6.1 Dual adverbs in 19th century BrE narrative and current affairs texts Data on the use of zero and -ly forms of the five dual adverbs were extracted from the custom-built (330,000-word) corpus of British texts, discussed above in Section 3.1. Its contents were designed to match those of the 19th century Australian corpus as closely as possible, and to permit direct comparisons between the data in Table 3 above and Table 4 below. Normalised figures are also provided (in brackets) as before, to allow generic comparisons between the raw frequencies obtained from the two components of the minicorpus.
Table 4. Distribution of dual adverbs in 19th century BrE texts and syntactic contexts Current
affairs 80,000 wds raw (norm.)
Narrative 250,000
wds raw (norm.)
Total freq.
both sources
With dyn.
cop. V
Before lexical/
main V
After verb VI/VT
Mod.
adv/
prep phrase
Mod.
in adj phrase
bad 3 (12) 3 2 1
badly 2 (25) 5 (20) 7 1 4 1 1
close 3 (37.5) 27 (108) 30 9 19 2
closely 2 (25) 19 (76) 21 5 10 5 1
high 4 (50) 11 (44) 15 5 4 6
highly 12 (150) 24 (96) 36 4 2 30
quick 2 (25) 2 (8) 4 4
quickly 6 (75) 35 (140) 41 14 25 2
slow 2 (8) 2 1 1
slowly 4 (50) 46 (184) 50 18 31 1
Total zero
adverb 9 (112.5) 45 (180) 54 (26%) 3 18 (20%) 24 9 (20%) Total -ly 26 (325) 129 (516) 155 (74%) 42 72 (80%) 6 35 (80%)
In this historical British data, the frequencies of zero and -ly forms are far more polarised than in the Australian data of Table 3. The overall percentage of zero adverbs in the Australian minicorpus is 43%, whereas in the British minicorpus data in Table 4 it is only 26%. Chi-square testing of the raw figures returned a p value of 0.0006. This finding is underpinned in the data from narrative texts, with much greater use of the -ly forms in 19th century British data than contemporary
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.comDual adverbs in Australian English 199 Australian data: compare the total of 129 in the bottom row of Table 4 with 67 in Table 3. Zero adverbs are less frequently found in the British data in all the syntactic slots identified above, and the difference between the Australian and British data in postverbal uses of the zero form is statistically significant at the 0.05 level. Thus the trend to replace zero adverb forms with -ly was already well advanced in 19th century BrE.
Although instances of both zero and -ly are to be found post-verbally, and as modifiers in adjectival and noun phrases, the overall frequencies are heavily skewed towards -ly. Only as modifiers of adverbs and prepositional phrases do zero forms (especially close) appear with any frequency, especially in narrative texts where there is a variety of compositional forms, apart from close to, which as indicated above (Section 4.2.2) was excluded from the analysis. They include close at hand, close by, standing close upon the road, paralleling those found in the prose of the 19th century Australian narrators (examples (25) to (29)). It suggests that the grammaticalisation of close to as a complex preposition was taking place contemporaneously in BrE and AusE. But the 19th century British narrators make much more use of quickly and slowly in pacing the action in their texts than their Australians contemporaries. Com- pare the total frequencies for the two -ly forms in Table 4, column 3 (35 + 46 = 81) with their counterparts in Table 3 (23 + 14 = 37), which help to boost the overall frequency of -ly in Table 4.
The 19th century BrE data on usage of zero and -ly adverbs in Table 4 have more in common with the 20th century AusE (Table 2) than those of 19th century AusE (Table 3). They suggest the early independence of AusE from the parent variety, in the decades leading to Federation (1901).
6.2 Dual adverbs in 20th century BrE: Data from ICE-GB
Let us now compare the frequency data for -ly and zero forms of the five dual adverbs under investigation in data from ICE-GB,12 to see how far they have changed since the later 19th century, and how they compare with data from the contemporary ICE-AUS corpus. Although ICE-GB has been fully tagged, untagged searches were used for this research, to ensure that the data was analysed in the same way for all four sets. The raw figures in Table 5 below can be compared directly with those of Table 2, since both consist of one million words.
12. I am most grateful to my colleague Adam Smith, for his assistance in extracting data from ICE-GB.
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200 Pam Peters
Table 5. Distribution of dual adverbs in syntactic contexts in ICE-GB TOTAL With dynamic
copula in SVA Before lexical/
main V After verb
VI/VT Mod. adv/
prep phrase Mod. in adj phrase
bad 7 5 2
badly 55 1 35 18 1
close 17 13 4
closely 54 19 25 5 5
high 28 22 6
highly 83 15 3 1 54
quick 3 3
quickly 113 37 76
slow 1 1
slowly 59 23 34 2
Total zero
adverb 56 (14%) 5 0 40 (20%) 10 1 (2%)
Total -ly 354 (86%) 1 129 156 (80%) 7 61 (98%)
The percentages of zero and -ly forms shown at the bottom left of Table 5 show just how low the use of zero adverbs has become in current BrE. At 14% (including both spoken and written data), it weighs in slightly below Tagliamonte and Ito’s (2002: 250) overall figure of 15% for zero adverbs in their spoken corpus. Both British figures are markedly lower than that found in the contemporary ICE-AUS corpus with 23% over- all use of the zero form (see Table 2). Chi-square testing of the raw figures for zero and -ly adverbs in the two ICE corpora returned a p value of 0.001. The close comparability of the two corpora shows that they diverge substantially on this adverbial feature, and how dramatically the use of the zero adverb form has declined in BrE usage. The 19th century British data (Table 4) shows that this decline was already well advanced by the second half of the century.
The statistical significance of differences between the ICE-GB and ICE-AUS figures for the pairs with sufficient raw numbers in each cell were also tested. The difference between bad/badly in the two varieties was found to be significant at the 0.05 level; close/closely significant only at the 0.1 level; and for high/highly the differ- ences were nonsignificant even at that level. The declining use of zero adverbs is thus most significant the first two pairs, although the relatively smaller frequencies of zero adverbs for the other three pairs show the same trend. The lower frequencies of zero adverb use in BrE reduce the overall scope for free variation between the members of a dual adverb pair.
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.comDual adverbs in Australian English 201 In Table 5, BrE zero adverbs mostly share a syntactic slot with -ly adverbs in post- verbal use (column 5), though the numbers are strongly biased towards -ly for bad/
badly, quick/quickly, slow/slowly, as in AusE. In ICE-GB the bias towards high in the data is fed by live sports commentaries on tennis and football, where the physical sense of high is most salient. It puts the BrE use of high on a par with that of AusE (Table 2, column 5). Compare also the very frequent use of highly as a premodifier of adjec- tives (Tables 2 and 5, column 7), especially in its intensifier sense that can be har- nessed in many kinds of discourse, written and spoken (cf. Section 4.2.3 above). So although both high and highly are well used in BrE, the near correlation of their forms and syntactic behaviour makes it complementary distribution rather than alternative selections. This effect is less pronounced in the comparable AusE data, because of the greater number of instances of high found in its spatial sense combining with other adjectives (Table 2, column 7). That apart, the semantic alienation of high and highly is visible in both sets of data, and in line with the nonsignificant finding between BrE and AusE on this point, mentioned above.
The numerical differences between BrE and AusE for bad/badly are statistically significant (noted above), and reflected in the much greater British use of badly in preverbal position (Table 4, column 4), where it is the default form. Likewise highly appears much more often preverbally than in the AusE data, using its marked position to evaluate and intensify the main verb. Preverbal uses of -ly forms in the ICE-GB data make up 36% of all BrE use of the suffixed forms, whereas in ICE-AUS usage they are only 22% of the total (Table 2, column 4). The BrE use of -ly forms postverbally (80%) is also greater than that of AusE (73%, as shown in Table 2, column 5), though the difference is nonsignificant. It nevertheless means that there are fewer contexts in BrE where the zero and -ly forms could be interchanged. This is most obvious with slow/
slowly, where there is a 30% to 70% ratio between them in AusE, but 100% for the -ly form in BrE. The British predilection for the -ly form is also evident in an example of badly used with a dynamic copula (they smell badly (W2D-017)), a construction in which bad is always found in the Australian data. While this British use of badly might be regarded as hypercorrection, it incidentally supports the analysis of the suffixless form as a zero adverb in that collocation (rather than the homomorphic adjective).
All these ICE-GB data show that the BrE bias towards -ly is much stronger than that of current AusE. They confirm the trends found in Opdahl’s corpus research and the results of her elicitation experiments, where British responses were consistently more in favour of -ly than the American (2000 v.1: 78, 157–158). The prescriptive orientation towards -ly seems to have intensified in Great Britain following World War II, with repeat editions of censorious usage guides such as that of Partridge (1947/1965/1994), and public anxiety about grammar in the 1990s (Cameron 1995: 85–93). The upshot is that there are few dual adverb pairs available in current BrE, and certainly fewer
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202 Pam Peters
than in contemporary AusE. But the argument of (Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 264) that the remaining zero forms are largely idiomatised (with a restricted set of complex transitive/intransitive verbs) is not supported by multifactorial analysis (Opdahl 2000 v.2: 544–545), nor by the range of adverbial complements illustrated above.
7. Conclusion
This corpus-based study of five high-frequency dual adverbs in 19th and 20th cen- tury AusE finds that their interchangeability has declined over the last century or so, though not to the same extent as in BrE. The time difference that has emerged between them in the usage of dual adverbs could be seen as ‘colonial lag’ i.e. conservatism in AusE (Gửrlach 1987), or as early ‘republicanism’ (Schneider 2007: 121), i.e. emerging republican independence in AusE, before it presents the typical characteristics of nati- visation and endornomativity.13
Zero adverbs are still used in late 20th century AusE with a range of intransitive, transitive and complex transitive verbs, as well as modifier roles in relation to adverbi- als and adjectives. A few examples (bad, high) could be found with dynamic copular verbs, but without evidence of being interchangeable there with -ly forms. In other syntactic slots they are fully interchangeable with -ly adverbs, where their semantics coincide; in some they are in complementary distribution. In BrE by comparison, the use of zero adverbs is much more circumscribed and associated with a limited set of verbs, so that few dual adverb pairs enjoy free variation. Meanwhile the -ly adverbs investigated show a scale of abstraction, from the still concrete meanings of quickly, slowly to the entirely abstract use of highly as intensifier. This semantic development is ongoing for badly and closely.
The corpus data analysed here gave only partial support to the notion that generic factors such as the mode of communication (spoken or written) affect the distribution of dual adverbs. Zero adverbs bad, quick, slow did indeed occur more often in conver- sation and scripted dialogue in contemporary AusE, hence their informal associations.
But the others investigated (close and high) were found more often in written data.
References
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward. 1999.
Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
13. Other signs of AusE’s early emergence as a regional variety are discussed in Peters (2009).
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.comDual adverbs in Australian English 203 Boyd, Alexander Jenyns. 1882[1974]. Old Colonials, facs. edn. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Cameron, Deborah. 1995. Verbal Hygiene. London: Longman.
Denison, David. 2010. Category change in English with and without structural change. In Gradience, Gradualness and Grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 90], Elizabeth Traugott & Graeme Trousdale (eds), 105–128. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
DOI: 10.1075/tsl.90.07den
Donner, Morton. 1991. Adverb form in Middle English. English Studies 72: 1–11.
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Fritz, Clemens. 2007. From English in Australia to Australian English. Bern: Peter Lang.
Gửrlach, Manfred. 1987. Colonial lag? The alleged conservative character of American English and other ‘colonial’ varieties. English World-Wide 8(1): 41–60. DOI: 10.1075/eww.8.1.05gor Greenough, James & Kittredge, George. 1901. Words and Their Ways in English Speech. New
York NY: Macmillan.
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey. 2002. Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
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Marckwardt, Albert & Walcott, Fred. 1938. Facts about Current Usage. New York NY:
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Mencken, Henry. 1919[1945/1961]. The American Language. New York NY: Alfred Knopf.
Mittins, William, Salu, Mary, Edminson, Mary & Coyne, Sheila. 1970. Attitudes to English Usage.
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Nevalainen, Terttu. 1994. Diachronic issues in English adverb derivation. In Creating and Using English Language Corpora, Udo Fries, Gunnel Tottie & Peter Schneider (eds), 139–147.
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Opdahl, Lisa. 1991. -ly as adverbial suffix: Corpus and elicitation material compared. ICAME Journal 15: 19–35.
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doi 10.1075/scl.67.09rod
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The evolution of epistemic marking in West Australian English
Celeste Rodríguez Louro
The University of Western Australia
Across English varieties, frequent subject + epistemic/evidential verb constructions have been reanalysed as formulaic stance markers capable of introducing an embedded clause in the absence of that. I think has
grammaticalised further and can occur in a syntactically parenthetical location in an utterance as an ‘epistemic parenthetical’. This chapter explores the emergence of grammatical constraints on think usage in a collection of State Library of Western Australia oral histories. The corpus features 39 speakers of Anglo-Celtic Australian English born between 1874 and 1983. Findings indicate that it is not until the late 20th century that parenthetical I think emerges as a grammatically entrenched variable with pragmatic functions involving the expression of opinion and the mitigation of negative judgement.
Keywords: epistemic; evidential; think; Australian English; parenthetical
1. Introduction
This chapter explores the diachrony of epistemic/evidential complement-taking phrases (e/e ctps), subject + verb constructions as exemplified in (1)–(3) below that introduce a complement clause, providing information about the speaker’s degree of commitment to an utterance (Thompson & Mulac 1991b; Thompson 2002: 27;
Kọrkkọinen 2003; Boye & Harder 2007; Brinton 2008).
(1) She was just bursting to leave the ship when it came in. Finally he did get away. I think it took about ten hours driving in a T-Model Ford to get from
Bruce Rock to Fremantle. (MRF1928)1
1. The corpus from which this and all other examples stem consists of spontaneous narra- tives of personal experience extracted from a selection of oral histories housed at the State Library of Western Australia, Perth and collected between 1963 and 2007. All names have been replaced by pseudonyms. See Section 3 for further details.
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206 Celeste Rodríguez Louro
(2) I’m a very dedicated teacher. I don’t believe that I am here to waste their time. (MSF1953) (3) I suppose the war ended before Mum finished her nursing training but my
Father had already gone to France. (MRF1928)
Across varieties of English, such frequently used subject + epistemic/evidential verb constructions have been reanalysed by speakers as formulaic stance markers capable of introducing an embedded clause in the absence of the complementiser that (e.g. Thompson & Mulac 1991b; Thompson 2002; Torres Cacoullos & Walker 2009;
Rodríguez Louro & Harris 2013). I think, the most frequently used e/e ctp across regions as varied as the United States, Great Britain and New Zealand (Thompson
& Mulac 1991b: 320; Traugott 1995: 38; Diessel & Tomasello 2001; Kọrkkọinen 2003;
Tagliamonte & Smith 2005; Kearns 2007: 495; Torres Cacoullos & Walker 2009: 20;
Kọrkkọinen 2010; Van Bogaert 2010) and historical time (Palander- Collins 1999a), has grammaticalised further – demonstrated by its ability to occur in a syntactically parenthetical location in an utterance as an ‘epistemic parenthetical’ (Thompson &
Mulac 1991b: 317).
(4) My eldest brother, he must have been born in 1924, I think. (MRF1928) The chapter is organised as follows. In Section 2, I review some of the canonical lit- erature on the grammaticalisation of epistemic parentheticals, concentrating on the linguistic correlates of this development. The data and methods used in the study are introduced in Section 3, followed by a report of distributional and multivariate analy- sis results in Section 4. I discuss the implications of my findings and offer some conclu- sions in Section 5.