lexicon

Abstract The CONTRAGRAM Contrastive Verb Valency Dictionary of Dutch, French and English not only describes interlingual differences between different types of verb complementation exhaustively, it also provides a semantic picture of the entry verbs. Next to a lexical approach to verb valency, a multidirectional and non-reductivist contrastive approach therefore offers a suitable basis for describing conceptual differences between various languages. These conceptual structures in the verbal lexicon are illustrated by means of a concrete contrastive lexicological analysis of the Dutch verb beslissen and its proto-translatious, French decider and English decide.