Rhythmic Grammar: The Influence of Rhythm on Grammatical Variation and Change in English (Topics in English Linguistics)

Rhythmic Grammar

≥

Topics in English Linguistics 46

Editors

Elizabeth Closs Traugott Bernd Kortmann

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Rhythmic Grammar The Influence of Rhythm on Grammatical Variation and Change in English

by

Julia Schlüter

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines 앪 of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schlüter, Julia, 1973⫺ Rhythmic grammar : the influence of rhythm on grammatical variation and change in English / by Julia Schlüter. p. cm. ⫺ (Topics in English linguistics ; 46) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 3-11-018607-1 (acid-free paper) 1. English language ⫺ Rhythm. 2. English language ⫺ Grammar, Historical. 3. English language ⫺ Variation. I. Title. II. Series. PE1561.S34 2005 425⫺dc22 2005022034

ISBN 3-11-018607-1 Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at ⬍http://dnb.ddb.de⬎. ” Copyright 2005 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

The comforting view of language is that it is sedate, structured in an orderly manner, and reducible to rule. But in another view, it is at war with structure, which is to say that it is at war with itself. Dwight L. Bolinger (1972: 18)

Acknowledgements

While there is only one name on the cover, many people have contributed in their own particular ways to the realization of this book, which is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation, submitted to the University of Paderborn in April 2004. Above all, I am indebted to my supervisor Giinter Rohdenburg, whose support has been outstanding throughout this project. Without his exceptionally acute observation of linguistic phenomena and his selfless readiness to share ideas and insights, this book would never have been written. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Manfred Wettler, who took on the role of co-examiner and has brought in all his expertise and enthusiasm. The present book has benefitted immensely from the perceptive and sagacious comments supplied by Elizabeth Traugott, who has acted as a series-editor for this volume. She has been a most assiduous and considerate advisor and deserves my heartfelt thanks. I also thankfully acknowledge the efforts of an anonymous reviewer, which prevented me from getting lost in too much detail and redirected my attention to the essentials. There are many people to whom I owe my gratitude and sincere appreciation for their guidance and constructive comments. Special thanks are due to Donka Minkova and Thomas Berg, who have, on many occasions, helped me to form a clearer idea of things that occupied my mind. In the place of numerous others I would also like to mention Teresa Fanego, Janet Dean Fodor, Terttu Nevalainen, Martina Penke, Anette Rosenbach, Ricardo Bermudez-Otero and Fritz Pasierbsky, all of whom have engaged in helpful discussions of aspects of my work in personal intercourse and at various conferences. While working on this book, I had the privilege of being part of a research team headed by Giinter Rohdenburg. I thank my colleagues Eva Berlage, Britta Mondorf and Uwe Vosberg for the cooperative and stimulating atmosphere that made work in the office both productive and enjoyable. Thanks are further due to our student assistants, in particular Julia Hilker, Mareike Ibrom, Andreas Mankel, Andre Schaefer and Christian Voss, who helped with countless favours, large or small. Stefan Thomas Gries, Klaus Brinker and Heiko Schimmelpfennig proved to be just the experts I needed on statistical matters. Without Hendrik Schliiter's help, the figures in Chapter 6 would have remained quite unsightly. It goes without saying that - despite the great help I have received from so many colleagues and friends - the remaining blunders and inaccuracies are entirely my own doing.

Vlll

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge a grant from the Cusanuswerk that launched me on the present enterprise. Much appreciated as well is the funding received from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the project "Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English", where I was employed as a research assistant during most of the work that went into this volume. Further thanks are due to the University of Paderborn for travel funds enabling me to take part in international conferences, as well as to the University Library for substantial assistance in the acquisition of the corpus collection on which much of this work is based. The present book would not have seen the light of day without the encouragement and practical support provided by my family and friends. This is especially true of my parents, to whom I extend my deepest appreciation. My dearest thanks, finally, go to my husband Martin, whose loving care and faithful support have provided a never-failing source of motivation in the completion of this work. Martin, dieses Buch gehort dir. Paderborn, July 2005

Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations and symbols Chapter 1

1.1 1.2 1.3 Chapter 2

2.1 2.1.1 2.1.2 2.1.3 2.1.4 2.2

Chapter 3

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Chapter 4

4.1 4.2 4.3

Vll Xli

Introduction The state of the art Aims and scope The structure of the argument

1 2 10 15

The Principle of Rhythmic Alternation introduced Outline The universality of rhythmic organization Isochrony types: stress timing vs. syllable timing Compensation strategies Functional explanations for rhythmic alternation Previous research on rhythmic influences on English grammar

17 17 22 24 28 32

Methodology Corpora and their limitations The phonology of written language Concordance software and search procedures Tests of statistical significance

43 43 50 55 56

Analysis of attributive structures Introduction Worse vs. worser from EModE to nineteenth-century English A-adjectives in PDE

60 60

35

67 79

x

Contents

4.4 4.4.1 4.4.2 4.4.3 4.4.4 4.4.5 4.4.6 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8

Mono- and disyllabic variants of past participles Drunk vs. drunken from ME to PDE Broke vs. broken from ME to PDE Struck vs. stricken from ME to PDE Knit vs. knitted from ME to PDE Lit vs. lighted from ME to PDE Summary A quite vs. quite a from EModE to PDE The order of coordinated colour adjectives in PDE Negated attributive adjectives in PDE Summary

Chapter 5

Analysis of verbal and adverbial structures Introduction Negated sentence adverbs in PDE Suffixed and suffixless adverbs Quick vs. quickly from EModE to PDE Slow vs. slowly from EModE to PDE Scarce vs. scarcely in PDE Marked and unmarked infinitives Infinitives dependent on active make in EModE and LModE Infinitives dependent on passive make from EModE to nineteenth-century English Infinitives dependent on passive bid in nineteenthcentury English Infinitives dependent on the marginal modal dare from EModE to PDE A-prefixation of -ing-forms A-prefixation of -ing-forms following set from EModEtoPDE A-prefixation of -ing-forms following go from EModEto PDE Summary

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.3.1 5.3.2 5.3.3 5.4 5.4.1 5.4.2 5.4.3 5.4.4 5.5 5.5.1 5.5.2 5.6

86 88 92

97 101 105 110 112 124 129 143 150 150 154 160 163 171 178 185 189 197 203 206 209 212 222 229

Contents

Chapter 6

6.1 6.2 6.2.1 6.2.2 6.2.3 6.3 6.3.1 6.3.2 6.3.3 6.3.4 6.3.5 6.3.6 6.3.7 Chapter 7

7.1 7.2

Xl

237 237 238 239 246 252 257 260 265

Theoretical implications Introduction Optimality Theory Universal, violable and ranked constraints A critique of Optimality Theory OT approaches to language variation and change Spreading activation models Principles of neural action Networks in production and perception Implications of the alternation of activation and recovery Interactivity between levels Limits to interactivity Language variation and change in a neuro- and psycholinguistic perspective Limitations of interactive activation models

292 301

Conclusion Synopsis Outlook

307 307 321

271 277 285

Appendix

329

Notes

331

References Primary sources (corpora) Secondary sources

351 351 353

Index

384

Abbreviations and symbols

* * ** *** ? [] BNC BNCwridom 1 CSR df ECF EEPF EModE EPD HC LModE ME n.a. n.s. NCF NP NSR OE OED OT

P

PDE S.o. SSR s.th. V

x

unacceptable example significant (p ::; 0.05) highly significant (p::; 0.01) very highly significant (p ::; 0.001) example of questionable acceptability prosodic boundaries primary stress (e.g. introduction) secondary stress (e.g. introduction) British National Corpus British National Corpus written domain 1 (imaginative prose) Compound Stress Rule degree(s) of freedom Eighteenth-Century Fiction database Early English Prose Fiction database Early Modem English (1500-1700) English Prose Drama database Helsinki Corpus Late Modem English (1700-1800) Middle English (1100-1500) not applicable (for significance tests) not significant (for significance tests) Nineteenth-Century Fiction database noun phrase Nuclear Stress Rule Old English (700-1100) Oxford English Dictionary Optimality Theory error probability Present-Day English someone Stress Shift Rule something verb stress mark (in metrical grids)

Chapter 1 Introduction

To date, English is probably the most studied and best described language in the world. Many awe-inspiring university grammars have been preoccupied with the description of its structures, beginning with A Grammar of Contemporary English (Quirk et al. 1972), its successor, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al. 1985), more recently, the Longman Grammar ofSpoken and Written English (Biber et al. 1999) and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston and Pullum 2002). One might expect that there is not much more that can be said about the grammar of a single language. However, as the quotation from Bolinger (1972: 18) prefacing the present work suggests, it is erroneous to believe that we will ever manage to cast a grammar into a stable and orderly set of rules. Without indulging too much in the war metaphor, it is true that a language integrates a myriad of conflicting forces and is constantly seeking compromises between them. Thus, what the above grammars describe as grammatical rules is at best a momentary balance between these forces, and what they describe as tendencies is the outcome of a complicated interplay of forces, the analysis of which can provide valuable insights into the essence of language. Most comprehensive grammars - as the name grammar suggests - focus on and are organized around aspects of grammatical structure; prosody and rhythm are only described summarily in an appendix but not adduced as an explanatory factor in grammatical descriptions (cf. Quirk et al. 1972; 1985) or, even worse, completely ignored (cf. Biber et al. 1999; Huddleston and Pullum 2002). In contrast, the present study foregrounds a phonological tendency, examines its defining characteristics and then sets about exploring its influence on the grammar of English. This tendency is known as the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, and is the fundamental maxim according to which the rhythmic structure of English as well as other natural languages is organized. The present discussion is exemplary in a number of respects: it concentrates exclusively on the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, which has been alleged to be the most important phonological influence on grammar (cf. Rohdenburg 1997: 106), although many phonological constraints would deserve to be subjected to a systematic study doing justice to their contributions to the grammar of English. And it picks out only a few phenomena, which are proposed as representative examples of an as yet inestimable quantity of similar cases, although the preference

2

Introduction

for rhythmic alternation is presumably ubiquitous in the structure of the language. Such an enterprise is by no means new in the study of English. There have been a number of monographs dedicated to the study of rhythm in English, notably Fijn van Draat ([ 191 0] 1967) on rhythm in English prose, Stroheker (1913) with a focus on the language of the EModE authors Marlowe and Kyd, and Bihl (1916) on Chaucer's and Gower's late ME,l These remarkable works however date from the early years of the twentieth century and are based on manually selected examples with no claim to completeness. In the meantime, descriptive linguistic research has revolutionized its methodological repertoire. The accessibility of modem computerreadable mega-corpora has opened up new dimensions in the collection of data. Above and beyond qualitative statements, this enables linguists to make empirically founded quantitative statements about the variable aspects of a grammar. Moreover, linguistic theory has developed innovative models inspired by research on the human brain, which has also made significant advances in the recent past. The present book is unprecedented in its contents of detailed and extensive data analyses bearing on the interface of rhythm and morphosyntax. The insights gained from empirical studies complement the descriptive work accomplished by contemporary grammars and combine it with an evaluation of the explanatory potential of modem linguistic theory. The work capitalizes on the fact that a living language is not only a product of a set of rules with a predetermined output. The numerous domains in which a grammar is variable tell us much more about the forces at work in its core. Variation is to be found not only in synchrony, but also and to an even larger extent in the diachronic change undergone by a language. Thus, the historical dimension of the present work is an indispensable component, only limited by the availability of appropriate corpora.

1.1.

The state of the art

Since the present book deals with the influence exerted by a phonological factor on the grammar of a language, it has connections bearing on a variety of recurrent themes in linguistics. Some of these issues will be spotlighted in this section as a background to the following chapters. Since it is however impossible to do full justice to the state of the art in a few pages, the following remarks can at best be suggestive. They merely serve to situate the present work in a larger context and to open up different perspectives on the findings that will be described in subsequent chapters.

The state afthe art

3

For the sake of exposition, this section tackles the state of the art from two opposite angles. Though these appear to be diametrically opposed, there are of course many intermediate positions defended in present-day linguistic research that manage to integrate the assets of both approaches (cf. e.g. Jackendoff 1997; 2002). The present survey revolves around two central issues: the architecture of the grammar of a language, which can be taken to be fully modular or fully interactive, and the sort of data that should be used in linguistics to gain insights into this architecture. For a start, the present book will be concerned throughout with the relationship between two different kinds of representations, namely phonological and morphosyntactic ones. In other words, the focus of the discussion will be on the 'interface' of two traditionally distinguished 'modules' (though, for reasons that will become clear, neither the term interface nor the term module seems particularly adequate). The subject matter can thus be viewed as a contribution to the highly controversial debate going on in cognitive psychology about the Modularity of Mind (cf. Fodor 1983: 37). In linguistics, the idea of modularity is strongly associated with formal theories of grammar of the Chomskyan school (cf., for instance, Chomsky 1964: 9; 1995: 2), though it is also common in psycholinguistic models of language processing (cf. Garrett 1975: 176; Levelt 1989: 9). Despite fundamental differences in orientation, but in accordance with Fodorian ideas, all of these conceptions share the notions of modularity, Le. the division of language into specialized components, autonomy, i.e. the relative independence of the processes going on in one module with regard to those going on in other modules, and seriality, i.e. the assumption that the output of anterior modules serves as the input to posterior modules, without a reverse flow of information. Thus, the modules are relatively isolated units and impermeable to the processes taking place in the others. Specifically, most linguistic and psycholinguistic production models assume that syntactic operations precede phonological ones. This ordering conforms to widely shared intuitions about speech planning and has substantial empirical evidence in its favour (cf. also Bock 1982: 35; 1987: 119; Vogel and Kenesei 1990: 339). The reverse direction of influence, from phonological to grammatical structure, is intuitively less obvious and more or less incompatible with these models. 2 In Chomskyan linguistics in particular, a concentration on syntax as the only creative (generative) module of a grammar has culminated in a maxim according to which phonology is no more than an interpretive component, assigning a phonological structure to a ready-made string of morphemes that is the output of the syntactic component (cf. Chomsky 1964: 9, 65; 1965: 141; Chomsky and Halle 1968: 7; Selkirk 1984: 410; Chomsky 1995: 229). Thus, syntax is assumed to have the exclusive power to determine the well-formedness of a sen-

4

Introduction

tence; its output is definitive and unmodifiable. 3 In the face of potential counterevidence, a lot of ink has been spilt on safeguarding the fundamental tenet of a phonology-free syntax, Le. the assumption that phonological representations have no influence whatsoever on syntactic processes (cf. in particular Zwicky 1969; 1985; Zwicky and Pullum 1986: 71; Pullum and Zwicky 1988: 255). Attempts by generative linguists to accommodate any contrary findings have had recourse to lexical specifications (e.g. Langendoen 1982: 108-11 0) or to output filters (e.g. Vogel and Kenesei 1990: 351; Halle and Idsardi 1995: 423-424). Such tours de force have however been argued to obliterate powerful generalizations and to undermine the foundations of the entire syntactocentric conception (cf. lackendoff 1997: 16; 2000: 22-23). Recent trends in linguistic theory have recognized the need for the simultaneous presence of different types of information (semantic, syntactic, morphological, phonological) and discarded sequential input-output conceptions in favour of more interactive conceptions. 4 To the present day, it is unclear exactly how a model of language apt to accommodate a direction of influence from phonology to syntax should be envisaged. This is certainly due in part to the longstanding lack of interest in phenomena that are incompatible with the maxims of linguistic and psycholinguistic theory. As a result, the extent of interactions between the modules has never been systematically investigated - a clear case of theoretical preconceptions getting in the way of an adequate recognition of empirical phenomena. The empirical research that has nevertheless been realized independently of the dominant theoretical paradigms has more often than not failed to bring its findings to bear on theoretical tenets. For a more detailed survey, see section 2.2. This is not to deny that certain branches of theoretical linguistics as well as of psycholinguistics have produced models that do away with the traditional segregation of linguistic processes into modules. For this reason, these models will turn out to be of particular interest in the present context. The original generative model in theoretical linguistics has partly given way to a radical re-formulation known as Optimality Theory, which is the exact opposite of a modular conception with heavily constrained interfaces (see section 6.2). Furthermore, a restricted group of cognitive linguists (e.g. McClelland and Rumelhart 1981; Dell and Reich 1981; Rumelhart, Hinton, and McClelland 1986; McClelland 1987; Berg 1998; Lamb 1999) have for almost two decades been cultivating a neurolinguistic type of models known as spreading activation models, which are based on highly interactive networks not divided into anything comparable to modules. These theories make interesting predictions with regard to the output of the grammars they conceptualize, but an empirical verification of the

The state ofthe art

5

claims derivable from them on the basis of naturalistic data is still pending (see section 6.3). An obstacle to the fruitful integration of these research paradigms is provided by the fact that they adhere to fundamentally different approaches to the human language capacity. Jackendoff (2002: 34) distinguishes a "theory of competence", dealing with the data structures in the language user's mind, a "theory of performance", dealing with the use of these data structures in language production and perception, and a "theory of neural instantiation", dealing with the realizations of data structures, storage and assembly processes in the brain. Although these divisions are mainly methodological in nature, there is little cross-talk between the subdisciplines (cf. Jackendoff 2002: 34). This state of affairs is exacerbated by substantial disagreement about the procedures that should be applied to promote insights into the language faculty. Should the structure of the human brain, for instance, constrain the hypothesis space that we exploit when analyzing grammar? Can linguistic competence be elucidated by making introspective judgements about the grammaticality of artificially constructed utterances? What role has to be attributed to quantitative usage data and their contingencies with situations of language use? Finally, should language change be taken into consideration in the construction of a grammar, and how should it be integrated? Linguistic research within the generative paradigm usually adheres to a methodological maxim introduced by Chomsky (1965: 4), according to which linguistic competence, i.e. the ideal speaker-hearer's abstract knowledge of his or her language, should be the prime object of study, rather than his or her performance in concrete situations, which is error-prone and thus not representative of linguistic competence. A logical consequence of this reduction of language to an idealized, perfect system is the refusal to accept probabilitistic tendencies in language use as worthwhile objects of study. Linguistic competence is typically conceived of as a set of rules that are algebraic, not statistical, and that are independent of place and time (cf. Zwicky and Pullum 1986: 66). As a result of this focus on abstract competence, linguistic research has in the wake of the Chomskyan revolution turned away from quantitative empirical methods and concentrated on introspection as the appropriate means of gaining insights into the system of a language. This position has not found much acclaim beyond the generative school (cf. Wasow and Arnold 2003: 150; Wasow 2002: 132-134). The most serious criticism that it has incurred has to do with the fact that if actual language data are relegated to performance and therefore considered irrelevant for linguistic theory, linguistic theory cannot make any testable predictions about language use. It has been pointed out that in linguistics, there is no

6

Introduction

way around quantitative empirical data, which have the power to support or contradict claims that derive from linguistic theory, and theory should strive to reflect the processes of language production and perception at least to some degree (cf. Labov 1969: 759; Anttila 1997: 63; Hudson 1997: 105). In effect, a linguistic theory is informative only insofar as it is applicable to data on language use and falsifiable on the basis of such data (cf. Guy 1991: 20; Berg 1998: 10). There are also important theoretical reservations with regard to the competence-performance divide. The equation of categorical rules with competence and of variable tendencies with performance has in many cases turned out to be an obstacle to linguistic research rather than an asset. For a start, a very practical problem of delimitation is pointed out by Anttila (2002: 210) and Wasow and Arnold (2003: 148-149): there can be no discrete borderline between categorical constraints and statistical tendencies since the same principle can have the status of a categorical constraint in one language or in one domain of grammar, but that of a mere tendency in another. If the one was attributed to competence and the other to performance, a cross-linguistic generalization would be lost. The same can be the case within a single language undergoing change: a principle that was formerly only a preference can subsequently become a rule, or a former rule can turn into a mere preference. Ascribing one state to competence and the other to performance would force us to postulate the unmotivated and sudden emergence or loss of a rule of competence. Many authors from different backgrounds agree that it would be desirable for linguistic theory to integrate non-categorical preferences in a systematic way and thus to be able to predict variable frequencies. 5 A stronger claim is made by authors like Berg (1997: 672,695) and Guy (1997a: 140), who argue that grammar is variable in essence and that reducing grammar to its invariable parts might leave us with a mutilated, if not disappearingly small object of study. The separation between competence and performance in formal grammar is not only a question of the data linguistic theory should be based on; it also limits the range of explanations that can be adduced for linguistic phenomena. In formal grammars, functional explanations making reference to performance factors are not permitted. However, there is reason to assume that language is the way it is largely because it is a function of the human cognitive, auditory and articulatory apparatus. Furthermore, it is subject to external factors such as style, register, addressee, gender, age, socio-economic status, language contact, etc. If such functional factors are disregarded, it has been argued, a massive explanatory potential is lost (cf. Bickerton 1971: 483, 487; Lindblom, MacNeilage, and Studdert-Kennedy 1984: 201). Stampe (1979: 43) puts this most pointedly as follows: "the conditions of the use of language (performance) are responsible for the

The state ofthe art

7

nature of language." Though these conditions may be grounded in performance, they are implemented by grammatical means. Therefore, the acquisition of a language and its linguistic description must include the language-specific ways in which the grammar incorporates these factors (cf. Kiparsky 1982: 115; Guy 1997a: 129). Coming back to the present book, its title anticipates the attitude that will be taken with regard to the tenets of formal grammar. For one thing, the discussion will be concerned throughout with the impingement of a phonological preference on morphosyntax, which indicates that the argument is based on a non-modular, non-autonomous and non-serial conception of grammar. For another, the book investigates grammatical variation and change, a subject that speaks for itself on the issue of which linguistic phenomena should be of interest to study. Some fundamental assumptions underlying the following discussion have to be clarified in advance. For this purpose, the basic premises of the functionalist school of linguistics will be adopted. Unlike generative grammar, this paradigm has never developed into a formalized, comprehensive theory of language. The most consistent research paradigm with a decidedly functionalist orientation is the framework known as Natural Linguistics (with its branches of Natural Phonology and Natural Morphology). The outstanding (though relatively little appreciated) exponents of this paradigm are works like Stampe (1979), DressIer et al. (1987) and Wurzel (1987; cf. also the references in section 4.2). However, neither Natural Linguistics nor functionalism in general prejudges the precise shape of a model of grammar in the way that either generative linguistics, Optimality Theory or spreading activation models do. It rather defines the scope of the phenomena and motivations that a theory of grammar should consider. The functional view of linguistics can be characterized, in accordance with Croft (1995: 490, 509) and Kirby (1999: 13), in the following way. 'Functional' considerations are those relating to the concrete conditions of language use in communicative situations. Many of these can ultimately be reduced to pressures of language processing in real time, where processing refers both to the encoding of a communicative intention into a string of articulated sounds (production) and to the decoding of an acoustic wave as a corresponding message (perception). These considerations boil down to a maximal facilitation of language use for the speaker and hearer (cf. Mayerthaler 1987: 27). While it is commonly agreed that such functional factors determine many facts of linguistic behaviour, such as language use, change and acquisition, the central assumption of functional linguistics, in contradistinction to formal linguistics, is that extra-linguistic factors can also impact on linguistic structures proper, such as syntax or morphology (cf. also Kiparsky 1982: 88, 115). Thus, rather than mere descriptions, func-

8

Introduction

tional linguistics proposes explanations of linguistic patterns (cf. Berg 1995: 186). This view has ramifications for a number of positions that are assumed with regard to the relationship between (internalized) grammars and (external) facts of usage. For one thing, Universal Grammar equals in large parts the complete set of functional constraints and motivations. In other words, there is no need to assume a particularly rich genetic endowment specific to the language faculty since the outward conditions of language use suffice to explain similarities between human languages. However, since functional constraints derive from very diverse sources and have as many different teleologies (e.g. the simplification of language production, the improvement of its perceptibility or the facilitation of its acquisition), the requirements they impose on language are not consistent with one another. This gives rise to interactions and conflicts between constraints, even though each one may be thoroughly functionally motivated (cf. also Stampe 1979: 21; DressIer et al. 1987: 7-8; Kiparsky 1982: 117; 1988: 377-378). The functional approach to grammar is therefore decidedly multifactorial, including such factors as semantic and pragmatic tendencies, stylistic and sociolinguistic considerations, processing strategies, frequency effects and, crucially, phonological influences such as the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. As is indicated by the existence of interlinguistic variability, Universal Grammar underdetermines the shape taken by individual grammars. In a similar way, a single grammar may incorporate different solutions to the conflicts between constraints on language processing, which surface as intralinguistic variation. Variation within a grammar results from different more or less optimal grammatical coding strategies that compete with each other (cf. Croft 1995: 514). A grammar represents no more than a momentary balance between multiple competing functional forces and is inherently variable. An individual speaker may occasionally produce a deviant solution to the permanent state of conflict, where the term deviant merely means 'deviating from the probabilistic mean'. Such a conception invalidates the formal distinction between competence and performance, since competence itself is assumed to be probabilistic in essence and performance directly mirrors this aspect of competence. This implies that performance is no longer downgraded to a peripheral issue but becomes the central object of linguistic investigation (cf. Croft 1995: 511; Wasow and Arnold 2003: 148). This also means that factors that lack the status of an obligatory rule but represent statistically stable tendencies can nevertheless represent linguistic universals and are worthy to be described as part of a speaker's competence (cf. Kirby 1999: 5). What has been said so far should suffice to make it clear that these factors, which will be referred to

The state afthe art

9

in the present work as determinants of grammatical variation, are considered to be extremely important in the description of a grammar, though they may be violated in favour of other factors in the non-deterministic framework of functional linguistics. Functionally motivated constraints (or determinants) determine the direction not only of the deviations from currently valid rules of a grammar in performance errors and in language acquisition, but also the direction of language change (cf. Stampe 1979: xix-xx; cf. also DressIer et al. 1987: 3). As is widely accepted (cf. e.g. Samuels 1972b: 3, 138, 177), variability is a precondition for change. Language change selects from among the variants present in a synchronic system and the choices are multiply conditioned by a set of interacting factors. Since nonoptimal states entail a pressure for change aiming at a better satisfaction of the violated constraint or constraints, alternative structures may be adopted into the grammar (cf. Ritt 2004: 113). However, language change is not deterministic: a given function can be fulfilled by a variety of different processes (cf. Kiparsky 1988: 384). Nor does it lead to an overall improvement of the grammar: improvements on one dimension inevitably lead to deteriorations on another, and the social functions of language enforce contrasts between group members and outsiders through the maintenance of linguistic differences (cf. Ritt 2004: 112-114). In brief, the competing forces bunched up in a grammar and its inherent indeterminacy amount to an inbuilt mechanism for generating changes (cf. Croft 1995: 524). Both synchronic variation and diachronic change can thus be investigated within the same theoretical framework of functional linguistics. Since functionally motivated factors are, by hypothesis, universal, they can be expected to exert their influence at all synchronic stages in the course of the evolution of a language and to guide diachronic language change. The Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is no exception here. It has been assumed to emanate directly from more general principles shaping the most diverse aspects of rhythmic behaviour, of which it is only the linguistic manifestation (cf. Hayes 1984: 59; Myers 1997: 147; for more details, see sections 2.1.1 and 2.1.4). Though the pressure exerted by the preference for rhythmic alternation is thus presumably universal and constant, it can be expected to be implemented in different ways, which are specific both to a particular language as well as to a particular state in its history. The exemplification in the present study is limited to English and to a diachronic span from about 1500 to the present day. Therefore, research into other languages and their histories promises to yield complementary insights into the efficacy of rhythm in grammatical variation and change.

10

1.2.

Introduction

Aims and scope

The following chapters pursue a number of interrelated objectives that arise from the state of the art outlined above. They constitute a progression from empirical findings to their theoretical implications. However, the present work is conceived primarily as a contribution to the grammatical description of earlier and present-day forms of English - a fact that is mirrored in the greater weight given to the empirical studies in comparison to theoretical considerations. The empirical analyses aim to demonstrate that the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation generalizes across a large and varied set of grammatical phenomena in the past and present of the English language. It accounts for and ties together the distribution of morphological and syntactic variants of different kinds, so that it should be assigned an appropriate place in any comprehensive grammatical description. The theoretical objectives go beyond the critique of current linguistic theories, but present new hypotheses and develop a relatively comprehensive model on the basis of the empirical findings. The individual objectives can be spelled out as follows. In a first step, the rhythmic determinant at the centre of the discussion, known as the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, will be introduced and characterized from a number of different perspectives. Since this principle is frequently described as a linguistic universal, its cross-linguistic relevance will be made explicit as far as the literature on the subject permits. The main part of the work is concerned with an elucidation of the effect of this principle on the grammar of English on the basis of appropriate corpus analyses. At the outset, this includes a clarification of the methodological premises that will be applied. In combination with a survey of similar findings culled from the secondary literature, the range of phenomena that will be selected for investigation is designed to constitute a representative, though certainly not complete overview of phenomena that testify to the effects of rhythm. The study of these phenomena probes into domains of English grammar that have so far either not received the attention they deserve or resisted an analysis, partly on account of the dominant theoretical paradigms that ruled out influences exerted by 'posterior' representations on 'anterior' ones. The overriding aim is to show that if we take the rhythmic aspects of the phenomena into account, a generalization with a large explanatory potential can be formulated in terms of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. By integrating this factor, we will arrive at accounts that can fill out the blanks left open by the current standard grammars of English. Incidentally, this amounts to an empirically

Aims and scope

11

founded refutation of the widespread assumption that grammar and phonology represent separate modules and interact in a serial fashion without a reverse direction of influence. - Depending on the phenomenon under consideration, this descriptive work will in most cases include a diachronic dimension. This will serve to address the question of whether and to what extent the evolution of grammatical structures has been guided by rhythmic preferences. A related issue is whether there is any evidence that the rhythmic character of the English language has changed in the course of its history. - Though the focus is on the impact of rhythm, all of the analyses purport to present a comprehensive and realistic picture of the phenomena under investigation. Variable domains of a grammar are naturally susceptible to other determinants besides rhythm. Thus, all studies will bring into play a range of factors that may, depending on the case, produce synergies or antagonisms with the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. The empirical work also aims to furnish further insights into the nature of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation itself. A hypothesis will be formulated as to whether this phonological factor plays the same role in spoken and written language use. Furthermore, the studies will help to clarify what combinations of syllables can pass as alternating, and to define the domain of the principle in terms of syntactic or prosodic units. - To accomplish these aims, not only qualitative, but also quantitative insights will be essential. Therefore, the analyses will be based on corpora of naturalistic language use, from which representative datasets will be compiled. The complete evaluation of these data permits quantified statements in terms of higher or lower, growing or declining frequencies of use. The quantitative assessment of the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation in different domains of the grammar will also make it possible to delimit its scope: are all domains of the grammar similarly permeable to rhythmic constraints, and if not, what can be said about the line of demarcation between permeable and impermeable domains? This leads on to the theoretical questions that the present work seeks to address. - Having obtained crucial evidence on the nature of the grammarphonology connection, some of the current models of language will be evaluated that allow for interactions between these traditionally distinct 'modules'. The models that will come under scrutiny are, first, Optimality Theory, and second, a neurolinguistic spreading activation model. - Since the latter model accords best with the empirical facts (and also seems preferable for independent reasons), it will be enlarged upon and

12

Introduction

developed further so as to accommodate the results gained in the empirical part. In addition to the integration of rhythmic influences on grammar, this should take account of the limitations of the influence of alternating rhythm, of the interactions with other determinants, and of a mechanism for grammatical variability and change. It should also contribute an answer to the question of whether we can distinguish an internal structure of the grammar or whether a grammar should bee seen as an amorphous mass, given that there are no modules in the traditional sense. Eventually, we aim to end up with a model apt to unify as many of our corpus-based findings as possible in a plausible overarching model. All in all, the aims thus encompass empirical as well as theoretical aspects, synchronic as well as diachronic analyses, a potential linguistic universal and implications for linguistic theory-building. Before we enter into the discussion, we will therefore have to delimit the precise scope of the present book by clarifying what it will do and what it will not do. As stated above, the book builds on descriptions of English grammar available to date and seeks to endow them with a greater descriptive and explanatory adequacy. It will propose adjustments and refinements to the work accomplished by the standard university grammars and by the current state of research as reflected in articles and monographs on the grammar of English past and present. Thus, the focus is on morphological and syntactic phenomena rather than on an in-depth study of the prosody and rhythm of the language. Like its time-honoured predecessors (Fijn van Draat ([ 191 0] 1967, 1912a, 1912b; Stroheker 1913; Bihl 1916; Franz [1939] 1986), the present work makes use of a comparatively basic inventory of rhythmic rules. While the alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables is fundamental to its concerns, the book does not propose to contribute any substantial new insights to the debate on issues such as sentence-level prosody or the foot structure of English. The remarkable advances achieved recently in branches of theoretical phonology such as metrical stress theory will certainly add further perspectives to the work begun in this book. For present purposes, however, a relatively unsophisticated version of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation will be adopted. In effect, this offers the advantage of keeping the amount of detail required for a description of the grammatical phenomena investigated at a maniable degree of complexity. While the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is often represented as a universal of rhythmic organization, extending to other languages and even to extra-linguistic behaviour (cf. section 2.1.1), the focus will exclusively be on the English language, which, by hypothesis, integrates the principle in a language-specific way. The task of studying the influence of the prin-

Aims and scope

13

ciple in other languages, while being a promising avenue for further research, is left to others. Furthermore, the focus of the work will be on the "common core" of English (Denison 1998: 95), in other words, the written standard language as used by the educated classes that were and are engaged in the publication of widely read texts. The restriction to written sources is unavoidable when dealing with the past, and the largest collections of texts that have survived are unsurprisingly those of the works of authors belonging to the literary standard. It would doubtless be interesting to analyze corpora of nonstandard usage (both earlier and current) or contemporary spoken language, but the corresponding databases are comparatively small or only under construction. All that can be done in the present work is an occasional analysis of a rather small spoken corpus, and a comparison between non-dramatic prose and dramatic prose, which, by hypothesis, represents a type of 'written-to-be-spoken' language that is to some degree representative of the spoken usage of its time. The existence of relevant effects in nonstandard forms of English is not being contested; the contrary is the case. Extending the analysis of phonological effects to the more oral registers would certainly be a worthwhile task for future linguistic research. For the analysis of phonological influences on grammar, those domains of the grammar will prove to be of particular interest that exhibit variability or liability to change. Interestingly, earlier stages of the English language were not subject to standardization tendencies to the same degree as the language is now, due to factors like schooling, mass communication and mobility. Therefore, earlier forms of English, like modem nonstandard dialects, involve a considerably greater degree of grammatical variability than standard Present-Day English. What is more, varieties that have undergone relatively little standardization are generally more open to all kinds of natural phonological preferences, including the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation (cf. van Marle 1997: 29). The present study exploits this fact in its strong historical orientation, which is only limited by the availability of sufficiently large corpora. Thus, the studies to be presented reach back into the Late Modem English period (LModE; 1700-1800) and the Early Modem English period (EModE; 1500-1700), with an occasional excursus into the Middle English era (ME; 1100-1500), where the density of the available data however leaves much to be desired. As for PresentDay English (PDE), it is true that many formerly variable domains of grammar have become fixed in one way or the other. However, this means neither that there is no more scope for variation (which is part of the essence of language), nor that there is no evidence for rhythmic effects in the contemporary standard language. As far as corpus linguistic research is concerned, the loss of variability is compensated for by the immense reser-

14

Introduction

voir of electronic texts that have become available in the past few years. These texts can be put to use as computer-readable corpora and give us a handle even on low-frequency structures or on phenomena where variants are extremely rare. The domains of grammar that will be shown to be susceptible to phonological influences include, by definition, syntax and morphology. Both are, however, viewed as aspects of the processing of language, i.e. the creative processes in language production and perception, rather than the storage of linguistic information. As far as syntax is concerned, there is little dissent that new structures are assembled each time the processor outputs a sentence and that a new analysis is constructed each time a given sentence is perceived (except when dealing with a fixed phraseological collocation). As for morphology, the issue is more problematic. Following Dressier et at. (1987: 6), we will draw a line between inflectional morphology, which is located towards the "processing" end of the scale, near to syntax, and lexical morphology, which is located towards the "storage" end of the scale, near to the lexicon. For our purposes, the processing aspects of inflectional morphology are of greater interest since they overlap with syntactic processing and are dependent on syntactic relationships in the sentence (for a collection of relevant examples, cf. Plank 1984; 1985). This is not to deny the fact that phonological factors like rhythm have an influence on lexical morphology as well. On the contrary, even proponents of generative grammar acknowledge that the make-up of complex lexemes is permeable to phonological preferences and articulatory constraints (cf. e.g. Pullum and Zwicky 1988: 276). Such effects are, however, beyond the scope of the present study, which focuses on the creative processes taking place at the intersection between grammar and phonology in language processing. Except for a few pertinent remarks in the survey of previous research in section 2.2, rhythmic effects on lexical forms will therefore be left out of consideration. Detailed treatments of the constraints bearing on lexical morphology can be found in standard works on English word formation, e.g. Adams (1973), Bauer (1988) and Plag (1999). The determinant of grammatical variation foregrounded in the following chapters is assumed to play an equally fundamental role in language production and perception. Two detailed discussions of the arguments for this hypothesis and its potential limitations will be found in sections 2.1.4 and 6.3.2. Basically, the assumption is that production and perception are closely intertwined processes dependent on the same neural mechanisms, and that one cannot take place without the other. Consequently, whenever reference will be made to language processing, this is intended to include both production and perception.

The structure ofthe argument

15

Finally, the approach taken in the present work, though focus sed on a single determinant, is decidedly multifactorial. The factors that will be taken into consideration in addition to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation will, however, not be controlled for in their entirety. On the one hand, this would require an enormously complex descriptive apparatus, which would, however, remain piecemeal due to the lack of a complete inventory of the relevant factors. On the other, the present quantitative approach sets certain limits with regard to the feasibility of a comprehensive in-depth analysis of a large number of corpus examples. Therefore, unless stated otherwise, we start out from the assumption that the factors not controlled for lead to a certain amount of random oscillation in the data, but by and large cancel themselves out provided that the dataset is sufficiently large.

1.3.

The structure of the argument

The seven chapters of the present work are organized in a progression centring around the empirical main part, which is represented by Chapters 4 and 5. The present chapter has served to sketch the general background in which the present study is situated, to introduce the aims that it will pursue, to define its scope and limitations, and to explain some basic assumptions figuring in its background. The following two chapters have a more specific introductory character, although they already contain important hypotheses. Chapter 2 introduces the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, including its characterization as a potential linguistic universal, the current state of research on its implementation in different types of languages and in English in particular, and an examination of its causality and teleology. It also contains a summary of the findings described in the secondary literature that show an influence of the principle on grammatical variation and change in English. Chapter 3 prepares the corpus linguistic studies by introducing important facts and assumptions concerning the research methodology employed in the empirical main part. It provides an exposition of the database, the concordancing procedures and the statistical evaluation of the results. Furthermore, it discusses the potential problem presented by the fact that the database to be examined for phonological influences is mainly composed of written texts. Since it is not obvious that rhythm should play a role here, some notes of clarification will be in place. The two central chapters (Chapters 4 and 5) contain all the empirical substance of the present work. They outline 20 case studies that can be considered in their own right, independently of all others. All studies are provided with a survey of relevant insights culled from the secondary lit-

16

Introduction

erature and contribute some aspects to the aims defined in section 1.2: they exemplify different grammatical variation phenomena susceptible to rhythmic influences, they bring into play a range of other functional constraints, they quantify the relative contributions of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation in synchrony and mostly also in diachrony, and last not least, they end up with an account of the phenomena under discussion that exceeds the descriptive adequacy attained by prior grammatical descriptions. Taken together, Chapters 4 and 5 present a representative picture of the range and intensity of rhythmic influences on grammar. The phenomena surveyed are subdivided into attributive structures (Chapter 4) and other syntactic constructions involving adverbs as well as verbal structures (Chapter 5). As will be seen, attributive structures provide an extraordinary wealth of phenomena that are highly sensitive to rhythmic preferences. In addition, they display a set of characteristic avoidance strategies that modify their rhythmic structures so as to adapt them to an alternating pattern. These facts motivate their treatment in a separate chapter. In contrast, grammatical constructions outside of attributive structures, for instance adverbials and verbal constructions, while being likewise susceptible to effects of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, form less integrated wholes and their rhythmic structures are more diverse. Moreover, an adequate investigation of grammatical variation in these domains has to take into consideration numerous other influences that compete with rhythmic tendencies. Therefore, the discussion in Chapter 5 goes beyond that in Chapter 4 in several respects and takes it to a higher level. Chapter 6 concentrates on the implications of the empirical findings for a theory of language. It outlines the conception of the relationship between grammar and phonology as detailed in Optimality Theory (section 6.2) and evaluates it against the empirical evidence in the preceding chapter. In a second step, it expounds the basics of neurolinguistic spreading activation models and develops them further so as to accommodate the empirical findings under a unique theoretical conception (section 6.3). Chapter 7 contains a general conclusion that brings together the results with regard to the objectives set out in section 1.2. Finally, it provides an outlook that summarizes the questions that have remained open and suggests avenues for further research on the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, on phonological influences on grammar in general and on the neurological aspects of language.

Chapter 2 The Principle of Rhythmic Alternation introduced

The present chapter introduces the phonological preference that will be at the focus of the empirical and theoretical discussion of this work. The Principle of Rhythmic Alternation belongs to the domain of prosody, or suprasegmental phonology. Prosody is defined as including at least the following auditory aspects of speech: loudness/intensity/amplitude, duration/tempo, pitch/frequency/tone/FO patterns, and pause (cf. Lehiste 1970: 4; Couper-Kuhlen 1986: 4; Shattuck-Hufnagel 1996: 196; Warren 1999: 156). Therefore, the minimal domain of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is the syllable, not the individual sound. Prosody is open to influences from many disparate sources, such as syntax, semantics, pragmatics, focus, unit and utterance length, speaking rate, and segmental phonology (cf. Shattuck-Hufnagel 1996: 237; cf. also Warren 1999: 176). Furthermore, as will be seen below, it can exert an influence on the linguistic sub-systems it interacts with, in particular the grammatical components, syntax and morphology. The present discussion of prosodic features is restricted to a principle that is relatively basic and clearly circumscribed, namely the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. In section 2.1, this principle is elucidated in a general way from a variety of perspectives. Subsequently, section 2.2 reports on the present state of the research regarding effects the principle has on grammatical variation and change in English.

2.1.

Outline

The description of alternating stress contours has long been an issue in linguistic theory and has accordingly been dealt with under may different frameworks. Chomsky and Halle (1968: 78, 114-117), in their fundamental exposition of generative phonology, set up three rules (numbers 39, 107 and 108) that promote a separation of primary stress and secondary stress by intervening unstressed syllables. I Yet, the scope of these rules is restricted to the single word, and the authors admit that their account is insufficient to explain the emergence of rhythmic alternations in larger domains. To remedy this shortcoming of generative phonology, an extensive formalism has been developed to describe rhythmic regularities. This formalism is variously known as metrical stress theory, prosodic phonology,

18

The Principle ofRhythmic Alternation introduced

or metrical phonology and considered to constitute one of the subcomponents of phonology, besides lexical phonology and autosegmental phonology (cf. Nespor and Voge11986: 302). While Chomsky and Halle (1968) resort to numerical indices to symbolize stress contours, later metrical stress theories develop graphic representations of prosodic relationships as their vehicle. In the literature, metrical trees, representing prosodic constituent structure, are used in combination with or as an alternative to metrical grids, representing rhythmic structure. 2 Though the concerns of metrical phonology are by no means central to the present discussion, the metrical grid convention will be borrowed occasionally to illustrate rhythmic relationships. The grid treats stress not as an inherent property of a syllable, but the particular stress level assigned to a syllable depends largely on its position in a sequence of syllables (cf. Kenstowicz 1994: 554). It defines preferred and dispreferred constellations (cf. Jackendoff 2002: 112). Therefore, the grid lends itself well to the abstract representation of rhythmic regularities. Selkirk (1984: 39-40) goes so far as to assume that metrical grids have some degree of psychological reality. Whether we wish to follow her thus far or not, grids can certainly help visualize the conditions and effects of the application of rhythmic stress rules. 3 The principal purpose of all metrical theories is to describe rhythmic properties of language. What we refer to as rhythm, "in speech as in other human activities, arises out of the periodic occurrence of some sort of movement, producing an expectation that the regularity of succession will continue" (Abercrombie 1967: 96).4 From this general impression of rhythmicity, metrical theories derive their fundamental tenet, the so-called Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, which has been given many, mostly congruent, formulations: 5 ... stressed and stressless syllables tend to alternate at rhythmically ideal disyllabic distances. Rhythmic alternation manifests itself by the avoidance of sequences of stressed syllables, as well as of long sequences of stressless syllables. (Kager 1989: 2, italics in the original) Whether the tendency for strong and weak syllables to alternate with one another is ultimately physiologically or psychologically conditioned, there is reason to believe that rhythmic alternation is a universal principle governing the rhythms of natural language. (Couper-Kuhlen 1986: 60)

In other words, an ideal rhythm alternates between maximally contrasting units, i.e. between stressed and unstressed syllables. In the shape of the metrical grid, this principle is reflected as in (1). On the left, a schematic representation is given, which is illustrated by an example on the right.

Outline

(1)

19

rhythmic alternation

x x x x x

(on any level of the grid)

x x x x x x x x xx x x x xx twenty people went to China

Each x mark on the bottom level represents a syllable. Each stressed syllable receives an extra mark on the second level. In the same vein, the initial syllables of people and China receive an additional mark on the third level, since they have higher stress levels than the numeral twenty and the verb went. The initial syllable of China, which occurs under the main sentence accent, is assigned the topmost mark. On all levels of the grid of this randomly chosen sentence, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is implemented: two adjacent stress marks are regularly spaced out by one intervening stress mark on the next lower level. For the purposes of the present discussion, however, metrical grids that are elaborated only up to the second level will prove sufficient in most cases because the fundamental contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables will be focus sed on and prosodic relationships on higher levels can be neglected. Of course, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation describes an idealized state; constellations deviating from this ideal are subjected to different optimization strategies, depending on their degree of deviation. Ternary patterns, involving one stressed syllable accompanied by two unstressed syllables, are usually tolerated, while quaternary patterns with three unstressed syllables are usually perceived as two binary patterns with an interpolated secondary stress, and unary patterns, lacking unstressed syllables, are highly marked exceptions (cf. Selkirk 1984: 11, 37; Nespor and Voge11986: 84; Kager 1989: 2),6 One type of infraction of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, absence of intervening unstressed syllables, is known as stress clash. In the metrical grid representation, a stress clash, exemplified here by the phrase three men, takes the following shape: (2)

stress clash x x (on any level x x of the grid)

x x x x three men

A stress clash is defined as a sequence of two stressed syllables which are not separated by any unstressed syllables on the next lower level (cf. Sel-

20

The Principle ofRhythmic Alternation introduced

kirk 1984: 47; Giegerich 1985: 211; Kager 1995: 382). Like rhythmic alternation, a stress clash can be defined on any level of the metrical grid. The second major deviation from rhythmic alternation is referred to as stress lapse. The corresponding grid configurations are as follows: (3)

stress lapse a. x x x x x x

(on any level of the grid)

x x x x x x twenty machines

b. x x x x x x x

(on any level of the grid)

x x x x x x x seventy machines

Depending on the purpose of the analysis, a stress lapse may be defined more strictly as containing a sequence of two (cf. Plag 1999: 156), or less strictly as containing a sequence of three (cf. Selkirk 1984: 49; Giegerich 1985: 185; Nespor and Vogel 1989: 83; Kager 1995: 382) unstressed syllables in a sequence. There is agreement, however, that the avoidance of sequences of more than one unstressed syllable is a matter of degree: two unstressed syllables are avoided less strongly than three, which are in turn more acceptable than four, and so on. What is more, many authors (e.g. Schane 1979: 565; Nespor and Vogel 1989: 87; Kager 1995: 372) concur in the view that stress clashes are perceived as far more objectionable than stress lapses; while the latter are tolerated to a certain extent, the former almost categorically necessitate compensatory measures. Thus, sequences of the more prominent member of the pair stressed-unstressed are avoided more consistently than sequences of the less prominent one. At this point, the notion of foot deserves some comment. A foot, according to Abercrombie (1976: 131), consists of a stressed syllable plus a variable number of unstressed syllables that separate it from the next stressed syllable (cf. Abercrombie 1976: 131; Giegerich 1985: 268; see furthermore Nespor and Vogel 1986: 83). While the most widely used metre in English verse is the iamb,? linguists usually hold that the basic foot of English is the trochee (cf. AlIen and Hawkins 1978: 176; Dresher and Lahiri 1991: 283; Lahiri, Riad, and Jacobs 1999: 340; Lahiri 2001: 1356). The fact that disyllabic feet (whether iambic or trochaic) are the most common and trisyllabic feet are relatively marked is, however, uncontested and concurs with the notions of stress lapse expounded above. In languages like English, the significance of the foot is underlined by the fact that it

Outline

21

constitutes the major timing unit for speech (cf. Giegerich 1985: 268; see section 2.1.2 below). For the purposes of the present book, the question of the right- or leftheadedness of English feet is only of minor importance. In effect, the basic recognition that underpins this debate, viz. that two stressed syllables tend to be separated by an unstressed one, turns out to be fully sufficient for the following discussion. While the present work has little to contribute to the debate going on about the foot in English, it capitalizes on a distinction between two (and occasionally three) levels of stress. What may seem to be an undue simplification of insights into the rhythmic structure of English will in the end turn out to provide a maximally general account of the phenomena investigated in the empirical part. The terms rhythm, metre, foot and stress, which have figured prominently in this section, are also widely used in the study of the metrical language of verse. Indeed, poetic metre can be viewed as an elaboration and formalization of the rhythmic tendencies found in naturally occurring speech (cf. Kurylowicz [1970] 1975: 5; AlIen 1972: 73; Harding 1976: 17; Kelly and Bock 1988: 189), though in ordinary speech its execution is obviously not as conscious and accurate as in poetic language. s In poetry, just as in speech, binary feet (iambs and trochees) are the most favoured ones, followed at a considerable distance by ternary feet (anaprests and dactyls; cf. Saran 1907: 140). Since verse exploits the avoidance of stress clashes and lapses for artistic purposes and studies of poetic metre abound, metrical texts have been excluded from the databases investigated for effects of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation in the present work. 9 A few notes of clarification are in place with regard to the notion of stress. In contradistinction to accent, which belongs to the syntactic side and depends on the syntax and semantics of the sentence, stress merely refers to the morphological or lexical side. It denotes the relative prominence of a syllable and is equivalent to the potential location of an accent if an accent happens to be conferred (cf. Bolinger 1965c: 82-83; 1980b: 12; 1981: 24; 1986b: 40--41; Couper-Kuhlen 1986: 35; Warren 1999: 158). Stress has a number of phonetic correlates that conjointly influence perceived stress. Thus, a listener's judgement as to whether the noun permit or the verb permit is meant, depends on a combination of the following: (4)

phonetic correlates of stress a. pitch: permit

vs.

permit

b. duration: [p3:mlt] vs. [pgmI:t] c. loudness: PERmit vs. perMIT (adapted from Hayes 1995: 6; cf. also Saran 1907: 94-95)

22

The Principle ofRhythmic Alternation introduced

While pitch is the most important cue, and loudness the least important one, for the perception of stress, all three are highly correlated in English: high pitch, long duration and amplified volume all involve a higher amount of (muscular) effort, so that speech rhythm can ultimately be described as a duality of tension and relaxation (cf. AlIen 1975: 78; Bolinger 1986a: 2122; see furthermore lones 1969: 245; Abercrombie 1967: 96; Ladefoged 1982: 225).10 In the following sections, we will consider some issues revolving around the role the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation plays in the structure of languages in general. This includes a discussion of the hypothesized universality of rhythm (section 2.1.1), a summary of the longstanding debate about different isochrony types (section 2.1.2), an overview of the strategies available to languages to compensate for infractions of the principle (section 2.1.3), and some remarks on the possible functional motivation of rhythmic alternation (section 2.1.4).

2.1.1.

The universality of rhythmic organization

There is widespread agreement in the literature that the Princifle of Rhythmic Alternation holds true across most, if not all, languages. 1 The explanations adduced for this are decidedly functional in nature and partly overlapping, but vary largely. Thus, various authors assume that rhythmic alternation is physiologically or psychologically conditioned (cf. CouperKuhlen 1986: 60), due to the tension-relaxation dichotomy of our respiratory muscle system (cf. Lehiste 1970: 99,106-110; cf. also Bolinger 1964: 843), based on cycles of activation and inhibition phases (cf. Lenneberg 1967: 109; Fraisse 1974: 22-23, 46), due to a rhythm generator emitting signals at regular intervals (cf. Fowler 1977: 12-14), or inborn and observable in new-borns as intonated proto-rhythms (cf. Fridman 1980: 91). Many accounts go beyond the mere linguistic domain and relate rhythmic alternation to extra-linguistic rhythms (e.g. Martin 1972: 487; Fraisse 1974: 169-171; AlIen 1975: 79; Harding 1976: 1-16; Selkirk 1984: 11,37; MacKay 1987: 93; Kelly and Bock 1988: 390; lackendoff 2000: 7). Thus, all kinds of recurrent behaviour tend to fall into regular rhythms, and repetitive events tend to be interpreted as rhythmic sequences. The examples that are adduced include, to name just a few, finger tapping, typewriting, hammering, handwriting, piano playing, Morse code, marching, dance, the dripping of a tap and the ticking of a clock. The similarity of linguistic and extra-linguistic rhythms extends to the principles of hierarchical organisation and equal subdivision of intervals that are characteristic of the metrical grid (as illustrated in example (1) above; cf. Keele 1986: 35). Experimental

Outline

23

findings show that rhythms are not informationally encapsulated, i.e. one can hardly engage in simultaneous activities with divergent rhythms (unless the rhythms are in a hierarchical relationship with each other; cf. Keele 1986: 35; lackendoff 2000: 7, 21). This is additional evidence for Keele's (1986: 33-34; 1987: 484) conclusion that timing for language and non-language domains is controlled by a particular core region of the brain cortex and that one and the same interval timer is responsible for rhythmic performance on linguistic and extra-linguistic tasks. The regular emission of timing pulses may also be made responsible for the compensatory relationship between lengthened and shortened intervals (cf. Fraisse 1974: 22; Fowler 1977: 12-14; Wing 1980: 470-474; Keele 1986: 34). In addition to rhythmic preferences for production, perception has been shown to equalize time intervals between repeated events even if they vary to some degree (cf. AlIen 1975: 76-77). In contrast, more notable differences tend to be exaggerated, which results in a perceptively enhanced rhythmic structuring of sequences of events (cf. Fraisse 1974: 111). The similarities between language-internal and -external rhythmic organization are underpinned by quantitative data. Lenneberg (1967: 109119) and Lehiste (1970: 7-8, 155) find similar average numbers (about 6) and maximum numbers (about 8) of beats per second for the production of syllables and non-linguistic voluntary movements (e.g. finger taps) and relate both to neurological rhythms (for slightly diverging numbers, see Fraisse 1974: 46). Beyond the maximum frequency, neural reactions have been shown to occur on every second beat, and at even higher frequencies on every third (cf. Fraisse 1974: 46). Intervals between stressed syllables separated by intervening unstressed ones are longer, but also have parallels in other behavioural domains (cf. AlIen 1975: 76-77). In general, the perception of rhythms has certain limits: events produced at a frequency of below 150 or 200 milliseconds become indistiguishable, whereas events occuring at intervals of above 1500 or 2000 milliseconds are no longer perceived as part of a rhythmic group. Similarly, rhythmic groups generally cannot extend beyond a total duration of 4 or 5 seconds (cf. Fraisse 1974: 78-79). The perception of recurring groups consisting of stressed and unstressed elements also has parallels in extra-linguistic performance. It has been shown (cf. Fraisse 1974: 74, 78) that subjects tend to impose rhythms consisting of two or three, rarely four, elements even in cases where no objective correlates of that grouping are present. Furthermore, Fraisse (1974: 82) finds that elements that stand out from the others in terms of increased loudness, pitch or duration tend to be perceived as the first or last in a group. More precisely, loudness and pitch lead to the element being perceived as initial, whereas duration leads to it being perceived as final (cf.

24

The Principle ofRhythmic Alternation introduced

also Alien 1975: 77; Plank 1998: 216). This result has been framed in terms of the Iambic/Trochaic Law, proposed by Hayes (1995: 80): sequences of beats alternating in loudness are universally perceived as trochees, whereas sequences of beats alternating in duration are perceived as iambs. Given these results, language - being produced and perceived by humans - appears to be governed by the same rhythmic constraints as other human motor and perceptual behaviour (cf. Alien 1975: 82). Therefore, it may be tempting to treat principles of rhythmic well-formedness such as the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation as nothing more than the linguistic manifestation of more general principles of behaviour and to relegate their study to general cognitive and behavioural sciences (cf. Hayes 1984: 59). There are, however, at least two considerations that argue for a linguistic investigation of rhythmic effects. For one thing, although they may be due to performance universals, cross-linguistic differences like the distinction between stress- and syllable-timed languages (cf. section 2.1.2) suggest that they have been incorporated into the phonologies of individual languages in different ways (cf. Alien 1975: 83; Dauer 1983: 60). For another, the recognition of alternating rhythm as a determinant not only in the phonology of a language, but also in its morphology and syntax permits numerous generalizations and considerably simplifies the task of describing grammatical regularities and tendencies, as will be shown in the empirical main part of the present study (Chapters 4 and 5).

2.1.2.

Isochrony types: stress timing vs. syllable timing

In this section, a longstanding debate concerning a rhythmic typology of languages will be outlined. These notions are in apparent contradiction to the hypothesized universality of linguistic rhythm, but recent research has been able to reconcile the discrepancies up to a certain point. The distinction between different rhythmic types is based on the fact that all human speech is divided into temporal intervals that have a tendency to be of equal length, i.e. to be isochronous. Precisely what has to be considered as an isochronous interval varies from language to language. Following Pike (1945: 34-36), stress- and syllable-based timing units have to be distinguished. In syllable-timed languages such as French, Spanish, Telugu and Yoruba, the basic timing units are syllables, which are of about constant duration. Consequently, the duration of a phrase is more or less proportionate to the number of syllables it contains. Languages of the second type distinguished by Pike, including English, German, Polish, Russian and Arabic, are known as stress-timed languages. Their basic timing units

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25

are feet, so that the intervals between stresses are approximately equidistant, independently of the number of intervening unstressed syllables. That means that the duration of syllables is compensatorily adjusted: sequences of unstressed syllables are crushed together, while stressed syllables that are not flanked by unstressed ones are drawn out (cf. also Abercrombie 1967: 97; Grabe and Low 2002: 515-516)Y The English language is generally considered as a prototypical member of the stress-timed class (cf. Pike 1945: 34; Martin 1972: 494, 496; Quirk et al. 1985: 1588; Grabe and Low 2002: 523). As a consequence, in a sentence like (5a), which contains no stressless syllables, each syllable by itself functions as a timing unit, which results in a syllable-timed rhythm. Intervening unstressed syllables borrow length from the stressed ones, so that a sentence like (5b) is less than twice as long as (5a) (cf. Bolinger 1986a: 40; 1986b: 37; 1981: 18). (5)

a. Gets out dirt plain soap can't reach. b. Takes away the dirt that common soaps can never reach.

Unambiguous evidence in favour of stress timing in the literature is somewhat scarce (cf. also Ritt 2004: 143). In a series of experiments, Alien (1972) reveals that subjects choose stressed syllables rather than unstressed ones as locations for beats in naturalistic English speech, a result which supports the prevalence of the interval between two stressed syllables as a timing unit. Ramus, Nespor and Mehler (1999: 267) report findings to the effect that new-born children are able to discriminate rhythmic types. Lehiste (1977: 258) and Auer and Uhmann (1988: 241) provide evidence to show that isochrony is primarily a perceptual phenomenon: only on the condition that intervals differ by at least 30 to 50 milliseconds are listeners able to discriminate different durations; differences below that threshold are perceived as non-existent. In the extra-linguistic domain, it has been shown that listeners tend to perceive minimally different intervals as equal, while at the same time maximizing more substantial differences (cf. Fraisse 1974: 111). This predisposition proves stronger for speech than for nonspeech stimuli, so that isochrony appears to be a specifically phonological artefact rather than a phonetic fact (cf. Fraisse 1974: 74, 77; Auer and Uhmann 1988: 244). Isochrony in production is regarded with scepticism by most researchers who conduct experimental tests (see Bolinger 1965b: 167-168; Lehiste 1977: 256; cf. also Bolinger 1981: 18; Ramus, Nespor and Mehler 1999: 267; Grabe and Low 2002: 516-517). Exact measurements rather revealed that the duration of stress groups in languages like English depends to a large extent on factors like syllable structure, nearness to initial or final

26

The Principle ofRhythmic Alternation introduced

position, contraction, syntactic relationships, relative semantic importance as well as on the number of intervening unstressed syllables. Bolinger (1986b: 43; cf. also Couper-Kuhlen 1986: 51-52) arrives at a stance which, while being disillusioned with regard to absolute isochrony, is all the more realistic: "full syllables are longer before other full syllables and shorter before reduced syllables, and this produces a sort of even beat when there are not too many reduced syllables one after another." Current research discards the categorical dichotomy of stress- vs. syllable-timed languages and replaces it with a one-dimensional, scalar orientation (cf. Dauer 1983: 55-60; Auer and Uhmann 1988: 219,244-251).13 A gradient of isochrony is proposed, with prototypical stress- and syllabletimed languages at either extreme of the continuum. The isochrony type is a product of the patterning of certain phonological properties, the most important ones being: - a sharp contrast in the phonetic properties of stressed and unstressed syllables, the former usually being heavy and the latter light (cf. also Bolinger 1981: 2; Vennemann 1988: 30), - lexical determination of stress placement in words, - more compensatory lengthening of stressed syllables in stress clashes, and more compensatory shortening, vowel reduction, and temporal compression of unstressed syllables. English is located fairly close to the stress-timing extreme and displays these characteristics to a high degree. Since stress-timing languages are particularly sensitive to stress clashes (cf. Auer and Uhmann 1988: 251252), English can be expected to exhibit strong avoidance effects, which will be investigated in the empirical part of the present book. The observation that timing properties of languages can vary along a continuum should, however, serve as a caveat against unjustified generalizations from English to other languages. Apart from typological evidence, a range of language-internal considerations compel us to recognize that the rhythmic typology has to be a scalar rather than categorical one. Language acquisition research suggests that all children start out with a syllable-timed rhythm (cf. AlIen and Hawkins 1978: 174; Grabe, Post, and Watson 1999: 1204; cf. also Dauer 1983: 59; Auer and Uhmann 1988: 254) or with a rhythm intermediate between prototypical stress- and syllable timing (cf. Levitt and Wang 1991: 242-245), and that only afterwards, English-speaking children acquire the processes of lengthening and shortening syllables to achieve stress isochrony. There is also evidence that in special uses (such as emphatic speech or countingout rhymes), a stress-timed language like German can nevertheless be syllable-counting (cf. Auer and Uhmann 1988: 254). A strong argument for

Outline

27

the gradient character of the distinction can be derived from the finding that geographical varieties or different historical stages of one and the same language can be stress- or syllable-timed to varying degrees (cf. Dauer 1983: 59; Auer and Uhmann 1988: 254). Low, Grabe, and Nolan (2000; cf. also Grabe and Low 2002: 531), for instance, demonstrate that Singapore English is more syllable-timed, while British English is more stress-timed. Markus (1994: 187-198) advocates the hypothesis that English has developed its extreme stress-timing character only step by step. Following this author, while ME was basically syllable-timed, a characteristic adopted as a consequence of Norman-French influence, EModE formed a period of transition, establishing the modem, stress-timing character, and the language became more sensitive to the requirement of rhythmic alternation. At the same time, under the influence of schooling and grammar, the grammatical flexibility of the language was reduced and many options were semantically or grammatically functionalized (cf. also Stroheker 1913: 2; Franz ([1939] 1986: 588-589). The unstressed word endings, partially preserved in ME, were phonetically eroded and lost, and the English lexicon displayed a powerful pull towards monosyllabicity (cf. Bolinger 1965b: 179). In the face of these changes, speakers ran into increasing difficulties when trying to maintain an alternating rhythm. As a way out of this conflict, the reduction of all unstressed syllables, particularly of function words, was introduced as an option. Vowel length and secondary stress were, however, preserved in many lexemes (e.g. openly [:n] , emperour [AU], captain [er]; cf. Strang 1970: 118-119; Baugh and Cable 1993: 234; Dobson 1968: 445; Gorlach 1991: 73).14 The development of reduced vowels was not nearly as far advanced in EModE as it is in PDE and correlated with the register level (cf. also McCully 2002: 335). Thus, in the EModE period, the rhythmic character of the English language was undergoing a change towards an extreme stress-timing type, reinforced by the evolution of a set of reduced vowel phonemes characteristic of PDE (described in Bolinger 1981: 3; 1986a: 347, 357; 1986b: 40; cf. also Dauer 1983: 57). While the present study will not investigate the rhythmic characteristics of ME, a restriction which is mainly due to the unavailability of sufficiently large corpora of non-metrical prose, one of its main tenets will be that effects of the even spacing of stresses are clearly observable in English prose from EModE onwards. The rhythmic typology introduced in this section makes no claims about the role played by the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation in rhythmically different languages, but it leads us to expect certain differences in the treatment of stress clashes and lapses. If rhythmic alternation is a universal

28

The Principle ofRhythmic Alternation introduced

tendency, then its effects should be visible across languages, even though they may be parameterized in different ways.

2.1.3.

Compensation strategies

Nespor and Vogel (1989: 70; cf. also Selkirk 1984: 41) affirm that stressand syllable-timed languages vary in the ways stress clashes and lapses are defined and the compensation strategies they employ to repair violations of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. In the following discussion, a survey of three sets of strategies available in English will be given: - manipulation of syllable durations, - manipulation of the placement of stresses, and - extra-phonological (e.g. grammatical) avoidance strategies. One set of strategies consists in the manipulation of syllable durations. As suggested by the rhythmic typology introduced above, this procedure is barred in extreme syllable-timed languages, but typical of stress-timing languages. In stress lapses, sequences of unstressed syllables are compressed to fit into the interval allocated to each timing unit. Thus, the interval between the first two stressed syllables in sentences (6a--e) ideally takes the same amount of time, irrespective of the number of unstressed syllables it contains (Kelly and Bock 1988: 189; cf. also lones 1969: 237).

(6)

a. Thefact started the argument. b. The factor started the argument. c. The factory started the argument.

This strategy is known as polysyllabic shortening. As is the case with isochrony, empirical evidence for polysyllabic shortening is hard to come by. While Fowler (1977: 33) and Beckman et al. (1990: 7) find robust evidence, Bolinger (1965b: 164-171) and MacKay (1987: 105) remain pessimistic. The analogous means of compensation for a stress clash is generally assumed to be the introduction of a pause between the two clashing syllables or the lengthening of the first syllable (cf. Fijn van Draat 1967: 9-10; Martin 1972: 490; Bolinger 1965b: 139, 168-170; 1981: 17-18; Giegerich 1985: 15; Nespor and Vogel 1989: 79). However, Cooper and Eady (1986: 373) and Beckman et al. (1990: 7) find no or little objectively measurable evidence for either pause or lengthening. The second set of strategies, available to both stress- and syllable-timed languages, is the manipulation of the placement of stresses. To illustrate the effects produced by these strategies, a number of English stress rules

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29

will be introduced. It should, however, be noted that these rules are not considered here, as they were originally conceived, as procedures transforming an input constellation into an output constellation. Rather, they present a convenient means of comparing stress constellations in citation forms and in rhythmically defined contexts and are not necessarily claimed to have a real existence as derivational rules. In stress lapse, Beat Addition (or Beat Insertion) applies to interrupt a series of three or more unstressed syllables (cf. Kager 1995: 385; Levelt 1989: 299; Nespor and Vogel 1989: 76, 85, 100). The illustration in (7) takes up the example given in (3). (7)

Beat Addition x x x x x x x x seventy machines

~

x x x x xxxxx seventy machines

In the opposite case of stress clash, two types of strategy are applicable. One is Beat Deletion (see Bolinger 1965b: 172; Kager 1995: 385; Hayes 1995: 36-37; Levelt 1989: 299; Nespor and Vogel 1989: 76, 100), exemplified in (8). (8)

Beat Deletion x

x x

x x

x x

x

five men

x

five men

The second and more interesting compensatory process is the Stress Shift Rule, variously known as the Thirteen-Men Rule, Iambic Reversal or Stress Retraction. 15 Stress shift is made possible by the fact that in words with final stress and a preceding stressable syllable, the stress can be shifted leftwards if the word is followed by another stressed syllable. 16 Consider the following grid representation. (9)

Stress Shift Rule x

x

x

x x x fifteen men

~

x x x x x x fifteen men

30

The Principle ofRhythmic Alternation introduced

As suggested by the example, stress shift occurs particularly often in premodifier + noun combinations. Since it is always the weaker of two clashing stresses that shifts, in the unmarked case, the premodifier is affected by the stress shift (cf. Kager 1995: 386). Examples of stress-shifting premodifiers, all of which have final stress in their so-called citation forms, are adjectives like overhead, robust, prefixed items like misspelt, untied, compounds like clear-cut, far-away, half-asleep, and prenominally used nouns like afternoon, farewell, Chinese, Tennessee, New York (cf. Bolinger 1965b: 141-145; 1986a: 60). In earlier forms of English, prior to the pervasive phonological reduction of unstressed syllables, relatively more items were liable to shift their stress, e.g. absurd, insane, express, extreme, diverse, complete, supreme, antique,forlorn etc. (see Jespersen 1972: 97; Ekwall 1975: 9; Kiparsky 1975: 594-595; cf. also Stroheker 1913: 94-99). Similarly, stress shifts can occur within syntactically close-knit units, such as adverb + adjective combinations, when they premodify nouns. (10) Stress Shift Rule x x x x x x x x remarkably few

x x x x men

~

x x x x x x x x x x x x remarkably few men

Note that contrastive focus may interfere with the Stress Shift Rule. In the above example, if contrastive focus occurs onfew, the stress may not shift (cf. Selkirk 1984: 280). Once again, objective evidence for stress shift is scant. Cooper and Eady (1986: 383) and Beckman et al. (1990: 7) find no or only a weak acoustically measurable difference between shifted and unshifted conditions. In a similar vein, Kelly (1989: 701-707) and Grabe, Warren, and Nolan (1994: 103) show that articulation contributes little to the impression of stress shift; if anything, final stress is not converted into initial stress, but only levelled. However, according to these authors, it is perception that accounts for the impression of stress shift, but only under the condition that the potentially stress-shifting item is heard in a context favouring stress shift. As was the case with isochrony, the oft-repeated English Stress Shift Rule seems to be, after all, primarily a perceptual phenomenon. Yet, Grabe, Warren, and Nolan (1994: 112) can prove that the (weak) acoustic correlates of stress shift can be used by listeners to identify the syntactic function of potential stress-shift items even before the following words are encountered (e.g. Chinese fan with stress shift, 'fan from China', vs. Chinesefim with compound stress, 'fan of the Chinese language').

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31

Nespor and Vogel (1989: 96-112) discern an interdependence between the rhythmic type of a language and the remedial strategies it employs. The increased flexibility of syllable durations characterizing stress-timed languages goes along with a heightened sensitivity to stress clashes. Since stress-timed languages like English tend to have reduced syllables in unstressed positions, these may be perceived as contributing insufficient substance to separate two strong stresses. In contrast to syllable-timed languages, English is likely to apply stress shift in cases like the following, although the probability of application decreases with the growing number of intervening unstressed syllables (cf. Giegerich 1985: 212; cf. also Couper-Kuhlen 1986: 61; Hayes 1995: 371). (11) stress shift

x x x x x x x x xx x twenty-seven men

x

x ~

x

x x x xxxx x twenty-seven men

In sum, there is not as much difference in the prosodic organization of stress- and syllable-timed languages as one might believe. In particular, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, which is the most important law of grid well-formedness, and the rules that conspire to manipulate the placement of stresses have frequently been assumed to be part of the set of linguistic universals. As a consequence of its stress-timing character, English can, however, be expected to be highly susceptible to stress clashes and to draw on all possible means to circumvent them. What has been said so far about remedies for infractions of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is, however, no more than a prologue to the focus of the present work. The third, and for our purposes most interesting, set of compensation strategies, which is available to all languages and language types, involves extra-phonological stress clash avoidance. As will be argued, dispreferred prosodic constellations such as stress clashes can be avoided at higher levels of the grammar, e.g. by selecting alternative morphological or syntactic devices. Some relevant examples from the secondary literature are summarized in section 2.2, and Chapter 4 as well as Chapter 5 furnish ample empirical data on a variety of additional phenomena.

32

2.1.4.

The Principle ofRhythmic Alternation introduced

Functional explanations for rhythmic alternation

The functional perspective employed in this work implies that phonological tendencies are not isolated from their phonetic correlates. Accordingly, the following section will present explanations for the preference for an alternating rhythm in terms of articulatory and auditory phonetics as well as from more general neurophysiological and cognitive principles. Care will have to be taken to avoid the teleological fallacy, pointed out by Ohala (1990: 266; 1992: 342) and Haspelmath (1999a: 188): if we actually find phenomena of language variation and change that seem to enforce contrasts between adjacent syllables, it is not enough to recognize their usefulness in maximizing the efficacy of communication. Rather, we will have to track down their articulatory and auditory correlates and/or try to relate them to the neurocognitive basis of language. Yet, even though linguistic structure and change involve no volitional element with a purpose to change language in a way to make it more adequate to its function, the evolution of language is at least partly "Lamarckian" (Haspelmath 1999a: 193): it may be influenced by the intentionality of the language users who choose in an intelligent (though not necessarily conscious) way from the variants at their disposal and may pass acquired features on to others learning the language. Several functional considerations provide an avenue for explaining the prevalence of alternating patterns in language. On the one hand, functional accounts frequently draw a distinction between processes playing a role in language production and those playing a role in language perception. Accordingly, production is subject to the speaker-oriented principle of minimization of articulatory effort, while perception complies with the listeneroriented principle of minimization of perceptual confusion. On this view, language production derives no advantage from alternating structural patterns, but rather tends to reduce contrasts between adjacent elements. The opposite force maintaining contrasts is language perception, which functions most efficiently and is least error-prone if the incoming speech signal preserves sufficient contrast to avoid confusion. This conflict necessitates a trade-off between production-oriented and perception-oriented processing preferences (cf. Lindblom, MacNeilage, and Studdert-Kennedy 1984: 191193; DressIer et al. 1987: 12; McCalla 1980: 1-2; Haspelmath 1999a: 180; Boersma 1998: 2; McCarthy 2002: 220). On this account, the contrastenforcing potential of perceptual principles is limited to an indirect influence on the actualization of speech, which presupposes that a speaker continuously monitors how clear he or she must be in a particular speech situation for the listener to be able to understand, and expends the necessary articulatory effort (cf. DressIer et al. 1987: 12; Myers 1997: 132).17

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33

On the other hand, there is some evidence that speakers may be pursuing less altruistic goals when they fall into alternating patterns. In his booklength study of the psychology of rhythm, Fraisse (1974: 10-11) maintains that there is a fundamental correspondence between executed and perceived rhythms. While Fraisse is unable to decide if the ability to produce rhythms derives from the ability to perceive them, or whether the perception of rhythms is dependent on the ability to tune into them actively, he alleges that the compelling nature of rhythm has to do with the fact that perception and production happen in synchrony. As a result, rhythm engages the entire human being in one harmonious activity. Furthermore, it may be assumed that lack of contrast between adjacent elements in the speech signal can lead to encoding problems in the production system, where the avoidance of confusion is also an issue. This presupposes a certain degree of contrast between elements that have to be produced in a sequence (cf. Berg 1998: 79; Frisch 2004: 354). Thus, Berg (2004: 1089-1095) is able to show on the basis of various sources of evidence (language structures, change, use, acquisition and breakdown) that at different levels of linguistic structure, elements that stand in a syntagmatic relationship tend to contrast maximally if they are adjacent or separated at short distances. At larger distances, however, the processor exhibits a tendency to fall back on similar elements again. Moreover, he finds that if confusion occurs (as, for example, in slips of the tongue), elements that share relatively many properties tend to be exchanged one for another (cf. Berg 2004: 1062). More specifically, findings described in Cutler (1980: 186) show that beyond the compensation strategies resorted to in normal usage, speech errors such as syllable omission and addition and errors of stress placement testify to an underlying striving for stress isochrony in speech production. Thus, the maintenance of a regular rhythm seems to facilitate language production. Taken together, these findings - maximal similarity or identity at distance 0, maximal contrast at distance 1 and return to similarity at greater distances - lead us to expect a predominance of alternating patterns in language. On this view, then, the maintenance of contrasts between neighbouring units is not only a matter of perceptibility, but also and to the same extent one of producibility. In section 6.3.3, language processing will be investigated from a neurolinguistic point of view. As will be seen, there are also neurophysiological arguments that can be marshalled as possible causes underlying the preference for alternating patterns. These likewise speak in favour of a double motivation of rhythmic alternation, grounded both in language production and perception. The accounts adduced so far have in common that they consider rhythmic alternation as a function of the articulatory and auditory processing of language. In addition, rhythm has also been argued to fulfil certain func-

34

The Principle ofRhythmic Alternation introduced

tions in the communicative process. Since language is a cognitive faculty exerted with a particular intention in mind, the functions of rhythm in discourse can also be marshalled as teleological explanations for the existence of the phenomenon (the "Lamarckian" account). Some approaches of this kind can be found in the literature. AlIen (1975: 84) attributes to speech rhythm no more than an auxiliary function, arguing that it does not carry much linguistic information. Indeed, in a communication system as complex as language, one could expect the numerous requirements imposed on the speech signal to obliterate the underlying rhythm. As Bolinger (1981: 33) puts it, "There is not a great deal one can do intentionally in the heat of putting a sentence together to pick words that will make the metrical feet more or less even, but what happens unintentionally testifies to some kind of underlying rhythmic tendency." Thus, Bolinger argues, automatic activities are universally more efficiently performed when they are rhythmic because rhythmic performance requires fewer computation and memory capacities than irregular or random sequences (cf. also Lenneberg 1967: 108; Bolinger 1986a: 63; Auer and Uhmann 1988: 215). Similarly, rhythmic language can be memorized more easily than unrhythmic language since it involves a recurrence of similar structures. These lend themselves readily to an integration into the memory, which relies on an organization of individual elements into structures (cf. Fraisse 1974: 175). The bulk of the teleological accounts of rhythm in language however foreground the facilitation of perception. First, there is evidence that listeners exploit the rhythmic properties of their language in order to segment speech into words (cf. McQueen, Otake, and Cutler 2001: 103-104). Second, many linguists (Abercrombie 1967: 97; Jones 1969: 245; Lehiste 1970: 119; Martin 1970; 1972: 496; MacKay 1987: 94; Kelly 1989: 706) maintain that listeners (especially if familiar with the language) have a large share in the imposition of rhythm. They can be shown to tune into the rhythm produced by speakers so as to be able to predict by means of identification with the speakers where the stresses will fall and to hear stresses even where their auditory correlates are absent. The benefits of this synchronization with speakers are twofold. On the one hand, listeners can be shown to pay more attention to stressed syllables and to slacken their attention during the intervening unstressed syllables, since the former are more informative in terms of phonetic, phonological and semantic measures (cf. Martin 1972: 488; Shields, McHugh, and Martin 1974: 251; MacKay 1987: 93-94). On the other hand, speakers can exploit the rhythmic pattern established by themselves and tuned into by their listeners in order to disrupt the listeners' expectations where a particular effect is intended (cf. Lehiste 1977: 488). For instance, the unclear reference of old in the sequence old

Previous research on rhythmic influences on English grammar

35

men and women can be disambiguated by introducing a pause after men to signal the presence of a syntactic boundary. In conclusion, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation seems to be motivated by causal considerations and teleological advantages that facilitate language use both for the speaker and the hearer. Since this generalization applies to users of any natural language, it can be assumed to be a universal property of the language faculty. If we were prepared to follow Myers (1997: 147), who argues that this type of "phonetic functionalism" makes a treatment of functionally motivated and therefore universal phonological constraints within a grammatical description superfluous, we could stop the discussion at this point. Yet, the core thesis of this work is that so many areas of grammar are sensitive to phonological influences that we would overlook numerous important generalizations if we tried to formulate a grammar without reference to extra-linguistically inspired phonological principles. Without doubt, extra-linguistic factors, which are common to all natural languages, underdetermine linguistic structure. They merely limit the choice of grammatical techniques that are available to languages (cf. Dressier et al. 1987: 12), and the specific techniques adopted by a particular language merit investigation. Therefore, the claims made in this work are restricted to the English language and the ways it implements rhythmic alternation. Accordingly, the literature on rhythmic effects on grammatical variation and change surveyed in the following section as well as the case studies described in Chapters 4 and 5 are restricted to examples from English.

2.2.

Previous research on rhythmic influences on English grammar

The following survey of the relevant literature addressing influences of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation on the grammar of English can be no more than a representative selection. While the morphological and syntactic phenomena mentioned here may appear to be an extremely heterogeneous cross-section of the structural patterns of the language, they are all tied together by their sensitivity to rhythmic alternation. The tendency to keep stressed syllables apart has been adduced as an explanation in different research paradigms, three of which will be mentioned along with their contributions to the present debate. The discussion of those publications that focus on the phenomena to be investigated in the empirical part of this work will, however, be postponed to the exposition of the analyses in Chapters 4 and 5. Thus, the following survey is by no means exhaustive. A large number of examples can be culled from philological studies dating from the first half of the twentieth century. The prominent figures in

36

The Principle ofRhythmic Alternation introduced

this research tradition are Fijn van Draat ([1910] 1967, 1912a, 1912b), Stroheker (1913; on Marlowe' sand Kyd' s language), Bihl (1916; on Chaucer's and Gower's language) and Franz ([1939] 1986). A number of later studies by Bolinger (e.g. 1965b, 1978, 1980a, 1981, 1986a) can be considered as continuations and refinements of this longstanding tradition. While some of these authors' suggestions have been taken up and subjected to closer scrutiny in the empirical part of this work, for most of the examples reported here quantitative tests are still at a premium. A further caveat refers to Stroheker and Bihl, who concentrate on language in the form of verse, but both imply throughout that the same means of achieving rhythmic alternation are exploited in the language in general. Many relevant findings cluster around the structure of noun phrases. For instance, in earlier forms of English, the place of the possessive adjective oscillated between Germanic pre-position and Romance post-position, but in some cases, rhythm overruled these syntactic tendencies (e.g. lady mine, but *lord mine; cf. Fijn van Draat 1912a; Stroheker 1913: 90-91; Franz 1986: 679). EModE also allowed possessive pronouns intervening between attributive adjectives and nouns, e.g. good my lord rather than my good lord, these my ears instead of later these ears of mine (cf. Stroheker 1913: 60; Franz 1986: 294, 678). In PDE, the use of the indefinite article as a buffer in exclamations like what a noise! (rather than *what noise!) has become obligatory (cf. Franz 1910: 158; 1986: 245). Names of months or seasons immediately followed by a noun are only unproblematic if they end in an unstressed syllable (e.g. April morning, December night, but ?May night, ?June morning; cf. Fijn van Draat 1912a: 49-50). Adjectival forms tend to be given a disyllabic pronunciation (e.g. cursed, blessed, learned, aged) or to be distinguished by an optional suffix (e.g. the material suffix -en in ashen, earthen, hempen, waxen; cf. Fijn van Draat 1912a: 40--47) when they precede nouns. Similarly, despite the overall tendency of English to evolve into an analytic language (cf. Markus 1988: 108), synthetic comparatives are well preserved in attributive uses due to their rhythmic advantage (cf. the oldest man vs. ?the most old mim; cf. Franz 1911: 209; 1986: 209-210; Stroheker 1913: 39, 47; Bihl 1916: 146, 149150; Rohr 1929: 26-27; Bo1inger 1965b: 153-154; 1981: 31; 1986a: 54). What is more, in certain cases, suffixed and suffixless comparatives (e.g. bet vs. bett(e)re, leng vs. lenger, less vs. lesser) alternated in earlier centuries, depending on the rhythmic environment (cf. Fijn van Draat 1912a: 53-54; Bih11916: 196-197; Rohr 1929: 93; Arnold 1970: 294). Another set of rhythm-sensitive items is provided by optional prepositions. Thus, in earlier forms of English, the prepositions of and to could be used to introduce the indirect objects of the verbs make, beg, do, pray, teach, tell, deny, send and give, if a stress clash buffer was necessary (cf.

Previous research on rhythmic irifluences on English grammar

37

Franz 1910: 157; Fijn van Draat 1912b: 536; Stroheker 1913: 81; Bihl 1916: 220-221). Furthermore, before it became obligatory, partitive ojwas more frequently used after monosyllabic unit words like pound, ounce, pair, yard, inch, but dispensable after disyllables like barrel, bushel, morsel, certain, etc. (Fijn van Draat 1912b: 523-525; Bihl 1916: 175; cf. Bolinger 1965b: 151). Oj also used to be variable and rhythm-dependent after the nouns name, half and side, the prepositions aside, alongside, inside and outside, and the verb beware; to was variable after the prepositions near, like and opposite. Finally, some prepositions had interchangeable and rhythmically distinct forms themselves, e.g. (up)on, (un)til, (un) to, (in) to, throughlthorough,jorth (oj), (in) despite oj(cf. Fijn van Draat 1912b: 529535; Stroheker 1913: 66-69). In the domain of pronouns, usage in earlier forms of English was less fixed than it is today. In EModE, simple personal pronouns could still be used in reflexive contexts if they suited the rhythm better than the newly established marked reflexive pronouns (cf. Stroheker 1913: 58; Bih1 1916: 152, 180-185; Franz 1986: 278). Rhythm has also been made responsible for the obligatory introduction of subject relative pronouns as buffers in EModE (consider the persistent stress clash in the ME example All but a squjer, highte Damian; cf. Stroheker 1913: 62; Bihl 1916: 191; Franz 1910: 158; 1986: 592). In the ME and EModE periods, the relative pronouns which, whose and whom could variably be preceded by the article the or followed by the subordinator that without a functional distinction, but with a rhythmic effect (cf. Stroheker 1913: 61; Bihl 1916: 188-194; Franz 1986: 301). Incidentally, numerous conjunctions could also take an additional subordinator that (e.g. though, after, but, ere, if, save, there, till; cf. Stroheker 1913: 69; Bihl 1916: 204-206; Franz 1910: 158; 1911: 209). With regard to PDE, it is argued that in questions with multiple interrogative pronouns, juxtaposition of the pronouns (which are usually stressed monosyllables) tends to be avoided due to the threat of successive stresses (e.g. I know they're taking something someplace. *But whitt where why?; better: But whitt, where and why?; cf. Bolinger 1978: 145). A final group of variation phenomena that have been brought into connection with rhythm comprises different types of affixation. For example, the presence or absence of the ge-ly-Ii-prefix in ME could be motivated by stress clash avoidance (cf. Bih11916: 103; cf. also Horn and Lehnert 1954: 1172; Pilch 1955; Higuchi 1998: 200). Similarly, the a-prefix in the past participle ago was exceptionally preserved due to the frequent occurrence of the form after monosyllabic nouns like years, months, weeks, days, etc. (cf. Franz 1912: 116). In EModE, the second person singular morpheme and the -ed-suffix had a syllabic and a syncopated variant that could be distributed in accordance with rhythm (e.g. thou thinkest vs. thou think'st;

38

The Principle ofRhythmic Alternation introduced

he loved vs. he lov'd; cf. Stroheker 1913: 39). As a final point, EModE still had numerous prefixes and suffixes that were semantically bleached and optional, so that the variation between the affixed and affixless forms could be exploited for rhythmic purposes (e.g. (be)gird, (be)wail, (com)plain, (con)join, maid(en) , morn(ing), mount(ain), import(ance), calm(y), ope(n), hap(pen), haste(n), threat(en); cf. Stroheker 1913: 24-39). The early descriptions from which these variants have been culled provide a plethora of further examples which cannot all be taken up here. A note of caution is, however, in place in connection with their claims. None of the phenomena that are argued to be sensitive to the preference for rhythmic alternation have been submitted to empirical tests. The authors quoted naturally adopt a somewhat limited perspective on the variation phenomena, whereas we would expect many of these to be co-determined by multiple extra-phonological factors. What is more, not all of the phenomena are easily amenable to a corpus-linguistic analysis. Some quantitative studies have been conducted in recent times, but come to disappointing results. Thus, while Franz (1911: 209; 1986: 597; cf. also Stein 1987: 408, 410; G6rlach 1991: 88-89) affirms that the choice of the third person singular inflection (-s vs. -eth) in EModE depends on whether the following syllable is stressed or unstressed, Bambas (1998: 66, 70) examines a corpus of EModE and concludes that this is the case only in verse, but not in prose. Furthermore, while Fijn van Draat (1967: 123-145; cf. also Stroheker 1913: 89) claims that the position of the adverb only depends partly on rhythm, Nevalainen (1987: 366, 375) checks this statement against the London-Lund Corpus, but finds that the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has only little influence, while semantic scope marking seems to be a more influential determinant. Studies like the latter two are part of a research tradition that developed after the early research on linguistic variation and its determinants was brought to a halt by the growing popularity of formal linguistics. Corpusbased linguistics has relatively recently produced new, quantified results on the efficacy of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, a selection of which will be summarized in the ensuing discussion. Many analyses, in particular Minkova (1990; 1991), concentrate on the loss of unstressed final -e in ME, a process spanning many centuries and presenting different facets. Final schwa in nouns disappeared first where it was flanked by one or more unstressed syllable(s) (and also where it preceded a vowel or the grapheme , an effect attributable to the tendency to avoid hiatuses, e.g. for gold and for seoluere vs. for seoluer and for golde; cf. Minkova 1991: 63-68, 162). As one of the consequences, the nominal inflection -e was retained in late ME only in the attributive genitive of monosyllabic nouns, where it usually preceded a stressed syllable

Previous research on rhythmic influences on English grammar

39

(e.g. myn herte rote; cf. Minkova 1990: 326; 1991: 184). For the same reason, the weak adjectival inflection -e (in adjectives occurring attributively after the definite article, possessives and demonstratives) was preserved relatively long where it was of use as a stress clash buffer, e.g. in monosyllabic adjectives and in disyllabic adjectives with final stress (e.g. ]xet blake smoke vs. his berdwas blak; cf. Minkova 1990: 319-320; 1991: 178-187; cf. also Mosse 1952: 64; Samuels 1972a: 445). In contrast, attributive comparatives and superlatives containing an unstressed suffix lost their final -e particularly early, which may equally be attributed to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation (cf. Minkova 1990: 320; 1991: 178-179; cf. also Mustanoja 1960: 276; Samuels 1972a: 446). What is even more interesting, Minkova (1990: 328,330,331 footnote 6; 1991: 178, 186) argues that final -e eventually lost its grammatical function as an inflectional suffix and acquired an extra-grammatical stress buffer function. 18 As a result, it came to be used in weak adjectives that, etymologically, had no final -e, and also in strong adjectival forms where it was equally unjustified. In a comparable way, the verbal ending -e in the verbs have and be was maintained longer in ME where the verbs were used as main verbs, since here they occupied metrically strong positions and required a buffer intervening before the subsequent (frequently initially stressed) item. Inversely, -e was given up earlier in auxiliary uses, where have and be were relatively unstressed themselves (cf. Samuels 1972a: 446; cf. also Minkova 1990: 326; 1991: 184). Lutz (2002: 59-63) studies the distribution of the reflexive and emphatic form self and its variants selve and selven in a corpus of Chaucer's works and identifies a higher incidence of the disyllabic selven in versified language. On the basis of some representative examples from Chaucer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Cursor Mundi, she shows that selven is used mainly for metrical purposes, namely where its second syllable serves to separate two stressed syllables. In a corpus study, Estling (2000: 115-116) finds that variable of after all, half and both is relatively more frequent before demonstratives in nominal uses than before demonstratives in prenominal uses, and more frequent in demonstratives in prenominal uses than before the article the preceding nouns (e.g. all (oj) the kids < all (oj) these kids < all (oj) these). Though she does not relate these findings to speech rhythm, an interpretation along the lines of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation seems possible. The elements the, prenominal thislthatltheselthose and nominal thislthatltheselthose are associated with an increasing degree of rhythmic prominence (cf. lones 1969: 266), and the more prominent the stress clash with the preceding alllhalf/both, the higher is the probability of occurrence of of as a buffer (cf. also Franz 1912: 116).

40

The Principle ofRhythmic Alternation introduced

Mondorf (2003: 274-279) provides quantitative evidence of the skewed distribution of synthetic and analytic comparatives in attributive and other positions. She distinguishes rhythmically critical and uncritical cases and confirms earlier authors' hunches that the use of non-finally stressed synthetic comparatives correlates with the rhythmically critical prenominal position. Gries (to appear) finds statistical evidence in the British section of the International Corpus ojEnglish of an avoidance of verb-particle sequences where the verb is monosyllabic and the particle monosyllabic or initially stressed (e.g. he didn't want me even to pick up the child). He argues that in such cases, the particle tends to be postposed to avoid the clash of two stressed syllables (e.g. he didn't want me even to pick the child up). Davis (1982: 22) is able to show that rhythm plays a role in the distribution of the syllabic and non-syllabic short forms of would. Thus, when would occurs in combination with the auxiliary have, which is unstressed, it shows a more marked propensity to be shortened to non-syllabic [d] than in other contexts, where the tendency to choose the syllabic form [gd] is stronger. The maintenance of an unstressed syllabic form in potential contexts for stress clashes is explained by the preference for alternating stresses. A third line of research focuses on lexical phonology and investigates the rhythmic structure of words. For instance, it has long been recognized that rhythmic alternation plays a role in stress patterns of plurisyllabic English words (e.g. Monongahela, monastery; cf. Schane 1979: 564-592) and in word formation, where affixation can lead to stress shifts in the roots (e.g. solid> solidity, compensate> compensatory; cf. Kelly 1988: 108; Kelly and Bock 1988: 389) or block certain derivations that would result in stress clashes (e.g. *corruptize, *securize, *dptize, *jirmize; cf. Raffelsiefen 1996; Plag 1999). It has been argued that rhythmic preferences have in the long run of linguistic evolution influenced the stress patterns of single lexemes so as to conform to the typical stress constellations in the language. Ideally, nouns and adjectives have initial stress and verbs have final stress, which makes them particularly fit for their typical positions in the sentence (see Bolinger 1986a: 54, 351; 1989: 224; cf. furthermore Ross 1970: 166, 168). Thus, stress patterns of loanwords have shown a tendency to assimilate to the native pattern of English (cf. Berg 1999; but see also Lahiri, Riad, and Jacobs 1999: 401). Some highly relevant findings on the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation on the stress pattern of words have been contributed from a psycholinguistic approach. Kelly (1988: 111-115; 1989: 694-701) demonstrates that verbs are more likely than nouns to take syllabic inflec-

Previous research on rhythmic influences on English grammar

41

tions, e.g. the -ing-suffix, which is always syllabic, the -ed-suffix, which is syllabic after dentals, the -s-suffix, which is syllabic after sibilants, and the -en-suffix, which is always syllabic. By contrast, nouns only take the -ssuffix for the plural and the possessive, which is syllabic only after sibilants. Kelly calculates the overall probability of syllabic inflections in a written and spoken corpus at 16 to 19 percent for verbs and only 1 percent for nouns. As a consequence, verb stems are relatively more often followed by an unstressed syllabic inflection than nouns, a fact that biases disyllabic verb stems towards an iambic stress pattern and disyllabic noun stems towards a trochaic one. In a related study, Kelly and Bock (1988) show that the typical syntactic contexts of nouns and verbs push the balance in the same direction. The typical syntactic place of a noun is preceded by an unstressed and followed by a stressed syllable, whereas verbs are typically preceded by a stressed and followed by an unstressed syllable (e.g. the _ _ sleeps vs. the bOy _ _ the girl; cf. Kelly and Bock 1988: 391). As a consequence, the noun context predisposes a stress on the initial syllable of a disyllabic noun and the verb context predisposes a stress on the final syllable of a disyllabic verb. In an experiment, the authors also provide evidence that rhythmic alternation guides the assignment of stress to nonsense words unknown to the speaker. In a thoroughly functional vein, giving up the divisions between synchrony and diachrony and between performance constraints and the shape of the language system, Kelly and Bock (1988: 391) argue that "Over time, a word that consistently occupied a particular rhythmic context might come to reflect the pressures imposed by that context in its citation stress pattern." Thus, the structure of language can be understood as a diachronic adaptation to functional constraints on the phonetic actualization of speech. 19 This account explains the tendency for English nouns to have initial stress and for English verbs to have final stress and justifies the stress asymmetry in homographic noun-verb pairs of the type (a) rebel vs. (to) rebel, (a) permit vs. (to) permit, (a) convert vs. (to) convert, etc. 20 In a follow-up study to Kelly and Bock (1988), Berg (2000: 284-286) comes to the conclusion that adjectives, like nouns, occur about twenty times more often in a trochaic-biasing than in an iambic-biasing context. Hence, rhythm exerts the same pressures on them as on nouns, as a consequence of which they actually share with nouns the marked preference for initially stressed contours (cf. also the relevant remarks in the introduction to Chapter 4 below). In a nutshell, the secondary literature provides ample and multifarious suggestions for the efficacy of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation in the determination of grammatical variation and change in English. Quantified empirical data are, however, less abundant, and principled attempts to as-

42

The Principle ofRhythmic Alternation introduced

sess the sphere of influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation are entirely absent. Psycholinguistic approaches provide impressive evidence of the real-time effects of the principle and ideas as to how functional constraints such as the preference for alternating stressed and stressless syllables might be incorporated into the phonology of a language. Since English, while being an increasingly standardized language with a distinct trend towards monosyllabicity, has been identified as strongly stress-timed, it can be expected to hold an immense potential for conflict, and we may expect to unearth a large variety of phenomena testifYing to these clashing tendencies. The following chapters will explore this scenario by focusing on a representative set of grammatical phenomena that will allow us to explore and systematize the impingement of the preference for alternating stressed and unstressed syllables in the history and current state of English grammar. Before we can go about this task, the methodological array that will be used needs to be introduced, which will be done in Chapter 3.

Chapter 3 Methodology

Corpus linguistics is one of the fastest expanding fields in linguistics and has benefited immensely from the boom of information technologies, the availability of computer-readable corpora and the development of sophisticated concordance software (cf. McEnery and Wilson 2001: 24). What is more, English is to date the language for which the largest corpora have been compiled (cf. Kennedy 1998: 1), and a large number of English language corpora have been marshalled for the present research. These corpora are sketched in section 3.1 and further details are provided in the bibliography. Even though corpus linguistic approaches enjoy wide acceptance and popularity, certain caveats have to precede the exposition of the results. These concern in particular a discussion of whether and how phonological influences on a language can be successfully studied by looking at (mostly) written corpus material (section 3.2). The following section 3.3 briefly introduces the software that was used to generate the concordances and the way in which the search expressions were created. Section 3.4 explains how tests of significance were conducted for the data thus collected.

3.1.

Corpora and their limitations

A prototypical corpus, in McEnery and Wilson's (2001: 32) terms, is "a finite-sized body of machine-readable text, sampled in order to be maximally representative of the language variety under consideration." The British National Corpus (BNC), on which some of the following analyses are based, is a prototypical example of such a corpus and is the product of a joint project of Oxford University Press, the Longman Group, W. & R. Chambers, the British Library and the Universities of Oxford and Lancaster. With its size of 100 million words it belongs to the new generation of mega-corpora and is representative of present-day British English. The written part of the corpus makes up 90 percent (about 90 million words) and contains samples of texts dating from 1975 and after (with the exception of the imaginative prose section, which contains texts from 1960 onwards), assorted from different genres and stylistic levels (literary or technical vs. middle vs. low). The genres include imaginative prose, natural and pure science, applied science, social science, world affairs, commerce

44

Methodology

and finance, arts, belief and thought, and leisure. The spoken part, containing about 10 million words, is the largest currently available spoken corpus. It consists of a so-called context-governed section including lectures, tutorials, news reports, business interviews, sermons, political speeches, parliamentary debates, sports commentaries, broadcast phone-ins, etc., and of a so-called demographic section, which is assorted from transcribed recordings of informal conversations by 124 volunteers from different regions of the UK, of different socioeconomic groups and ages and balanced between male and female speakers (cf. Kennedy 1998: 50-52). The only other corpus expressly designed for linguistic purposes that is used in the present study is the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, compiled at the University of Helsinki between 1984 and 1991. This corpus contains a total of 1.6 million words covering three subperiods from OE (c. 750 to 1150; 413,250 words) through ME (1150 to 1500; 608,570 words) to EModE (1500 to 1710; 551,000 words) and includes (extracts from) legal and official documents, medical handbooks, philosophical and religious treatises, sermons, chronicles, biographies, fiction, romances, plays, editions of the Bible, travelogues, letters, diaries, etc. (for details on the composition of the corpus see Kyt6 1996). Needless to say, there are no spoken sources of any earlier stages of the English language. Some of the corpus analyses in Chapter 4 draw on the ME subperiod of the Helsinki Corpus, which is again subdivided into four sections: ME I: 1150 to 1250 with 113,010 words; ME 11: 1250 to 1350 with 97,480 words; ME Ill: 1350 to 1420 with 184,230 words; and ME IV: 1420 to 1500 with 213,850 words. Due to the moderate size of these subsections, the corpus has, however, only been searched as a whole, neglecting any changes that may have occurred over the three and a half centuries making up the ME section. A substantial part of the studies are based on a series of collections which provide an exceptionally dense coverage of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The Early English Prose Fiction (EEPF), EighteenthCentury Fiction (ECF), Nineteenth-Century Fiction (NCF) and English Prose Drama (EPD) databases produced by Chadwyck-Healey constitute meticulously edited full-text collections of narrative prose and, in the latter case, of prose drama in computer-readable format. The EEPF collection contains 211 texts by 96 known and several anonymous British authors published between 1518 and 1700 and totals slightly less than 10 million words. The ECF collection comprises 96 texts by 32 different British authors that were all published between 1705 and 1780 and thus forms a sequel to the EEPF collection. However, the database includes two editions each of Samuel Richardson's novels Pamela (the first edition of 1740 and the sixth edition of 1742) and Clarissa (the first edition of 1748 and the

Corpora and their limitations

45

third edition of 1751), and both the Motte (1726) and Faulkner (1735) editions of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. To avoid a skewing of the results, only the earliest editions have been included in the counts. After exclusion of the three doublets, the total number of words runs to over 10 million. The NCF database rounds off the chronological series. It spans British prose writing from 1782 to 1903, holds works by 102 different authors with a total of almost 40 million words and is thus by far the largest of the three historical British prose corpora. Due to its considerable size, the NCF corpus has frequently been subdivided into two or three subperiods according to years of publication. On these occasions, the three minor works by Jane Austen (Lady Susan, Sanditon and The Watsons) that were published only in 1954 were assigned to the early part of the nineteenth century, where they properly belong. Occasionally, the EPD collection is used to buttress the findings from these three corpora. EPD consists of 1653 plays by 356 known British playwrights plus some anonymous works, with a gross total of over 27 million words. The plays were first performed between 1540 and 1922 and first published between 1540 and 1965. For the purpose of the analyses, the EPD was subdivided into three chronological sections paralleling the EEPF, ECF and NCF collections (i.e., 1540 to 1700 amounting to more than 7 million words, 1701 to 1780 amounting to almost 7 million words, 1781 to 1903 amounting to a good 13 million words).l Note, in this connection, that texts cannot be adequately typified by assigning them either to the category 'written' or to the category 'spoken'. Rather, genres have been argued to vary on a continuum from 'oral' to 'literate' (cf. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 29).2 Considering that drama represents 'written-to-be-spoken' language, we may assume that by and large the dramatic genre will be less formal and closer to the actual spoken language of the day than the narrative literature featuring in the other three corpora. 3 The genre factor will be played out in three studies which take into consideration the degree of formality of the texts (see sections 4.5, 5.4.1 and 5.5.1), and some relevant remarks will be added in sections 4.4.2 and 4.4.3. In all other cases, the EPD collection is simply used to increase the number of examples culled from the prose corpora. Finally, three analyses in particular (described in sections 4.3, 4.6 and 5.3.3) require an extremely large database to yield statistically satisfactory results. For this purpose, an extensive corpus of newspapers has been exploited, including 40 years of British papers (The Daily Mail including The Mail on Sunday for 1993 to 2000 with 207 million words; The Daily Telegraph including The Sunday Telegraph for 1991 to 2000 with 371 million words; The Guardian including The Observer for 1990 to 2000 with 388 million words; The Times including The Sunday Times for 1990 to 2000

46

Methodology

with 478 million words). The overall number of words of the newspaper corpus approaches one and a half milliard, and this enormous size is its major asset. Otherwise, similar caveats apply as in the case of the fictional prose collections: the corpus cannot lay claim to being representative of present-day British English because, once again, it is limited to a single text type which may in addition be subject to an indeterminate degree of manipulation due to editorial policies and stylistic precepts. The complete bibliographical details of all corpora that serve as a basis for the present study are provided in the bibliography. Figure 1 gives the temporal distribution of the main texts and their respective sizes. As can easily be seen, the focus of the analyses is on EModE and LModE as well as PDE, for which the most substantial corpus material is available. As one might expect, it is also obvious that the density of coverage in terms of words per time unit increases exponentially from ME to PDE.

I I

British newspapers

1,444 million

BNC

100 million

EPD

27 million

NCF

39.7 million.

ECF EEPF Helsinki Corpus (ME)

10.3 million. 9.9 m i l l i o n . I :) million

1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000 2100

year

Figure I.

Corpus size in terms of numbers of words and chronology

Naturally, with the exception of a tenth of the BNC, all the data on which this study of phonological influences on grammar relies are written texts. The reasons for this possibly problematic fact are, firstly, the deficient scope of spoken corpora, and secondly, the total absence of spoken corpora for past periods of the evolution of English. Samuels (l972b: 4-6) calls attention to the fact that the spoken language can only be carefully reconstructed on the basis of the written form. If we want to infer earlier forms of spoken usage on the basis of written language, we are confronted with Labov' s (1994: 21) Historical Paradox: "The task of historical linguis-

Corpora and their limitations

47

tics is to explain the differences between the past and the present; but to the extent that the past was different from the present, there is no way of knowing how different it was." It is true that we are able to assess the relationship between written and spoken language in most cases of present-day writing. However, it has to be kept in mind that current habits in the matching of written and spoken representations of language cannot be projected into the past without critical consideration. Kiparsky's study of verse language is only one instance where changes of convention become apparent: the author (1975: 586) shows that recitation practices varied considerably between the early and late seventeenth century in accordance with the prevalent literary movements. For prose styles, there is little research on similar changes in writing or reading conventions. Since prose language is less subject to artistic (in particular, metrical) transformation, we may only assume tentatively that the relationship between spoken and written language has been more close in the relevant respects. A further point of insecurity is the possibility that texts from earlier centuries may have passed through various stages of revision, for instance by scribes, the authors themselves, or the editors. Since all of the corpus analyses to be presented below concern variable domains of grammar, it would be interesting to know if any disagreements cropped up in the process between these groups in the choice of grammatical variants. In the text types on which the corpus analyses are based, such effects are usually invisible. However, findings on the relationship between authors and scribes in the writing of fifteenth-century letters clearly show that authors generally impose the morphosyntax of the texts, while scribal influence manifests itself mainly in the phonological and graphological domains (cf. Bergs 2005: 80, 128). Similarly, journalists today are bound by the graphological conventions of the newspaper they are writing for, but morphosyntactic variability can be expected to mirror the relatively unconstrained choices of each individual contributor more liberally. Even if we choose to disregard possible discrepancies between the actual spoken usage of the authors and the written texts that have come down to us, the database employed in the present book still has substantiallimitations. One obvious disadvantage of using collections of literary texts as raw material for corpus analyses is the fact that these databases are by no means representative of the variety they are drawn from. The ChadwyckHealey collections have been compiled to represent the literary landscape of their epoch and their particular genre with a view to literary scholarship rather than linguistic research. As it turns out, female authors are severely underrepresented in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the ECF corpus, almost one forth of the running text (roughly 2,300,000 words) stems from four voluminous novels by Samuel Richardson. The selection

48

Methodology

of texts that enter our analyses is thus not motivated by aims such as linguistic representativity, but by their importance in literary history. In the event, this selection criterion is therefore utterly inappropriate for linguistic purposes. Furthermore, since all texts represent the printed literary standard language of their day, no major dialectal differences can be expected. Given the fact that, from 1500 onwards, texts were no longer localizable on the basis of their spelling and that the development of supralocal standards in grammar considerably antedated the eighteenth-century prescriptive grammars (cf. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 13), we cannot expect EModE and LModE literary texts to supply any significant insights into the dialectal divisions of the times. Nor can we be confident that the grammar of spoken and written standards was identical for earlier forms of English (cf. Denison 1998: 95). Rather, we have to assume that written texts from earlier as well as present centuries testify to their authors' attempts to conform to a given standard and therefore contain hypercorrections as well as errors (cf. Labov 1994: 11). We are thus dealing with a more or less contrived usage that does not necessarily mirror the actual spoken usage of the authors. As a consequence, any grammatical changes discerned in the corpora have to be interpreted carefully: their time course may, depending on the type of change, anticipate or lag behind the time course of the change in the spoken language (cf. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 29). What is more, apparent changes in grammar may at times be artefacts of changes in conventions of decorum (cf. Denison 1998: 95). Given the characteristics of the database as outlined above, it should be pointed out that many of the factors influencing language variation and change cannot be adequately researched. Though multifactorial in nature, the present approach can only take into consideration the variables that the database provides evidence of. Among these, the focus is placed on language-internal factors, with rhythm on the forefront, but phonotactics, constituent ordering, structural complexity, structural identity, semantics, frequency, grammatical fixation, system congruity, biuniqueness, iconicity, etc. equally playing an important role. Language-external factors such as dialect, spoken vs. written mode and text type of course have to be taken into consideration (cf. Labov 1994: 26), but since most of the following corpus analyses compare states of the system that are quite homogeneous in these respects, these variables are examined only sporadically. The task of a systematic study has successfully been addressed by others: Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003: 83-201) provide exemplary analyses of fourteen grammatical changes that prove sensitive to the following system-external, i.e. sociolinguistic, factors:

Corpora and their limitations

-

49

Individuals adopt changes at different speeds, depending on their personal histories (e.g. generation, community, social mobility; cf. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 83-99). - Women are generally more active in promoting changes from above though their access to formal education (including the ability to read and write) used to be limited (cf. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 111-131). - Changes can spread from the upper as well as the lower classes, and the directionality of a change determines its chances to become established as standard (cf. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 133-154). In earlier centuries, London played a more important part in the supralocalization of changes than today, even if they did not originate in the capital. The regional variation was, however, superseded by social stratification effects (cf. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 157-183). - Language users are able to accommodate their use of different registers to their interlocutors, but their ability to do so is constrained by their social class membership (cf. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 185-200). Thus, it has to be acknowledged that the corpus analyses to be presented below neglect many of the factors that would have to be addressed in a comprehensive description of the grammatical phenomena considered. A final problem encountered by all work in historical linguistics, including corpus-based approaches, is the absence of negative evidence (cf. Labov 1994: 11). We do know what was possible in earlier forms of English from the attestations in the database, and we can even work out the frequencies of different options. But what was not possible can only be inferred from gaps in the distribution. While speakers of a modem language can provide us with judgements about the acceptability of unattested structures, no similar methodological patch is available for earlier stages of the same language. Although the database thus leaves much to be desired, the use of corpora still is the choice methodology in historical linguistics, and there are good reasons for this. First and foremost, a database of the kind used here provides a firm and objective basis on which actual developments can be traced in the course of centuries (cf. Labov 1994: 10-11). The data are free from distortions due to the Observer's Paradox and independent of a potentially biased personal intuition (cf. also Nevalainen and RaumolinBrunberg 2003: 28). Moreover, the literary collections marshalled for the corpus analyses present the enormous advantage of their unrivalled size. For the purposes of the present study, this asset outweighs their lack of representativity. In addition, all texts included in the databases are pains-

50

Methodology

takingly edited from the authentic first editions, so that with the appropriate provisos these databases constitute an excellent and indispensable source of evidence. Finally, insofar as the EEPF, ECF and NCF corpora invariably contain fictional prose writing, they are directly comparable with each other and also with the imaginative prose section of the BNC, a possibility which is often made use of in the following studies. 4 Yet, the generality of the descriptions of grammatical phenonema proposed in this book is limited by the restrictions and insufficiencies of the database. Two caveats have to be kept in mind in the interpretation of the data. One is that the primary sources can by no means be taken as representative of the entire language in use at their time; if anything, they represent the literary standard language. The other is that the relationship between the spoken and written codes remains obscure in many respects. The next section outlines some recent psycholinguistic findings suggesting that the processes involved in speaking and writing may after all not differ so much as to render extrapolations from written sources illicit.

3.2.

The phonology of written language

Given the topic of this book, the influence of a phonological factor on English grammar, the selection of corpora outlined above may at a first blush seem inappropriate, if not paradoxical. After all, the largest part of the data represents written language, and only one tenth of the BNC involves texts transcribed from spoken conversation or more formal speech. This raises the question of what role phonology plays in written language, or differently put, whether writers have access to the sound of what they write. A trivial remark is that just as reading is based on listening, writing is based on speaking. The question that needs to be answered is whether there is a fundamental difference between the processes of writing and speaking. If there is, one may wonder whether phonological preferences should be expected to play a greater part in one or the other mode. Speaking is arguably more subject to articulatory constraints, so that the psycho-physiological conditions described in section 2.1.4 could be assumed to be valid exclusively in oral speech production. On the other hand, the complicated processes involved in speaking usually take place under real-time pressures, which may result in a lack of planning and a loss of performative accuracy. In writing, by contrast, language users have generally more time to see their pre-planning through to the end before they set pen to paper, which gives them a greater chance of adjusting their production to linguistic preferences, phonological or other. In fact, if in experimental studies stress shift is so little measurable in speaking (cf. section 2.1.3 above), but

The phonology ofwritten language

51

manifest in listeners evaluating language production post hoc, the effectiveness of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation might be argued to depend on the time a language user has to implement it. 5 An extreme case of premeditated and rhythmically accomplished written language is the artificially contrived language of verse. Thus, we may hypothesize that phonological preferences require a sufficiently low rate of delivery to manifest themselves clearly. It seems possible, moreover, that the maximum speed at which a phonological preference can be implemented depends on the scope of the preference in question: influences on the morphological makeup of words can be considered to be restricted to a relatively low level of processing, while influences on the syntactic structure of phrases and sentences will be argued to span a larger distance and therefore to take more time. These ideas will be elaborated in more detail in section 6.3, introducing spreading-activation models which allow us to model speech production in real time. On impressionistic grounds, Sievers (1912: 80-81) argues that authors enganged in a writing process are implicitly aware of the prosodic aspects of their production, though they only possess insufficient means of encoding them in the resultant graphic representation. In addition, Sievers assumes that readers reconstruct these prosodic features, even in silent reading. Similarly, Slowiaczek and Clifton (1980: 573) and Rayner and Pollatsek (1989: 216, 443) report introspective judgements to the effect that in silent reading the majority of people hear their own inner voice pronouncing the words that their eyes perceive. Significantly, this "subvocal speech" does not seem to be delivered in a monotone, but includes prosodic aspects. The ideas expressed by these authors remain confined to mere speculation based on shared intuitions. In the remainder of this section, some relevant results of psycholinguistic research will be outlined that provide an insight into the relationship between the spoken and written modes of language processing. Since reliable evidence on the connection of speech and writing is as yet scarce and hard to come by, some suggestive results on the connection between hearing and reading will be adduced as well. Naucler (1983: 596-597) describes three hypothetically possible models of the relationship between a meaning that is to be expressed and its spoken and written form. The dependence model sketched in (1 a) assumes that the meaning is first encoded in (subvocal) speech, as in normal speaking, and the speech is then graphically coded as writing. The independence model in (1b) sees speaking and writing as two completely separate processes, directly related to the meaning. Finally, the interdependence model in (1 c) discerns a trilateral relationship insofar as both speech and writing have a direct link to the meaning they transport but are also interdependent.

52

(1)

Methodology

a. dependence Meaning

/

Speech

Writing

b. independence

c. interdependence

Meaning

~

Speech

Writing

Meaning /

~ ""'-

Speech

Writing

The cumulative evidence provided by Naucler (1978, 1983) and Berg (1997) suggests that the interdependence model is the one which comes closest to reality. Naucler (1978: 11-12) finds that exactly the same linguistic units, namely phonetic features, phonemes and morphemes, play a role both in speech and writing. In a later paper (Naucler 1983: 596-597), evidence from slips of the tongue, slips of the pen and aphasic errors leads her to limit these conclusions somewhat in favour of a restricted amount of interdependence between speech and writing. Accordingly, both processes share an underlying level which serves as a mediator and contains abstract phonetic, phonological or/and semantic information. Naucler finds that skilled writers can take a direct route from meaning to writing, just as practised readers can take a direct route in the reverse direction and dispense with phonological mediation. Berg (1997: 687, 691) comes to a parallel result on the basis of a collection of slips of the tongue and the pen: the representation underlying written language is impoverished as compared to the representation underlying spoken language, and the degree to which writers rely on phonology correlates negatively with their degree of writing experience. It may, however, be argued that if Berg finds a considerable independence of writing from the phonology of spoken language, this may simply be due to the fact that he uses a corpus of slips of the pen produced by himself, and that he is a practised writer. A more representative corpus might have led him to postulate a more direct relationship between speaking and writing. This is what can actually be concluded from Aitchison and Todd's (1982) study. The authors find (1982: 192-193) that while fast readers may by-pass an auditory image stage, in writing there is no evidence that the intermediate auditory stage is ever omitted. Evidence for the intermediate auditory stage in writing comes from slips of the pen, such as the confusion of homonyms (there spelled their, made spelled maid), phonetic spellings (searched spelled surched) and assimilation phenomena (linked to spelled linke to). In sum, speaking and writing seem to be interconnected by a more or less abstract shared phonological representation and to a degree that depends on the proficiency of the writer. Unfortunately, research on the psychology of writing is as yet little advanced. More insightful findings are available from the study of reading, and since the present work assumes

The phonology ofwritten language

53

that the functional constraints on the phonological form of language take effect in language perception as well, the psychology of reading allows for careful extrapolations bearing on the issue. Patterson and Coltheart (1987: 439-442; cf. also Brown and Besner 1987) make the case that phonological representations must play a role in silent reading because the comprehension of written language immediately and automatically activates all representations connected with a certain item, including not only orthographic, semantic and syntactic information, but also phonological information. A theory of reading would be overcomplicated if a specific representation (e.g. the phonological one) was to be excluded in a reading task because a decision about which representations are relevant in a particular situation and which are not would require an additional selection process involving a surplus of processing expense. In a similar way, the psycholinguists argue, readers pay more attention to their inner voice in difficult reading tasks than in easy tasks. The reason is that the phonological representation can be stored by a process of subvocal rehearsal. Thus, phonological information is maintained in a short-term memory that functions as an interface between orthographic input and parsing procedures, which is particularly useful in complex processing tasks (cf. also Baddeley, Vallar, and Wilson 1987). By extension, unpractised readers can be expected to have more recourse to the phonological form of the written text. The experimental results described in Treiman and Chafetz (1987) and Fodor (2002) suggest that phonological coding plays a paramount role in the comprehension of written language. In particular, Fodor (2002: 116129) provides compelling empirical evidence in favour of the hypothesis that in silent reading, the processor projects default prosodic contours on the incoming graphemic signal, which may demand time-consuming reanalyses when these expectations are thwarted. A series of experiments conducted by Bader (1998) on silent reading are especially relevant in the present context since they have an immediate bearing on the importance of rhythm. His findings can be illustrated with the following pairs of partially ambiguous sentences (cf. Bader 1998: 37): (2)

a. Zu mir hat Maria gesagt, dafJ man nur ihr Geld beschlagnahmt hatte. b. Zu mir hat Maria gesagt, dafJ man Qusschliefllich ihr Geld beschlagnahmt hatte. To me has Maria said that one only her (poss.) money confiscated had. 'Maria told me that only her money had been confiscated.'

54

(3)

Methodology

a. Zu mir hat Maria gesagt, daft man nur ihr Geld anvertraut hatte. b. Zu mir hat Maria gesagt, daft man tiusschliefllich ihr Geld anvertraut hatte. To me has Maria said that one only her (dative) money entrusted had. 'Maria told me that only she had been entrusted with money.'

The two focus particles nur and ausschlieftlich are semantically similar. The contrast between the examples in (2) and (3) is that the verb beschlagnahmen is monotransitive, while anvertrauen is ditransitive. Therefore, it is the main verb towards the end of the sentence which disambiguates the function of ihr: possessive determiner of the accusative object Geld in (2) or pronominal dative object in (3). Bader's study rests on the assumption that the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation determines the comprehension of temporarily ambiguous sentences in reading. Thus, Bader maintains, the tendency to adopt an alternating rhythm leads readers to expect the absence of stress on the pronoun ihr following the stressed monosyllable nur, but the presence of stress following the initially stressed trisyllable ausschlieftlich, which in turn leads to an interpretation of ihr as an (unstressed) possessive determiner after nur, but as a (stressed) dative object after ausschlieftlich. This parsing strategy leads to measurable garden path effects in sentences of types (2b) and (3a), which call for a time-consuming prosodic re-analysis. Bader (1998: 5) explains this as a corollary of the inner speech that is implicated in reading and that comprises both the inner voice we hear when reading and subvocalizations, i.e. muscle movements of the speech organs that tend to accompany reading. In sum, the evidence in favour of the relevance of phonological representations in reading is fairly convincing as far as it goes, and the more creative and presumably more cognitively demanding activity of writing can a fortiori be expected to involve phonological information at least to the same degree, even though psycholinguistic evidence is more ambiguous in this domain. In an interactive model of activation flow in language processing, this state of affairs is in fact the only conceivable one, considering that this framework predicts that if any unit in the system is activated, it unfailingly activates all connected units in turn. Plausibly, the (direct or indirect) connections between the pronounced and written representations of one and the same item are extremely strong. Therefore the present study rests on the premise that the processes involved in speaking and writing are largely parallel and that regularities detected in written corpora can safely be assumed to hold for spoken language as well. Though the currently available knowledge of these processes is far from satisfactory, the results

Concordance software and search procedures

55

of the corpus analyses suffice to buttress the thesis that phonological preferences do play a role in written texts. Even so, if larger spoken corpora were available, the empirical analyses should be re-done and the results compared. Potential differences might display a stronger effect of phonological tendencies either in spoken or in written language. The literature suggests that there may be individual differences in the importance of phonology in reading and writing (cf. also Fodor 2002: 129). These factors may be an additional determinant mediating the interaction between phonology and grammar, but have been left out of consideration in this study. It is unclear whether the fact that novelists, dramatists and journalists, who have authored most of the texts constituting the corpus, are professional writers influences the results in a way to mask phonological effects that might manifest themselves more strongly in the production of less pracised writers. Problems like these are a topic for further research (cf. the relevant remarks in the outlook, section 7.2).

3.3.

Concordance software and search procedures

The concordances from which the data of the present study are drawn have been produced using the Wordsmith Tools software, version 3.00.00, produced by Mike Scott for Oxford University Press. Thanks to the cooperation of Chadwyck-Healey Inc. and the work of several colleagues involved in the Paderborn research project, the historical databases (EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD), the BNC and the British newspapers have been made accessible in a format compatible with Wordsmith Tools. Any corpus analysis involves a number of methodological problems that may lead to distortions of the results. As far as possible, these difficulties have been anticipated and obviated. The following measures have been taken: - For the historical corpora in particular, all conceivable spelling variants were ascertained, partly using the Wordlist function of Wordsmith Tools or the keyword browse indices of the Chadwyck-Healey software, partly drawing on the spellings listed in the OED 2 (1994). - Whenever a proximity search was carried out, a wider distance between search words and context words was allowed than would have been necessary in order to capture all examples separated by excess spaces or corpus-internal codes as are inserted, for example, in the texts of the Helsinki Corpus. - In the lists of concordance entries, care has been taken to exclude all examples deriving from poems, songs or other versified passages that are occasionally interspersed in the prose since these artificially metri-

56

Methodology

fied texts would distort the results with regard to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. If, in the historical corpora or the newspapers, the contexts of two hits showed exactly the same wording, possibly with some orthographic differences, the later of the two hits was discounted to avoid the inclusion of doublets that are merely due to word-by-word copying of one author by another. - In some cases, more recent texts quote sentences from earlier published works. This is particularly frequent in the newspapers. The BNC imaginative prose section includes a non-negligible list of rewrites of historical novels or novels that are set in earlier centuries. Both types tend to intentionally employ an antiquated language and thus to diverge from the usage of their respective periods. Whenever this was noticed, the examples concerned were excluded. All concordance entries were checked manually to ensure that the lists included only such examples as were relevant to the study. In cases where more than a single line of context was required to disambiguate the example, the corresponding functions of the retrieval software were exploited. While minor inadequacies cannot be completely excluded, it is hoped that these precautions are sufficient to render the analyses reliable and replicable. For economy of exposition, spelling variants, search expressions and excluded examples will usually not be specified for individual analyses. Suffice it to say that greatest care has been taken in every single study described in the empirical part of this book.

3.4.

Tests of statistical significance

The exposition of the results in Chapters 4 and 5 makes use of diagrammatic visualizations of statistical data that combine visual accessibility with information about the absolute numbers of examples on which the diagrams are based. These numbers represent tokens, not types, throughout the presentation. The distribution of the variants compared is generally given as percentages of the total number of occurrences in the category and corpus or corpus subsection under consideration. This way of presenting the results is the easiest to calculate and interpret. Moreover, it has been shown to reflect linguistic variation and change just as well as more sophisticated methods (cf. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 214217). Distributions that look convincing to the eye need not necessarily be reliable if the absolute number of examples is too low, or vice versa, minor

Tests ofstatistical significance

57

deviations may be significant even though relative values differ by only a few percentage points because the sample size is so large as to license certain conclusions. To distinguish such cases, the chi-square test has been applied as a test of statistical significance to the central distinctions made in the diagrams, and its results accompany the discussion of the results in the form of endnotes. As far as the comparison between distributions of certain characteristics in different sets of examples is concerned, this test is the most commonly used not only in corpus linguistics. It compares the difference between the actual frequencies that are observed in the corpus and those that would be expected if no factor other than chance hat been operating to affect the frequencies. The closer the expected frequencies are to the observed frequencies, the more likely it is that the observed frequencies are a product of chance. By contrast, the greater the difference between the two, the more likely it is that the observed frequencies are influenced by some systematic factor (cf. McEnery and Wilson 2001: 84-85). The advantages of the chi-square test lie in the fact that it does not presuppose that the data are normally distributed (which is often not the case with linguistic data) and that it is relatively sensitive, at least when large sample sizes are concerned. With small sample sizes, the test becomes unreliable, so that in the present study it is not applicable if the expected frequency of a variant in a specific context falls below the critical value of five instances. In such cases, the conclusions drawn from the corpus analyses are at best suggestive, but the accumulation of evidence pointing in the same direction can be taken to lend credence even to statistically unsatisfactory results. A further advantage of the test is that it can be carried out using the chi-square function of the Excel calculation software. The results of the chi-square function of Excel were occasionally double-checked using the professional statistics software package SPSS and were identical in all cases. The chi-square test has been applied as a test of fit between the respective frequencies of n different grammatical variants in m different contexts. In the majority of the analyses, there are no more than two variants that play a role (n = 2), but there may be more than two contexts (m :::: 2). Unless stated otherwise, the chi-square tests compare the contexts pairwise. That means that the actual value A Vij obtained for one of the grammatical variants (variant i) in one of the contexts (context}) is compared to the value that would be expected if the variant was equally frequent in both contexts. The expected value EVij for each variant i in context} is the frequency we would predict if the context remained without an effect on the distribution of the variants under disucssion. It can be obtained by multiplying the total of both variants in context} by the percentage of the same

58

Methodology

variant in the total of both contexts. The chi-square value by means of the following formula:

(4)

v A"

(AVy _E~)2 2 __ ~~ L..J L..J i~l j~l

E~j

(j)

is calculated

(cf. Bortz 1993: 147-149)

In case more than two contexts are compared at a time, the calculation applies analogically, but the results of the formula have to be treated differently since a higher number of contexts leads to a higher number of degrees of freedom (dj). The adequate number of degrees of freedom is determined according to the following formula: (5)

df= (n -1)' (m - 1)

(cf. McEnery and Wilson 2001: 85)

This procedure makes it possible to verify the extent of the skewing between two (or more) different contexts. It is preferable to a more global procedure which would compare all contexts in one single application of the test, since it is sometimes the case that only one context deviates from all the others, while the others exhibit no significant differences. In a global chi-square calculation (frequently used in other quantitative studies), these distinctions would be unrecognizeable. Excel's chi-square function outputs the probability value p, which designates the probability with which the hypothesis that the distribution of the variants is dependent on the context is erroneous. Thus, a p value close to 0 means that a difference between the distributions in the context investigated and in the total is very significant, i.e. it is very unlikely to be due to chance; a value close to 1 means that it is almost certainly due to chance (cf. McEnery and Wilson 2001: 85). The interval between 1 and 0 is a continuum, but conventionally, a cut-off point is defined which is taken to be the difference between a 'significant' and an 'insignificant' result. In linguistics (as in most other fields) this is normally taken to be a value of p = 0.05; i.e. the probability with which the hypothesis is erroneously adopted is equal to or lower than 5 percent. Probability values of equal to or less than 0.05 (written as p :::; 0.05) are assumed to be 'significant', whereas those greater than 0.05 are not (cf. McEnery and Wilson 200 I: 85). Values of equal to or less than 0.01 are considered as 'highly significant', and such of equal to or less than 0.001 as 'very highly significant'. The endnotes giving the statistical test results contain three sets of data: first, the result of the chi-square test formula et), second, the number of degrees of freedom (dj), and third, the resultant error probability (P). In addition, significant p values are marked by one asterisk, highly significant

Tests ofstatistical significance

59

p values by two asterisks, and very highly significant p values by three asterisks. Cases where the chi-square test yields a p value that is not sig-

nificant are indicated by n.s.; such where it is not applicable due to the lack of examples in at least one of the contexts investigated are marked by n. a. At this point it needs to be said again that statistical significance is no safeguard against erroneous conclusions. Whether a distribution that passes the test of significance makes sense or not can only be decided by common sense and linguistic intuition. If large datasets are available, statistical significance is easily reached even if the skewing is too slight to be linguistically satisfying. On the other hand, conclusions drawn from small datasets can be insightful without reaching statistical significance. Despite the considerable collection of corpora that has been marshalled for the present work, the latter is the case in some of the analyses to be described below. In conclusion to this chapter, the reader should keep in mind a number of caveats that relate to all of the empirical analyses that follow. Sample sizes may sometimes turn out to be critical, the scarcity of spoken corpora and the total absence of spoken corpora for earlier centuries may turn out to limit the generalizability of some of the conclusions drawn from individual studies, the issue of the connection between spoken and written language is largely unresolved, the corpus searches themselves may be liable to oversights, and tests of statistical significance are useful, but may obscure rather than elucidate the linguistic significance of the findings. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the sheer amount of analogous results will lend plausibility to the conclusions reached. Having addressed these technical details, we now turn to the empirical studies of effects of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation on grammatical variation and change. The discussion will progress from attributive structures (Chapter 4), which represent a construction type that is particularly tightly knit, to a variety of verbal and adverbial structures, which are characterized by lower degrees of syntactic and prosodic integration (Chapter 5).

Chapter 4 Analysis of attributive structures

The Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has been shown to be a powerful determinant of grammatical variation and change in a number of previous studies (cf. section 2.2). What is more, we can expect the English language, being a prototypical stress-timed language, to provide a wealth of phenomena sensitive to the avoidance of stress lapses and, in particular, clashes (cf. section 2.1.2). The following two chapters are devoted to an investigation of the effects of the preference for rhythmic alternation at different synchronic stages of the English language and as a factor co-determining the direction of language development (cf. Bolinger 1965b: 139). As has been pointed out in section 2.2, there is evidence to suggest that the relative importance of the determinant may have been increasing since ME times as the English language more and more emancipated itself from the influence of the French superstratum and developed its stress-timing character. The fact that the following analyses largely focus on EModE and LModE as well as PDE, with only occasional detours into ME, should, however, not be taken as additional support for the thesis that OE and ME were not stress-timed languages. The present work provides evidence neither for nor against this thesis but rather restricts itself to those periods in the history of English for which appropriate and sufficiently large corpora are available. OE and ME corpora could of course have been used, but large portions of these older collections consist of verse. As this genre has, since the ME era, codified rhythm in the form of poetic metre, these sources do not represent adequate samples for analyses concerned with rhythm in naturalistic language use. Lass' (1997: 69) caveat against studying poetic language as a substitute for naturalistic data is particularly pertinent here.

4.1.

Introduction

In the present introduction, a few general points will be addressed. In the first place, a preliminary definition of the distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables and an indication of ways to distinguish them in a corpus will be provided. Secondly, the common core of the attributive structures grouped together in this first empirical chapter and the particular interest that qualifies them for a study of the Principle of Rhythmic Alter-

Introduction

61

nation will be elucidated. This will lead over to a first formulation of the main hypotheses that the present chapter serves to corroborate. Finally, the progression of the sections making up this chapter will be introduced and explained. Like in poetic metre, in most of the following analyses, a simple dichotomy between stressed and unstressed syllables was assumed and found to be sufficient. To implement this binary classification, a very simple scheme was adopted that largely adheres to the classification proposed in Kelly and Bock (1988: 392; cf. also Getty 2000: 42): in content words of the major lexical categories (nouns, verbs including modal auxiliaries, adjectives, adverbs), the syllable bearing primary lexical stress was considered stressed and all others unstressed. For the large number of studies revolving around attributive structures outlined in this chapter, this was usually satisfactory. Monosyllabic function words (determiners, pronouns, prepositions, contractible auxiliaries, the copula be, the negator not only when contractible) were in contrast generally considered unstressed, unless special conditions apply that will be introduced in Chapter 5. The more complex, plurisyllabic members of these categories were considered to bear stress on their strongest syllable (cf. Getty 2000: 42).1 In terms of the metrical grid convention introduced in section 2.1, we will thus be concerned only with the lowest metrical levels. In most representations these would be two levels: the syllable level, at which each syllable receives a mark, and the "basic beat level" in Selkirk's (1984: 19) terms, at which unstressed syllables are mark-less and stressed syllables receive a mark (which may be topped up by different column heights at the superior levels). Although the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation applies at all metrical levels (cf. section 2.1), a restriction to the lowest ones is common practice in studies of its effects, and there are good reasons for doing so. According to Selkirk (1984: 19), rhythmic alternation is most strictly obeyed at the basic beat level, which is why it will in the present work be informally referred to as the rhythmic level. While a binary division into stressed and unstressed syllables may seem overly simplistic in view of the complex prosodic structure of natural language, it will turn out to be an asset in the analysis of large corpora lacking prosodic annotations. On the one hand, rhythmic measures have to be applicable with a high degree of intersubjective certainty, which discourages any ad hoc stipulations about intermediate stress levels or higher-level prosody. On the other, the grammatical phenomena that will come under scrutiny will necessitate such an amount of descriptive detail that a finer differentiation of the rhythmic parameters would threaten to make the analyses inefficient and the results uninterpretable. What comes out all the more clearly is that even in this admittedly crude version, the alternation

62

Analysis ofattributive structures

between stressed and unstressed syllables has a considerable explanatory potential that helps to improve the accounts of many grammatical phenomena beyond what has so far been achieved. Before we turn our backs on the analysis of versified language for the remainder of this book, a quick glance at Tarlinskaya's (1984: 16,23) findings can help us focus our attention in the study of prose corpora. Tarlinskaya is able to demonstrate that attributive structures play a pivotal role in the construction of English verse lines. Adjectives in attributive function are often trochaic and occur tightly bound to the following nouns, which are usually initially stressed. As a consequence, the remaining parts of the verse line are arranged around the noun phrase and conformity with the poetic metre is achieved. If we take the idea seriously that the form of metrical texts is based on the phonological and prosodic characteristics of ordinary speech, which poetic language seeks to enhance and codify (cf. Kurylowicz 1975: 5; AlIen 1972: 73), we can expect noun phrases to be particularly critical structures in terms of the ideal of rhythmic alternation even in prose texts. In fact, Bolinger (1981: 35) observes that attributive structures have a tendency to form a tightly bound constituent with their nominal heads and to thereby lose some of their individuality as words. Strong additional support for the expectation that attributive structures will be a worthwhile object of study in the present context derives from a survey of the stress patterns of different types of content words in English. It is well-known that the majority of English nouns, whether native or loans, have their main stress on their initial syllable. A computation executed on the basis of Francis and Kucera's (1982) word lists, which provide the frequencies of word lemmas in a representative corpus of written English, can be adduced to substantiate this? The technical details of the calculation as well as the complete table on which it is based are given in the Appendix (table 3). Figures 2 and 3 summarize the results. Note that these data do not take into consideration the different lengths in terms of numbers of syllables of the nouns, adjectives and verbs. The focus is rather on the beginnings of words and on whether their initial syllables are stressed or unstressed. The data in figure 2 refer to types rather than tokens. They clearly show that nouns as well as adjectives and verbs are in their majority stressed on their initial syllables. This is most true of nouns, of which 78.8 percent (i.e. 788 out of the 1000 lemmas taken from the Francis and Kucera list) are initially stressed. 3 Crucially for our purposes, this entails that any material that precedes a noun in attributive position is very likely to cause a rhythmic problem if it carries a stress on its final syllable. The rhythmic situation becomes even more critical if we take into account the token frequency of nouns with the different stress patterns. This is done in figure 3,

Introduction

63

which refers to the same lemmas as the previous figure, but takes into consideration the frequency indices provided by Francis and Kucera. As a result, we obtain the likelihood with which a randomly selected token of a noun, adjective or verb in Francis and Kucera's database will be stressed on its first, second, third, etc. syllable. 4

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

.------------------~

primary stress on • first sy liable II1I1I second sy liable El third sy liable

o fourth sy liable

nouns

Figure 2.

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

verbs

The proportion of lemmas (type frequency) with different locations of the primary stress in the 1000 most frequent noun and verb lemmas and the 894 adjective lemmas in Francis and Kucera's (1982) word list

-,-------------------~

primary stress on • first sy liable II1I1I second sy liable II1I1I third sy llable

o fourth syllable

nouns

Figure 3.

adjectives

adjectives

verbs

The frequency of occurrence (token frequency) of nouns, adjectives and verbs according to the location of the primary stress in the 1000 most frequent noun and verb lemmas and the 894 adjective lemmas in Francis and Kucera's (1982) word list

64

Analysis ofattributive structures

In these data, the dominance of initial stress is reinforced for all three word classes. The figures warrant the conclusion that any token of a noun that we encounter in written language will be initially stressed in as much as 84.8 percent of the cases, which is equivalent to the proportion of threatening stress clashes if a stressed syllable immediately precedes it in attributive position. This is due to the fact that those nouns that are either monosyllabic or plurisyllabic and have their stress on the initial syllable belong to the most frequently occurring nouns in the English lexicon. In a corpus of spoken English, we would expect the preponderance of initially stressed nouns to be even more marked. The next question is what this prototypical stress pattern of nouns implies for elements premodifying nouns in an attributive structure. We can straightforwardly predict that any attributive material that carries stress on its final syllable (the one which immediately precedes the noun) is likely to cause problems in the implementation of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. Attributive material par excellence is provided by the adjective class. For this reason, stress location in adjectives is of considerable interest in this context. From table 3 in the Appendix we can deduce the probability with which adjectives bear final stress. For present purposes, this category includes monosyllabic adjectives. These figures run to 26.3 percent of the lemmas and a considerable 40.2 percent of all adjective tokens. This high proportion is accounted for by the high frequency of monosyllabic adjectives. Prototypical adjectives can of course occur in attributive as well as postnominal or predicative position (for an interesting exception, see section 4.3). This syntactic distinction makes an important difference in terms of rhythm and will therefore be capitalized on in all of the studies in this chapter. When used as attributes, we can now predict that, in view of the initial stress of most nouns, monosyllabic adjectives and adjectives with a final stress are likely to produce infractions of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation (e.g. a worse case, ?an ashamed girl). In contrast, when used in other, non-attributive positions, adjectives are typically followed by a pause or an unstressed function word (e.g. the case became worse, she was so ashamed that she blushed).5 Minkova (1990: 332; 1991: 180) suggests that this situation has been exacerbated in the history of English: she argues that English attributive structures have been tending towards dysrhythmy since ME times, a trend that she ascribes to the loss of inflectional schwas in attributive adjectives which rendered many high-frequency adjectives monosyllabic. Attributive structures can therefore be expected to provide the rhythmically most critical structures in the sentence and promise to be a particularly fruitful ground for the study of effects of rhythmic alternation. Thus, in all of the analyses that are to follow, attributive uses

Introduction

65

of adjectival material are foregrounded; but to make the data stand out the more clearly, postnominal and predicative uses will frequently be exploited as a foil to which attributive uses can be usefully compared. The main hypotheses to be pursued in this chapter can thus be stated as follows. The influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation should manifest itself most clearly in structures consisting of a noun and premodifying material since these are rhythmically (and syntactically) closely linked. More precisely, it should manifest itself in the avoidance of structures in which an initially stressed noun is preceded by attributive material with a stressed final syllable. The nature of these avoidance strategies will provide the main subject of all the studies presented in this chapter. Crucially, it will be shown that the preference for alternating strong and weak syllables impacts on the grammatical structure of attributive structures, including the presence or absence of the comparative suffix -er and of the participial suffixes -en and -ed, the position of the degree modifier quite with regard to the indefinite article and the order of pairs of attributive adjectives, the licensing of a-adjectives like ashamed and aware and of adjectives negated by not in prenominal position. Besides such grammatical avoidance effects, it will be shown that the elimination of stress clashes is also aided by certain rhythmic rules that depend for their application on the presence of additional prenominal material that goes beyond a single unmodified attributive adjective. Such extensions are provided, for instance, by prefixes attached to the adjective (e.g. unaware, unhappy), compounds of which the adjective is the second member (e.g. fashion-aware, hand-knit), or adverbs that modify the adjective (e.g. socially aware, dimly lit). These structures will be argued to take care of the rhythmic inconvenience and are therefore accorded an important place in the following discussion (cf. Bolinger 1981: 35). They will be assigned to a third category besides single unmodified attributive uses and non-attributive uses of adjectives. Moreover, they will be shown to counterbalance to a considerable extent the trend towards unrhythmic single attributes alluded to by Minkova. In fact, it will be suggested that since the trend towards monosyllabicity in English is diametrically opposed to the needs of rhythmic well-formedness, the influence of rhythmic alternation manifests itself all the more noticeably in the morphology and syntax, in particular of noun phrases. All in all, this state of affairs promises to yield a set of interesting interactions between rhythmic and grammatical requirements in the domain of attributive structures. While revolving around the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation and its effects, the approach adopted in the present book is functional and multifactorial. For the following studies, this implies that interactions of the principle with other factors will receive the due attention. Most of the

66

Analysis ofattributive structures

analyses will moreover integrate the synchronic and diachronic perspectives, which provide complementary parts of the picture that will be drawn of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation as a determinant of grammatical variation and change. The following sections are arranged roughly in order of increasing grammatical complexity of the attributive expression. The progression also follows the division into mainly morphological and mainly syntactic variation phenomena. In section 4.2, we begin by looking at the variation between only two single words (representing the same lexeme and grammatical category), namely the suppletive comparative worse and its redundantly suffixed variant worser. While worse(r) does not lend itself to premodifications of the kind introduced above, prefixation, compounding and adverbial premodification play an important role in connection with a-adjectives like ashamed and aware, which have been referred to in the literature as 'predicative-only' adjectives. In the context of these two examples, the central importance of premodification will be illustrated (section 4.3). Attributive and other uses will be shown to present a significant contrast in this respect since postnominal and predicative uses in general involve little threat of a stress clash. Having established this difference, the following analyses will no longer distinguish between premodified and unpremodified nonattributive uses, whereas this distinction will continue to play a major role in connection with attributive uses. This is true, for instance, of the variable past participles studied in section 4.4. The examples discussed include three strong verbal participles that variably drop their -en-suffix, and two weak verbal participles that vary between a syllabic and a contracted form of the -ed-suffix. These analyses will capitalize on the distinction between simple and complex attributive uses to establish the degree to which an originally rhythmically motivated distribution has become fixed as a grammatical rule. In section 4.5, the focus shifts from morphological variants to rhythmic influences on the syntax of attributive structures. The first example (section 4.5) concerns the degree modifier quite, which, when modifying an attributive adjective, can occur either in the position before or after the indefinite article. It will be argued that this variability is exploited to avoid stress clashes with the adjective that is modified. The second example (section 4.6) also deals with the relative order of two elements in a complex attributive structure. The study concerns the sequencing of mono- and disyllabic colour adjectives in coordinations and once more highlights the particular sensitivity of attributive uses. A final example of highly intricate attributive uses of adjectives is analyzed in section 4.7. While some attributive adjectives can be directly negated by not, many others are not licensed in this construction or require the intercalation of additional filler words as stress clash buffers. It will be argued

Worse vs. worser (ram EModE to nineteenth-century English

67

that this phenomenon constitutes one of the most far-reaching and nearcategorical manifestations of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. Before we turn to the first analysis, it should be made clear once more that the selection of phenomena is by no means exhaustive. The different types of attributive constructions exemplified here can be taken to be a representative subset of the actual range of phenomena. They have been selected here on account of their accessibility in written corpora and their strong results. There is no doubt that the analyses presented in this chapter could be multiplied to an extent that these analyses can only foreshadow. What unifies the phenomena assembled here (besides their focus on attributive structures) is their susceptibility to the influence of the preference for rhythmic alternation, which will be at the centre of the discussion.

4.2.

Worse vs. worser from EModE to nineteenth-century English

The alleged universality of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is no safeguard against its loss of influence if other factors come to prevail. This is clearly illustrated by the case of the suppletive adjectival and adverbial comparative worse and its partly regularized competitor worser, which is equipped with a redundant comparative suffix and thus with an additional unstressed syllable. Knorrek (1938: 43), Graband (1965: 192) and Arnold (1970: 285) affirm that the second syllable of worser affords a particular advantage in attributive position, where it can serve to avoid a stress clash (cf. also Stroheker 1913: 49). Arnold (1970: 295) gives quantitative evidence that in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century English, worser was significantly overrepresented preceding nouns. Though rhythmic considerations clearly favour the form worser, the development of the form involves a variety of additional factors. The origin of the form, though etymologically unjustified, is easily explained and has an exact parallel in the comparative form lesser. Deriving from the OE sources wyrsa and liissa, the forms worse and less lacked the -er-suffix characteristic of English comparatives (cf. Arnold 1970: 284; Knorrek 1938: 43; Graband 1965: 186, 189; Mustanoja 1960: 281). They owe their redundant suffixation to a pressure for system congruity, exerted by the general structural properties that are internalized by language users and thus represent the norms of the system (cf. Arnold 1970: 285; cf. also Knorrek 1938: 43; Erades 1963: 234; Graband 1965: 191).6 These "systemdefining structural properties" (WurzeI1987: 65) are based on the quantitatively prevailing forms in the system. Thus, the "dominant paradigm structure" (Wurzel 1987: 79) of comparatives involves the suffixation in -er. The comparative worse consequently belongs to an abnormal and unstable

68

Analysis ofattributive structures

class, which can for this reason be predicted to be absorbed by the normal, suffix-containing class. Apart from system congruity, worse violates two more of the five naturalness principles adduced by Wurzel (1987: 92; cf. also Wheeler 1993; McMahon 2000: 131). One is the requirement for constructional iconicity, which postulates that unmarked categories should be coded as non-feature-bearing, whereas marked categories should be coded as feature-bearing. Worse and less however belong to the (marked) comparative category, but are morphologically indistinct from the unmarked positive category. A further naturalness principle is that enforcing uniformity and transparency. In other words, its effect can be subsumed under the formula 'one meaning - one form'. This maxim, also known as the principle of biuniqueness, isomorphism or uniform encoding, favours an ideal one-to-one correlation between form and meaning. Bolinger phrases it as follows: "the natural condition of language is to preserve one form for one meaning, and one meaning for one form" (1977b: x; cf. also DressIer et aI. 1987: 7, 17, 21 note 8; Mayerthaler 1988: 26; McMahon 1994: 86). From this point of view, ideally, one form unequivocally encodes one grammatical category, and one grammatical category is uniquely encoded in one formative (cf. also Mayerthaler 1987: 49; Wurzel 1987: 92; Brinton and Stein 1995: 37; Anttila 2002: 210). Applied to our case, this means that the -er-suffix in adjectives should always encode the comparative and that comparatives should not be variously formed by either suffixation or suppletion but by a unique, unmistakable means. On another level, the 'one meaning - one form' principle also militates against the maintenance of both forms, worse and worser, to encode the comparative of bad(ly). One of the variants ought to be eliminated since both convey the same meaning (cf. Amold 1970: 295V On the basis of what has just been said, the form worse would be expected to give way to the form worser, which has a greater naturalness, system conformity and rhythmic well-formedness. However, the latter has an array of factors against it and thus shares the destiny of other instances of multiple gradation. Double comparatives like betterer and more better and double superlatives like leastest and most basest were frequent in EModE well into the seventeenth century and served as a means of intensification and emotional emphasis (cf. Franz 1986: 210; Rohr 1929: 18, 90; Markus 1988: 119). In the written language, they largely succumbed to a pressure for standardization that had begun to play a role in English as early as the end of the fourteenth century and redoubled its force in the seventeenth and even more so in the eighteenth century (cf. Lass 1994: 81; Stein 1997: 37-40). The aims of language purists, who promoted the standardization, can be characterized as a pursuit of intellectualization, rationality, regularization, uniformization (the 'one meaning - one form' princi-

Worse vs. worser from EModE to nineteenth-century English

69

pIe became an ideology), at the expense of expressive and subjective elements. Dialectal language was no longer conceived of as a regional variant, but as a mark of social inferiority (cf. Stein 1997: 37-40; Baugh and Cable 1993: 251; Arnold 1970: 283). Not astonishingly, double comparison fell victim to the incriminations of prescriptive grammarians because it provides a showcase example of linguistic redundancy.s Redundancies run counter to a standardization principle that Stein (1997: 38) captures in the formula "No double surface realization". Doubling was considered illogical and expressive of non-propositional meanings and thus had to be avoided in the written standard. This avoidance also extended to other redundancies such as resumptive pronouns, double negation, double relatives, double auxiliaries, expressions like from whence, etc. (cf. Stein 1997: 38-43). All of these forms remain in vigour in dialects to the present day and are used in the literary standard to characterize nonstandard speakers or to achieve joking or archaizing effects (cf. Franz 1986: 211, 230-231; Rohr 1929: 91,94; Knorrek 1938: 44; Arnold 1970: 292-293; Biber et al. 1999: 525). However, the comparatives lesser and worser, being less conspicuous than combinations of synthetic and analytic gradation, were retained longer in the standard (cf. Knorrek 1938: 44): while lesser has established itself with a different meaning from less (cf. Franz 1986: 211; Erades 1963: 234; Arnold 1970: 295), the form worser partly made it into the literary standard in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just to disappear again in the eighteenth century like the other double comparatives before it (cf. Rohr 1929: 93; Arnold 1970: 295; Graband 1965: 195).9 The combination of the standardization pressures bearing on redundant forms in EModE and in particular LModE on the one hand and the advantages weighing in favour of the double comparative worser on the other promises to give rise to multifaceted interactions in the distribution of the irregular form worse and its regularized counterpart. A set of conflicts is pre-programmed on different levels. On the sociolinguistic level, we are witnessing a "split grammar situation" (cf. Stein 1987: 428,431) between the written standard enforced by grammarians, guided by logic and knowledge of word histories, and the spoken language, orientated towards rhythmic well-formedness and regularization (cf. Graband 1965: 195), which is mirrored on a language-internal, functional level in a conflict between the 'one meaning - one form' principle striving to eliminate variable realizations of the same meaning, and the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation that is best satisfied if it can choose from rhythmically distinct variants. In a pilot study (Schliiter 2001: 194-199) of the occurrences of the form worser in the quotation corpus of the OED 2 (1994), two kinds of insights were gained: first, worser was most frequent in the sixteenth and seven-

70

Analysis ofattributive structures

teenth centuries, and second, its replacement by worse is most likely to lead to a stress clash in attributive position. Schliiter (2001: 199-206) also provides a detailed study of the distribution of worse and worser in the EEPF corpus. For the present study, this database has been extended considerably through the inclusion of the ECF and NCF corpora, from which some late occurrences of the double comparative could be culled. Furthermore, the coverage was improved through the inclusion of the dramatic works contained in the EPD collection for the corresponding periods. As a result, we obtain a much more complex picture of the evolution of the form worser in the course of four centuries. Figure 4 shows the frequency per one million words of the redundantly marked comparative in the four chronological sections that were chosen for the present study. 12

,-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~._~

-i3 11 SIO ::: 9

dramatic prose -e--non-dramatic prose

s::

:5 '8

8 7

... 6

g,

5

3.42 (6.7 million)

(/)

8s:: 4 ~ 3 u

u

1.19

2

3;h···· •...."•. :::~(6.

o 1

o +-~~~

7

~--,-~~~__~,-_~~.;0~.2~;:-;:::~_€)0.53

EEPF + EPD 1518-1600

Figure 4.

2.51 (13.1 million)

Cl million) -(39~7mlllion) ECF + EPD NCF + EPD 1701-1780 1781-1903

0.3

EEPF + EPD 1601-1700

The frequency of worser per 1 million words in the EEPF, ECF and NCF corpora (non-dramatic prose) compared to the corresponding sections of the EPD corpus (dramatic prose)IO

The graph makes it clear that the frequency of worser is highest in the sixteenth century and reaches a minimum in the eighteenth century, the heyday of the influence of prescriptive grammar. At the beginning and at the end of the period studied, the drama corpus displays a considerably higher incidence of worse than the non-dramatic prose and never avoids the form as much as the latter in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the absence of any spoken corpora of earlier forms of English, this type of written-to-be-spoken language is as close as one can get to the colloquial usage of the day. It may thus be assumed that double comparison is a largely oral

Worse vs. worser from EModE to nineteenth-century English

71

feature. Even so, its presence in non-dramatic fictional prose, which can largely be classified as part of the literary standard language, is all but negligible in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Before we embark on a contrastive analysis of the contexts in which worser competes with the standard variant worse, some restrictions have to be made. Since worser features only in the works of a few authors in each subperiod, and if multiple works by the same author are included in the database, worser is often found in only some of them, all works that do not contain the form were excluded from the following analysis. This leaves us with 15 works of the sixteenth century, 32 of the seventeenth century, 8 of the eighteenth century and 37 of the nineteenth century. As a consequence, while figure 4 is representative of the language of the entire database, the focus is now restricted to a few selected works in which the form under consideration is overrepresented. This distortion however enables us to discern certain distributional patterns that would otherwise be disappearingly subtle. Among the resultant hits for worse and worser, those that occurred in one of the poems or songs occasionally interspersed in the prose texts that constitute the corpus were eliminated since the hypothesis to be pursued here concerns the influence of rhythmic alternation, which is artificially enhanced and codified by metrical considerations. The following analysis pinpoints the form worser, aiming to show that the second, unstressed syllable that the redundant comparative suffix affords is exploited for the sake of rhythmic alternation. Thus, we first concentrate on attributive uses, which combine a high potential for stress clashes with a high level of syntactic and prosodic integration. Compare the examples in (l a-d) from the EPD corpus. (1)

a. The devil himselfcould not have put it into your head to do a worse thing than this. (Joanna Baillie: The Tryal, 1798; EPD) b. It is true, but the worser part ofwickednesse, is the perseuerance therein. (James Mabbe: The Spanish Bawd, 1631; EPD) c. What worse disgrace did ever King sustain, than I by this luxurious couple have? (Anon.: The Thracian Wonder, 1590; EPD) d. Ohfilthy Fellow, that's a worser abuse than any has been yet put upon me, for he's the veriest Fop in Nature. (Thomas D'Urfey: The Richmond Heiress, 1693; EPD)

The added stress marks indicate the rhythmic constellations in these attributive structures. In the metrical grid representation, the highlighted portions of examples (1 a-d) come out as is shown in (2a-d).

72

Analysis ofattributive structures

(2)

a.

x x X

b.

X X

X X

[worse thing] c.

X X X

X

x X

[worser part] d.

X

X

X

X

X

[worse disgrace]

X X

X X

X

X

[worser abuse]

In example (2a), the standard comparative form worse is followed by a monosyllabic noun and thus gives rise to a sequence of two stressed syllables, a stress clash. In standard PDE, worse is the only possible option and initial stress on nouns is the rule so that there is no way around a clash of stresses. The insertion of a compensatory pause, which is a likely avoidance strategy in other constellations, is awkward in closely knit noun phrases like this. However, the introduction of the comparative suffix, as long as it is available, offers a convenient stress clash buffer and makes the attribute + noun sequence in example (2b) much more rhythmic. With noninitially stressed nouns, the rhythmically ideal constellations are the reverse: while the use of the monosyllabic standard variant worse before a noninitially stressed noun as in (2c) promotes rhythmic alternation, the use of the redundantly suffixed form as in (2d) slightly overshoots the mark. Yet, the resulting stress lapse must be considered a lesser evil than a stress clash. Figure 5 displays the results of the analysis of the dramatic and nondramatic prose texts according to four subperiods of approximately a century each. Importantly, it only refers to single unmodified attributive uses of worse and worser; complex attributive and non-attributive uses are discussed separately below. In this figure, the dark segments at the bottom of the columns (the black and the hatched black-and-grey areas) represent the share of worser in the works under consideration, whereas the remaining lighter area (the light grey and the hatched white-and-grey segments) represent the share of worse. As can easily be seen, the total percentage of worser declines from 60 percent in the sixteenth century and 39 percent in the seventeenth century to a mere 6 percent (2 occurrences) in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the double comparative apparently rises once more to 28 percent of the attributive cases. Thus, the frequency changes of the form worser delineated in figure 4 are directly related to the degree to which the form is substituted by the standard variant worse.

Worse vs. worser from EModE to nineteenth-century English • worser preceding an unstressed syllable EJ worse preceding a stressed syllable

73

l1li worser preceding a stressed syllable EJ worse preceding an unstressed syllable

100% 90% 80% 70% ~ 60%

1:: 50% ~ 40% Q)

0.-

30% 20% 10%

0%

Figure 5.

The distribution of the variants worse and worser and their rhythmic contexts in simple attributive uses in selected works of the EEPF, ECF, NCF and EPD corpora

In figure 5, a further distinction is made that cuts across the worserworse divide. Both hatched segments of each column refer to those cases in which the comparatives are followed by a noun stressed on its first (or only) syllable.) In other words, they represent potential loci for stress clashes. The size of the area concerned is remarkable: between 70 and 89 percent of the following nouns are initially stressed (thus confirming, by the way, the results obtained from the Francis and Kucera (1982) data for PDE displayed in figure 3). Crucially, the use of the redundantly suffixed form worser enables the authors to circumvent a more or less sizeable proportion of these threatening stress clashes. This proportion depends on the availability and acceptability of the form. As a result, in the four subperiods a residue of stress clashes remains that is equal to the hatched whiteand-grey segments in figure 5 and represents those cases in which worse precedes an initially stressed noun. In the sixteenth century, this concerns only 15 percent of the cases, since as many as eleven out of the 20 initially stressed nouns are preceded by disyllabic worser. In the seventeenth century, despite the decline of worser, stress clashes are still restricted to a minority of 44 percent of all cases. In the eighteenth century finally, worser yields up its resistance to standardization constraints and occurs only twice (once in a conversation in Francis Gentleman's Cupid's Revenge, 1772, and once in a private letter in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa,

74

Analysis ofattributive structures

1748). As a result of the avoidance of worser, the share of stress clashes rises to 78 percent - all but one of the cases involving initially stressed nouns. The data for the nineteenth century display a surprising revival of the form which had been subject to severe incriminations in the previous subperiod. A closer inspection of the examples shows that 5 of the 13 stem from the dramatic works in the database and that among the remaining 8, 4 also come from direct speech uttered in conversations between the characters. An extreme example where worser clearly serves as a nonstandard marker is the following (3). (3)

"Yo' know well, that a worser tyrant than e'er th' masters were says, 'Clem to death, and see 'em a' clem to death, ere yo ' dare go again th' Union. ' ... " (Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South, 1855;

NeE) This suggests that the apparent rise of the double comparative in the nineteenth century is not indicative of a renewed acceptance of the form in the written standard, but of the increasing importance of colloquial every-day language in the prose of the period. This can be taken as a bit of additional evidence for Biber and Finegan's (1989: 498-512) findings concerning the evolution of literary styles in seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury fiction: they claim that texts from the two earlier centuries tended to be moderately or extremely literate, whereas the nineteenth century witnessed a transition towards more oral styles, which Biber and Finegan ascribe to the spread of literacy and the popularization of fictional prose. Before we turn to more data on the competition between worse and worser, it should be noted how well the two collaborate in attributive contexts to produce the maximum number of rhythmically advantageous structures. Figure 5 shows the percentage of cases with noninitially stressed nouns as plain segments above and below the hatched middle segments. It demonstrates that the redundantly marked form is relatively rare in these contexts compared to the standard variant. Even in the sixteenth century, when worser dominates in attributive uses, it occurs in only one out of six cases involving noninitially stressed nouns. As was argued in connection with examples (1 c-d) above, in these particular cases, worse conforms to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, while worser gives rise to a mild stress lapse, which is not exactly objectionable, but can be avoided through the use of the standard variant. Thus, the use of worser in attributive position is far from being an automatism but responds adaptively to different rhythmic conditions in its context. The results for attributive uses cannot be properly appreciated without a comparison to non-attributive contexts. These comprise a variety of syntac-

Worse vs. worser from EModE to nineteenth-century English

75

tic functions that can be fulfilled by the suffixless as well as by the redundandy suffixed comparative. Example (4) is one of a handful of complex attributive structures and was excluded from the data for simple attributive uses in figure 5 since the comparative is followed by an unstressed and. Example (5) is also attributive, but the head noun is elided. Constructions of this kind therefore fall under the rubric of other than single attributive uses. Furthermore, there are cases in which worse or worser are nominalized as in (6), where they are predicative or postnominal as in (7) or (8), or adverbial as in (9). (4)

I counte these my Prymeroses to be ofthe worser and meaner sorte, by reason oftheir firste plantyng. (John Grange: The Golden Aphroditis, 1577; EEPF)

(5)

But in sooth Mr. Slope was pursuing Mrs. Bold in obedience to his better instincts, and the signora in obedience to his worser. (Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers, 1857; NCF)

(6)

But no extremitie hath eternitie as the worlde turned to better, so this Wretche changed to worser: ... (William Warner: Pan his Syrinx, 1584; EEPF)

(7)

Suche is the madnesse ofmen, that they preferre newe things afore old, though they be worser. (Thomas Blage: A Schole of Wise Conceytes, 1569; EEPF)

(8)

"No! 'twas not a dog barking, nor it wasn't a wolf, nor it wasn't a tiger; but it was something ten million oftimes worser than either -; ... " (Frances Trollope: The Life and Adventures ofMichael Armstrong, 1840; NCF)

(9)

... ; but there I wentfor him to a justice ofpeace, and rode all out of the way, and did every thing in the world, and was used worser than a dog, and allfor the sake ofserving ofhim, ... (Fanny Burney: Evelina, 1778; ECF)

In most of the cases where worselworser is not immediately followed by a noun that it modifies, it is followed either by an unstressed function word or by a punctuation mark indicating a pause. 12 The above examples are representative in this respect. All in all, only 41 (4 percent) out of the 976 other uses found in the entire corpus are followed by a stressed syllable (e.g. reinforced predicative uses like worse still or adverbial uses fol-

76

Analysis ofattributive structures

lowed by an initially stressed verb like worse treated). Figure 6 shows how the suffixed and suffixless variants are distributed under these circumstances. • worser preceding an unstressed sy liable III worser preceding a stressed sy liable [2] worse

preceding a stressed syllable

Il!!!I worse

preceding an unstressed syllable

100% 90% 80% 70% -

~ 60%

'5

50%

1i

40%

8

30% 20% 10%

.39/404

0%

=5% ECF + EPD 1701-1780

Figure 6.

=10% NCF + EPD 178 I-I 903

The distribution of the variants worse and worser and their rhythmic contexts in other than single attributive uses in selected works of the EEPF, ECF, NCF and EPD corpora

In stark contrast to the single attributive uses in figure 5, other uses turn out to be much less precarious with regard to rhythmic alternation: the columns contain only small hatched segments representing cases with a following stressed syllable. These almost exclusively consist of the whiteand-grey area where stress clashes persist due to the use of the monosyllabic variant worse. The reason why worser does not occur in cases where a non-attributive comparative is followed by a stressed syllable can only be the scarcity of such cases. In all rhythmically uncritical cases, the standard variant worse is unobjectionable and selected in a vast majority of between 73 and 93 percent (the monochrome grey segments). In most residual cases where worser is selected nevertheless (the black segments), it gives rise to a stress lapse. As examples (4) to (9) demonstrate, the use ofworser would have been possible in all syntactic functions - not just the attributive ones. If worser is nevertheless much rarer than in single attributive uses, this is by hypothesis due to the rhythmic factor: the redundant suffix provides a

Worse vs. worser from EModE to nineteenth-century English

77

highly welcome stress clash buffer preceding the typically initially stressed nouns, but in other contexts it is preferably dispensed with. 13 In addition to the mere quantities, the chronology of the evolution of the double comparative is of considerable interest. Considering the more frequent non-attributive cases first, figure 6 shows that worser is fairly current in the sixteenth century (19 percent), but almost disappears in the seventeenth century (4 percent). In contrast, worser is not only more frequent in the single attributive uses portrayed in figure 5, but also takes longer to disappear: it is still present in more than a third of the cases in the seventeenth century and reaches its minimum only in the eighteenth century. Thus, its disappearance from the rhythmically favourable contexts is delayed by about a century in comparison to the unfavourable contexts, where it even antedates the massive influence of eighteenth-century prescriptive grammar. Of the 46 occurrences of worser in the nineteenth-century data accounting for the resurgence of the form in the latest subperiod, 33 come from the written-to-be-spoken language of the EPD corpus. Of the remaining 13 stemming from the NCF collection of fictional prose, all but one occur in direct speech. They are thus clearly recognizable as a sociolinguistic marker for fictional characters and not part of the literary standard employed in the main text (cf. Franz 1889: 230-231). This feature bears witness to the tendency to admit colloquial elements that, according to Biber and Finegan (1989: 498-512; see above), is characteristic of fictional prose in the nineteenth century. It furthermore indicates that the form worser must still have been vigorous in nineteenth-century spoken English, and we know that nonstandard PDE still uses it (cf. Franz 1986: 210; Rohr 1929: 18, 90; Markus 1988: 119). The fact that the rise of worser in the nineteenth-century data in figures 5 and 6 turns out to be steeper in the case of the single attributive uses than in the other uses moreover indicates that the selection of the alternants is - as it has always been - conditioned by the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. While rhythmic alternation and standardization indeed seem to be the main determinants in the distribution and evolution of the double comparative, there are a few side issues that have been raised in the secondary literature. It has been claimed that the double comparative worser carries a different meaning from the simple comparative. Graband (1965: 190), for one, alleges that double comparison (in a way similar to double negation) is used in order to strengthen the comparative meaning by adding to the body of the adjective that is compared. In view of the corpus data, the evidence in favour of this position is, however, very scant. If Graband was right, we would have to conclude - rather counterintuitively - that the attributive position generally carries a stronger comparative meaning than a

78

Analysis ofattributive structures

non-attributive context since it attracts a higher proportion of worser than non-attributive uses. Another kind of support for Graband's claim would be if worser occurred in juxtaposition to worse as a means of intensification. This is however true of no more than the three examples listed in (10a-e). (10) a. "Is she so very bad?" asked he. "Worse, much worser than I ever saw her before, " replied John. (Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton, 1849; NCE) b. "Well, the worse pickle we was in, so much the worser in you not to help us, for you knowed where we was fast enough, ... " (Fanny Bumey: Evelina, 1778; ECE) c. "Close upon sixty, " replied Mrs. Raggles; "but, for all that, he'll leave worse behind him. " "There never was a worse but there was a worser," rejoined Nurse Waters. (Robert Bell: The Ladder ofGold, 1850; NCE) These examples also illustrate the fact that worser is more typical of spoken registers, which are known to have a stronger penchant for expressive and emphatic language. In fact, the drama corpus has been shown to have a higher proportion of double comparatives than the non-dramatic parts of the corpus. This is, however, not a criterion apt to account for the distribution of the altemants in attributive and other contexts. As mentioned earlier, Erades (1963: 234-235) claims that the meaning distinction between worse and worser is not one of intensity, but rather one of collocation. Accordingly, worser occurs only in explicit or implicit comparison to better, in which it has a different meaning from worse, similar to the distinction between lesser and less. Two examples of contrasts made explicit are given in (11a-b), and further instances of worser being opposed to better can be seen in examples (5) and (6) quoted above. (11) a. Lucy. What do you allude to, sir? Tubbs. Why, to a guilty attachment between Mr. Snooks and my better no, worser, half! (Edward Stirling: The Little Black Parlour, 1839; EPD) b. "1, John, -; take thee Ruby, -; to my wedded wife, -; to 'ave and to 'old, -; from this day forrard, -; for better nor worser, -; for richer nor poorer -; "; and so on to the end. (Anthony Trollope: The Way we Live now, 1875; NCE) However, in most corpus examples, there is no express contrast between worser and better (consider again examples (1a-d), (7), (8) and (9)), and the presence of an implicit contrast is difficult to demonstrate. Instead of a

A-adjectives in PDE

79

semantic contrast, examples juxtaposing worser and better can be taken together with those juxtaposing worser and another marked comparative, for instance sentence (12) as well as example (4) above. (12) Now whether it were, that despaire to regaine the estate he lately hadforgon made him resolute, or feare to goe farther and speede worser, diligent, or that necessitie made him vertuous being naturally vitious, I know not, ... (William Warner: Pan his Syrinx, 1584; EEPF)

Such examples can be argued to reflect on a small scale the pressure for system congruity, weighing against the suffixless form worse also on a larger, systematic scale, and to reinforce it through the direct succession of two comparatives. The use of worser is suitable to obtain a parallelism in the immediate surroundings of another, regular comparative,14 and to achieve a greater degree of uniformity of comparative formation in English. In conclusion, semantic considerations do not seem to play a major role with regard to the double comparative worser. Its emergence is accounted for by functionally motivated tendencies enforcing system congruity, while its distribution is rhythmically motivated, with single attributive uses constituting the most accommodating environment. On the diachronic level, the disappearance of the form worser in the eighteenth century can unambiguously be ascribed to the standardizing influence of prescriptive grammar. Differences in the rate of the demise of the redundantly marked form are, however, once more due to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, retarding the loss of worser under favourable conditions Gust as it has, on a more general level, presumably contributed to the preservation of synthetic adjectival comparison in spite of the longstanding tendency in English towards analytic patterns; cf. Bolinger 1965b: 153-154). Direct speech quoted in nineteenth-century novels and plays as well as 11 instances of worser that can be culled from the spoken part of the BNC testify to the fact that double comparison lives on in nonstandard speech, but in standard PDE, the form worser has completely given way, with the rare exception of some literary or archaic survivals that occur - of all plages - in attributive structures like the worser part/sort/halj(cf. OED 2 1994: s.v. worser).

4.3.

A-adjectives in PDE

While prototypical adjectives can occur in attributive as well as in predicative and postnominal position, some are restricted to attributive position

80

Analysis ofattributive structures

and a few others are barred from predicative and postnominal position (cf. Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 529). A class of adjectives that instantiates restrictions of the latter type are the so-called a-adjectives, including items such as afraid, aghast, agog, alive, aloof, ashamed, asleep, awake and aware ('predicative-only' adjectives; cf. Jacobsson 1996).15 To account for these restrictions, at least three types of factors have been adduced in the literature. For some of the a-adjectives, their historical origin as prepositional phrases accounts for their inappropriateness as attributes (cf. Jacobsson 1996: 208; Markus 1997: 490). A more general obstacle that bars them from prenominal position is their meaning, which typically refers to a transitory state and therefore is in conflict with the characterizing, permanent meaning inherent in attributive material (cf. Bolinger 1952: 1133-1137; 1967: 3-4; Leisi 1985: 54; Jacobsson 1996: 218). This semantic effect is taken by many authors to be an important - if not the most important - factor explaining the distributional idiosyncrasies of a-adjectives (cf. Bolinger 1967: 12; Jacobsson 1996: 217; Biber et al. 1999: 508; Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 559). A different line of argument makes reference to the rhythmic contour of these adjectives. Since the initial a- is a reduced vowel, stress falls on the second (and in most cases final) syllable. The resultant stress clash has been argued to make the adjectives unsuitable for prenominal position (cf. Bolinger 1965b: 143; Minkova 1990: 327).16 In the literature, several bypass strategies taking care of these constraints have been proposed, including the choice of near synonyms (e.g. asleep - sleeping, aware - conscious; cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 409), the introduction of unstressed dummy material (e.g. an aloof/alert kind ofperson; cf. Bolinger 1965b: 151) and the expansion of a-adjectives by premodification (e.g. two fast-asleep children, a wide-awake patient, their still awake children, half-alive people, a really alive student, a not fully awake freshman; cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 409; Bailey 1987: 149; Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 559; Jacobsson 1996: 208-211). In the most detailed study of aadjectives available to date, Jacobsson (1996: 211) describes the effect of the addition of a premodifier in wholly semantic terms: "By the insertion of a word implying degree or manner (fast, etc.), our attention is no longer focused on the state as such but rather on the quality of the state or on the quality alone." This takes care of the semantically motivated objections to the prenominal use of a-adjectives by formulating exceptions to the constraint against temporary meanings encoded in attributive structures. Considering that there are also rhythmic objections levied against finally stressed attributes preceding initially stressed nouns, this cannot be the whole story. The present study focuses on the contribution of rhythm to the licensing of two particularly interesting a-adjectives, namely ashamed and

A-adjectives in PDE

81

aware, in attributive position. For a larger-scale investigation of the interplay of rhythmic and semantic factors in connection with a greater number of a-adjectives, see Schliiter (in preparation b), of which the following study is an extract. In fact, the diversion of our attention from the a-adjective to what precedes it coincides with a shift in the main stress of the attributive construction. Example (13) shows one of the rare unpremodified attributive uses, while examples (l4a-e) illustrate the different types of premodification to be found in connection with ashamed and aware. (13)

He is an intelligent and aware person, for all that his membership of MENSA may suggest the contrary. (The Daily Mail 1993)

(14) a. Let's face it, if "The Crucifixion" was a newly-releasedfilm we would deplore its unashamed blOodlust. (The Guardian 1995) b. 'The Leicester people are a very rugby-aware public which adds to the spirit here. '(The Daily Mail 1994) c. Socially-aware songs and a lonesome harmonica have won him a 'Bob Dylan ofSenegal , tag, ... (The Daily Mail 1998) The premodification of premodifiers generally creates longer strings of syllables which form closely tied syntactic and prosodic units and can be subject to a redistribution of stresses that will repeatedly be shown to alter the grammatical properties of the attributive material. The metrical grid convention introduced in section 2.1 can be used to illustrate the relevant rhythmic constellations. Reference is also made to a set of English stress rules. Note, however, that this is not meant to anticipate an answer to the longstanding question of whether or not linguistic structures can be derived by rules applying one after another or cyclically in a procedural fashion. Rather, they are appropriated as a means of simplification for the complex dependencies characteristic of the prosodic structure of English. To begin with, the depiction of the stress clash arising between the unmodified attribute and the noun in the phrase aware person in example (13) is familiar from number (2) in Chapter 2 above. On top of the rhythmic level represented by the second layer of grid marks, the Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR), which requires that "The rightmost member of a phrase is strongest" (Hayes 1995: 368; cf. Chomsky and Halle 1968: 17; cf. furthermore Couper-Kuhlen 1986: 28), assigns an additional stress mark to the syllable per-.

82

Analysis ofattributive structures

(15) Nuclear Stress Rule x

x

x

x

x x x x [aware] + [person]

x

x x x x [aware person]

NSR ~

In the expression aware person, the Stress Shift Rule, introduced in (9) of Chapter 2 above, cannot apply to resolve the stress clash since there is no stressable syllable to the left of the stressed syllable of the attribute, and this is (part of) the reason why constructions like these tend to be avoided. The different types of premodification illustrated in examples (14a-e) contribute stressable syllables to the left of the a-adjective that can be exploited so as to implement the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. We will first turn to the case of prefixed a-adjectives like unashamed, illustrated in (14a). In its citation form, the adjective has final stress, but since the prefix contains an unreduced vowel, the Stress Shift Rule (abbreviated here as SSR) may shift the stress to the initial syllable as in (16). This abolishes the sequence of two stressed syllables and the result conforms to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. (16) Stress Shift Rule x

x x

x x

x

x x x x x SSR [unashamed bloodlust] ~

x x x x x [unashamed bloodlust]

In the formation of compounds as in (14b), the Compound Stress Rule (CSR) applies, which requires that "The leftmost member of a compound is strongest" (Hayes 1995: 368; cf. Chomsky and Halle 1968: 17; cf. furthermore lones 1969: 257; Couper-Kuhlen 1986: 28; Bolinger 1989: 215). Therefore, compounded adjectives have a stress contour that makes them more acceptable in prenominal position without any additional rule application (cf. Bolinger 1965b: 143). Consider the schema in (17). (17) Compound Stress Rule x

x x x x x x x x x [rugby] + [aware] + [public]

CSR ~

x x x x xx x x x [rugby-aware] + [public]

A-adjectives in PDE

83

x X X

NSR ~

X X

X

xxx X X [rugby-aware public] X

Finally, adverbially premodified a-adjectives, illustrated in (14c), in isolation form a closely-knit syntactic phrase that is subject to the Nuclear Stress Rule, assigning the highest stress level to the head adjective. The rule applies cyclically (cf. Hayes 1984: 42-43; 1995: 369) and in the next step increases the stress level of the head of the noun phrase, thus giving rise to a stress clash. Crucially, when followed by a stronger stress, the main stress on the phrase consisting of adverb plus adjective can undergo stress shift and be relocated on the adverb. As example (18) illustrates, the resultant rhythmic structure is improved in comparison to a single attributive adjective. (18)

x

x x x x x x x x x x x x NSR x x x x x x [socially] + [aware] + [songs] ~ [socially-aware] + [songs]

x x x x x x x x x x x x NSR x x x x x x SSR x x xx x x ~ [socially-aware songs] ~ [socially-aware songs] In sum, any kind of more complex, premodified attributive material is appropriate to mitigate the stress clash that is pre-programmed to result if an a-adjective precedes an initially stressed noun. The importance of premodification in the licensing of a-adjectives in attributive position can be established by looking at the distribution of premodified and unpremodified instances in a corpus. For this purpose, all occurrences for ashamed (including its prefixed forms) and one randomly selected occurrence out of ten for aware (likewise including its prefixed forms) were retrieved from a corpus consisting of 40 years of British newspapers described in section 3.1. All hits were classified according to their occurrence in attributive or postnominal/predicative function. For these syntactic functions, the relative proportions of unpremodified exam-

84

Analysis ofattributive structures

pies as opposed to the three types of premodified examples were calculated. The results are displayed in figure 7. premodified unpremodified

{

EiI adverbially premodified 12I compounded ~prefixed

• single unmodified

100% 90% 80% 1713 =15%

70% o ~ 60%

@ 50% ~

0.

40% . 30% . 20% 10% 0%

33=2To attributive non-attributive N = 1638 I N = 10986 ashamed

Figure 7.

attributive N= 123

non-attributive N = 11469 aware

The premodification of non-attributive and attributive uses of the a-adjectives ashamed and (1 in 10 instances of) aware in a British newspaper corpus (The Daily Mail 1993-2000, The Daily Telegraph 1991-2000, The Guardian 1990-2000, The Times 1990-2000)

A look at the total number of non-attributive and attributive uses (indicated below the columns) reveals that the latter are statistically rare: only 1 in 8 instances of ashamed and I in as many as 94 instances of aware is attributive. The restrictions bearing on attributive uses can however be defined more closely on the basis of these data. They apply in particular to unpremodified uses, which make up only 2 and 7 percent, respectively, of the attributive occurrences of ashamed and aware, as can be seen from the solid black sections of the columns. All the remaining attributive uses are made up by instances in which the a-adjectives are premodified in one way or the other. Prefixation with un- is particularly characteristic of ashamed, while aware typically occurs in compounds of the type rugby-aware, design-aware,fashion-aware, self-aware, and, above all, in combination with

A-adjectives in PDE

85

adverbs, as in socially-aware, ecologically-aware, environmentally-aware, politically-aware. 17 The important contrast is however that between attributive and nonattributive uses of the same adjective. While only 2 percent of attributive ashamed are unpremodified, 81 percent of non-attributive uses neither have a prefix, are part of a compound nor are modified by an adverb. Similarly, while only 7 percent of the attributive uses of aware are unpremodified, as many as 63 percent of the non-attributive uses stand on their own. 18 Therefore, Jacobsson's (1996: 218) generalization according to which ashamed and aware "are more frequent in attributive position than grammars and dictionaries would have us believe and should no longer be included among predicative-only adjectives" neglects the fact that for these adjectives (like for some others, for which Jacobsson does not fail to make this clear), premodification is virtually a sine qua non condition for their occurrence in attributive position. From the existence of examples such as (13) in which stress clashes persist, Jacobsson (1996: 213) concludes that the avoidance of rhythmically awkward constellations can only play a minor role. However, the extreme rarity of unpremodified attributive uses that appears from the quantitative data in figure 7 suggests a different conclusion. If attributive uses are thus strongly associated with premodification, it seems likely that the rhythmic effects resulting from the addition of stressable syllables play a crucial role in licensing the a-adjectives in prenominal position. This is not to deny the importance of the semantic effects attendant upon premodification, which are appropriately dealt with by Jacobsson (1996: 209-213). The interrelatedness of the rhythmic and semantic consequences of premodification are discussed in more detail in SchlUter (in preparation b). What this study has made clear, however, is that the rhythmic wellformedness of attributive structures is a factor whose contribution to the grammaticality of a construction must not be underestimated. A descriptively adequate account of the syntax of a-adjectives thus must have recourse to both semantics and phonology. It requires the co-presence of syntactic, semantic and rhythmic information. Such a conclusion poses a serious challenge to modular theories of grammar since it transcends the boundaries of the traditionally distinguished components (cf. section 1.1). Furthermore, it discredits derivational accounts that base attribution on predication: a-adjectives reveal a substantial discrepancy between the two syntactic uses. 19

86

4.4.

Analysis ofattributive structures

Mono- and disyllabic variants of past participles

Past participles are a domain of English grammar that is particularly rich in variants. It has been shown (cf. Lass 1994) that the past tense and past participle forms of strong and weak verbs started to become confused and to interfere with each other as early as the late ME period. The following data focus on the period from EModE up to PDE, selecting a few verbs for closer study that present a mono- and a disyllabic participial variant. Chaotic though the verb patterns in earlier forms of English may be, the following list spotlights a few parameters along which variation manifests itself. - The system of strong verbal inflections, making use of the ablaut feature derived from the Proto-Indo-European aspect system, was subject to simplifications and mergers, ultimately reducing the number of ablaut types (cf. Lass 1994: 85-90). - Originally strong verbs were transferred to the weak conjugation, a Germanic invention that has long since been the only productive pattern (cf. Lass 1994: 85-90; Cheshire 1994: 126). However, this transfer did not proceed at the same pace in past tense and past participle forms: Baugh and Cable (1993: 160) find that "For some reason the past participle of strong verbs seems to have been more tenacious than the past tense." Among their examples are the disyllabic past participles cloven, (mis-)shapen, shaven and swollen, which are maintained, while the past tense forms of the same verbs are already formed with a dental suffix, following the weak pattern (cf. also Bihl1916: 147). - Alternatively, the participles of originally strong verbs could also lose their -en-suffix, without replacing it with the weak -ed-suffix. This happened early on in the ME period and has only recently stabilized into a standardized pattern. As a result, the older full forms coexisted for a long time with the suffixless forms (e.g. broke(n), chose(n), drunk(en), eat(en), forbid(den) , (for)got(ten) , trod(den), spoke(n), stole(n), sunk(en), writ(ten); cf. Franz 1986: 166; Stroheker 1913: 42-47; Lass 1992: 146). - Insecurity in the use of the -en- and -ed-suffixes resulted in redundant suffixations of verbs that were originally weak or had turned weak and had a stem-final dental fused with the dental suffix (e.g. knit/knitted, lit/lighted, hit/hitten/hitted, burst/bursten/bursted; cf. Sundby, Bj0rge, and Haugland 1991: 304-313). - Furthermore, the original past tense forms of strong verbs could be used in the place of past participles, thus lacking the -en-suffix and exhibiting a different vocalism (e.g. drunken/drank, stricken/struck/stroke, fallenlfell, mistaken/mistook, shaken/shook, taken/took, written/wrote;

Mono- and disyllabic variants o/past participles

87

cf. Franz 1986: 166; Stroheker 1913: 42-47). Conversely (but less frequently), past participle fonns could also be used as past tense fonns (e.g. drank/drunk, sank/sunk, sang/sung, shrank/shrunk), leading to a free variation between the second and third grades of three-grade verbs (cf. Sundby, Bj0rge, and Haugland 1991: 225-236; Lass 1994: 89). - Finally, though irregular verbs can be assigned to different groups, the development is usually not unifonn across groups (cf. Lass 1994: 91). What is more, a single verb can participate in more than one development, as is obvious from the overlaps among the above-mentioned examples, leading to a competition between more than two variants with or without vowel gradation, without a suffix or with -en or -ed. Statements made by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century grammarians (summarized in Sundby, Bj0rge, and Haugland 1991: 225-236, 304313; cf. also Lass 1994: 98) lead us to assume that the real scope of variation in the spoken language of the day was even more considerable than what written documents seem to suggest. The focus of the following studies will be on the fonns of past participles in earlier fonns of English and PDE. Among the different parameters of variation, those cases are of particular interest in which suffixless or fused fonns alternate with fonns having a syllabic suffix. While the -en-suffix is syllabic after all consonant-final verb stems, -ed is not nonnally realized as an extra syllable (any more) unless it follows another alveolar plosive,z° Many linguists have noted that longer and shorter fonns of past participles have different distributions and have tried to account for this in different ways. Bailey (1987: 148), Cheshire (1994: 127) and Eisikovits (1991: 138) claim that a separation of meanings is going on: -en has a more passive or static meaning, whereas -ed has a more active or dynamic one. In actual fact, this phenomenon seems to be no more than a corollary of the fact that longer variants in tenns of the number of syllables are more frequent in prenominal position than shorter variants and that -en is more often syllabic than -ed. In fact, numerous linguists have noted that longer variants of past participles typically occur in attributive position and shorter variants elsewhere, and provide long lists of examples (cf. Franz 1910: 158; 1986: 167; Fijn van Draat 1912a: 24; Bolinger 1965b: 146-147; Bailey 1987: 150). Among those who venture an explanation for this finding, most concur in the view that the use of the longer variant before nouns is due to the avoidance of sequences of stressed syllables (e.g. Fijn van Draat 1912a: 24; Bihl 1916: 147; Franz 1986: 167; Bolinger 1965b: 146-147). Additionally, Franz (1986: 167) suggests as a possible account the fact that in OE past participles in attributive use following the definite article or demonstrative pronouns took the endings of the weak adjectival declension (e.g. se joresprecena here 'the aforementioned anny'), which contributed to

88

Analysis ofattributive structures

stabilize the -no While the influence of the OE inflectional system may have extended well into the ME period (cf. Btihr 1993: 54-55), it seems, however, unlikely that it is sufficient to account for the preservation of the disyllabic variants up to the present day. The preference for rhythmic alternation is the more longstanding determinant that can be credited with the potential to lead to a more or less strict division of labour between suffixed and suffixless forms. In the following analyses five pairs of participles will be studied, all of them possessing variants that differ in their number of syllables. The analyses will seek to determine what evidence there is of the effects of rhythmic alternation in diachrony and synchrony. A detailed consideration of the data will allow us to discern the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation beyond the attributive-predicative divide assumed by most of the authors quoted above. Thus, the question of the extent to which the distribution of the variants is grammatically fixed will be addressed in several places. The concept of grammatical fixation is taken to describe the process by which a grammatical tendency becomes generalized and turned into a grammatical rule and is thereby rendered impermeable to extragrammatical influences. The case of drunk and drunken, which will be studied as the first of five comparable cases, presents a showcase example, though some qualifications of the assumed fixation will eventually be necessary.

4.4.1.

Drunk vs. drunken from ME to PDE

Perhaps the best-known example of participial variants specialized for different syntactic functions is the pair drunk and drunken. In OE, the past participle of the strong verb was regularly suffixed in -en, but the suffix has been variable for many centuries. In PDE, according to Quirk et al. (1985: 114) and Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 553), drunken is limited to attributive position (e.g. a drunken sailor), while drunk occurs in other positions. While grammars do no more than state this difference, Fijn van Draat (1912a: 28) and Bolinger (1965b: 146) account for it in terms of stress clash avoidance. Building on Schliiter (2002b: 257-261), the following analysis provides an empirical basis for these statements and tests their generality. For this purpose, a large corpus of written English has been marshalled, stretching from the ME section of the Helsinki Corpus to the fictional prose section of the BNC. The sixteenth to nineteenth centuries are covered by the extensive EEPF, ECF and NCF corpora containing fictional prose, complemented by the EPD corpus of dramatic works, equally written in

Mono- and disyllabic variants o/past participles

89

prose. For the participles, three categories of syntactic uses were distinguished. 21 One comprises those attributive uses that are unpremodified and immediately followed by the noun (whether they are uncoordinated as in (l9a) or the final conjunct of a coordinated attributive structure as in (l9b)). (19) a. Then he pretends to be hospitable, and entertains the first people ofthe country, and yet he is not ashamed to boast that there has not been a drunk man in his house since he was master of it. (Joanna Baillie: The Country Inn, 1804; EPD) b. I think, Captain, you might have us 'd me better, than to leave me yonder among your swearing, drunken Crew; ... (George Farquhar: The Recruiting Officer, 1706; EPD) The second category comprises different types of more complex attributive uses where the participle is itself premodified as in (20a-b) or separated from the noun by additional attributive material as in (20c). (20) a. He had taken one from the side ofone ofa sleep-drunk coastguard. (Sabine Baring-Gould: The Roar ofthe Sea, 1892; NCF) b. Lee would pick out a suitably drunk customer, extol the virtues ofhis sister and then lure the man into a nearby darkened alley ... (Anna Dillon: Another Time, Another Season, 1989; BNC) c. ... ; a brutal, drunk, vile-tongued Old woman, who had beaten her oftentimes, as the sole maternal attention, when she was but an infant. (Ouida: Under Two Flags, 1862; NCF) Third, all remaining participial uses of drunk and drunken were indiscriminately grouped in the third category, other (non-attributive) uses. This includes postnominal (21), predicative (22) and nominalized uses (23) as well as verbal uses in the perfect tenses (24) and in passives (25). Since the present analysis of drunk/drunken is the first in a row of similar analyses, an example of each is given below, illustrating the typical rhythmic constellations in these syntactic functions.

(21)

The amount oftea drunk in Shanghae alone is estimated at a million pounds. (James Payn: By Proxy, 1878; NCF)

(22)

What did you not even get drunk in the Time ofyour Wife's Delivery? (Henry Fielding: Amelia, 1752; ECF)

90

Analysis ofattributive structures

(23) Butfor a drunk of really a noble class and on the highest principles, that brought you no nearer to the dark man than you were afore you begun, ... (Thomas Hardy: Far from the Madding Crowd, 1874; NCF) (24) Damme! if I've touch 'd a mouthful ofmeat, or drank a drop ofwine for three days! (Samuel lames Amold: The Veteran Tar, 1801; EPD) (25)

"I cannot abide waste. What's poured out mun be drunk. That's my maxim. " (Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton, 1849; NCF)

As in the case of worse/worser, the participles run little risk of colliding with subsequent stressed material when they occur in the body of the sentence where unstressed function words secure the separation of stressed content words or pauses intervene. Thus, as in the former cases, we can predict that non-attributive uses will be the first to give up the old participial suffix -en, giving rise to the attributive-predicative distinction described in the literature. Figure 8 shows the results for these contexts, differentiating furthermore between single unmodified and other, more complex attributive uses.

r

3/3=100% 266/266=100%

100% 90% 80% ~

~ ~ ;:l

0

o

i

~ o

P-

:

-9/10=90%

70%

{j 60%

....o

569/574=99%

50%

-e- single unmodified attributive uses 6/15=40%

40%

~ other

20/39=51%

attributive uses

other (non-attributive) uses

30% 20% 10% 0%

1/878=0%

65/1975=3%

2/1209=0%

.

+-----~---.------""'-====-T==;:;;):····::~~=---""'----""'-=~c=::-.; ~--;

HCME

EEPF + EPD

ECF + EPD

NCF + EPD

1150-1500

1518-1700

1701-1780

1781-1903

BNC wridom 1

1960-1993

Figure 8.

The distribution of disyllabic variants of the past participle of drink compared to monosyllabic variants in a series of prose corpora (HC ME section, EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD and BNC wridom 1)

Mono- and disyllabic variants ofpast participles

91

The sharp discrepancy between single unmodified attributive uses and nonattributive uses is immediately apparent. It manifests itself throughout the eight centuries investigated and is highly significant for the four later corpus subsections, where the data are sufficiently dense. 22 In the earliest subperiod, comprising the ME era, 6 out of the 15 non-attributive occurrences still exhibit the suffixed variant which once was the only participial form (cf. example (26». From then on, -en crops up only occasionally in nonattributive uses. Since ME times, however, -en has never been given up in attributive uses, where it fulfils an important rhythmic function. In the late twentieth century, the suffixless form drunk is apparently prepared to encroach upon this last resort of the full form. Only 3 of the 37 instances in single unmodified attributive uses of drunk occur before noninitially stressed nouns; among the rest, 9 premodify the nouns driving or driver(s), with which they seem to form close, compound-like units as in (27a). The other 25 instances of drunk creep in irrespective of the stress clash they produce (cf. example (27b» and unnoticed by PDE grammars that still give drunken as the standard attributive form.

(26) &, when he hase dronken ]Jam, pay will come owt at pe wonde & clence it with-in & hele it wele with-owtten. (Liber de diversis medicinis in the Thornton Manuscripts; HC ME IV) (27) a. ... , mind the mass slayers and maimers of innocent victims, mind the drunk drivers, mind the aeroplanes that fall from the sky and the ones that are aimed at you, ... (P. Bryers: The Adultery Department,1993;BlVC) b. Several drunk Britons tried to hang him one night, and would have succeeded had not a French Corporal cut him down in time. (C. Jennings: Mouthful ofRocks, 1990; BlVC) In the absence of additional evidence, we should perhaps not deduce the conclusion that the observance of rhythmic alternation is losing importance in PDE. Rather, in the data outlined in figure 8, the incipient demise of the suffixed form in attributive uses simply follows the example of the majority of other uses where the suffix has been obsolete for a long time. The more complex, multisyllabic attributive structures distinguished from the single unmodified ones provide a valuable testing ground for the productivity of the rhythmically determined distribution. Structures of this type, illustrated in the examples under (20), only begin to occur in the EModE period and from then on slowly increase in frequency. If the distribution of drunk and drunken was entirely grammatically determined (as

92

Analysis ofattributive structures

suggested by the grammarians' statements), an unrivalled dominance of drunken would be predicted in these attributive uses. If, on the other hand, rhythm was the only factor involved, we would expect stress clashes to be taken care of by a variety of stress rules (mainly the Stress Shift Rule and the Compound Stress Rule expounded in the preceding section) that shift the stress away from the participle and render the disyllabic variant drunken superfluous. The data in figure 8 indicate that the truth lies somewhere in the middle: though complex attributive structures behave more like simple attributes, the incidence of drunk is from the outset noticeably higher. The difference becomes statistically significant in the late twentieth century when the share of drunken in complex attributive structures drops markedly to a figure of around 50 percent. 23 In this latest subperiod, the difference between simple and complex attributive structures is most striking, although the share of drunken has decreased even in simple attributes. This argues in favour of the hypothesis that the suffixed form drunken is slowly dropping into obsolescence and at the same time cogently falsifies the hypothesis that the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has diminished on the way to PDE. In sum, the distribution of drunken in attributive uses and drunk in others has virtually congealed into a fixed grammatical pattern for something like five centuries. The maintenance of the -en-suffix was originally motivated by stress clash avoidance, but the functional split has never been completed. Wherever stress rules conspired to separate the stresses in mu1tisyllabic attributive structures, the shorter variant drunk has always been a viable option. The most recent data from PDE show an incipient loss of the -en-variant which may, if completed, lead to an impaired rhythmic wellformedness of simple attributive structures.

4.4.2.

Broke vs. broken from ME to PDE

Like the verb drink, the verb break belongs to the class of OE strong verbs and accordingly, its past participle was regularly suffixed with -en. In contrast to drink, however, the suffix has not been given up in non-attributive functions, but still marks the participle in the PDE standard and differentiates it from the past tense, which, in turn, has assumed the vowel grade originally reserved for the participle. Considering the starting point and the end point of the diachronic evolution of the participial forms of break, we might expect to find nothing of interest from the viewpoint of rhythm since the disyllabic variant broken has come down to us without any morphological change. However, the verb break would be rather exceptional if speakers had not shown a certain degree of insecurity concerning the form

Mono- and disyllabic variants ofpast participles

93

of the participle in the long period of vacillation that extends from ME to (nonstandard and even standard) PDE. In fact, the -en-suffix has been variable for many centuries and was temporarily absent in more than 50 percent of the occurrences of the participle, witness the surviving monosyllabic form broke, which in PDE has the specialized meaning of 'without money, bankrupt' (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 108, who label the expression as 'informal'). As for other participles possessing a mono- and a disyllabic form, Fijn van Draat (l912a: 27) and Bolinger (l965b: 146) claim that the longer, suffix-containing form has a particular affinity to the attributive position, where the suffix can help prevent a stress clash. This assumption has been put to a test in the following analysis. The database is again composed of the ME part of the Helsinki Corpus, the EEPF, ECF and NCF corpora, complemented by the corresponding sections of the EPD corpus, and the imaginative prose section of the BNC. Numerous spelling variants had to be retrieved in the first corpus sections, including the prefixed forms ibroke(n) and tobroke(n) for ME, but unlike the case of drank, which could be used as the past participle form, the stem vowel a is exclusively found in past tense forms of the verb break. 24 Figure 9 displays the results. 377/378 =100%

452/452 =100%

1018/1019 =100% 12 1/122=99% 100% IV1/},1=~1~0;Oo/t~o==:::~t:===:::::::::;r4~8~/4rs5~2=:9~9;~o: .....:".:/:;, 90% /?",0'J"~Y" 1489/1533 20/21=95% 25/27=93% 80% /4155/4680=89% =97% 4/4=100%

2199/2199 =100%

t

j

70%

34/59=68%

i2 -Cl 60% <+-<

o

.., 50% ~ E 40%

8

il 30% 20% 10% 0%

j --=--.

J 'C"//other (non-attributive) uses ,

HCME 1150-1500

Figure 9.

431/1224=35%

---=--smg1e unmo d'fi I le d attn'b' utlve uses -.Lh 'b' -=-ot er attn utlve uses i

EEPF + EPD ECF + EPD NCF + EPD 1518-1700 1701-1780 1781-1903

BNC wridom 1 1960-1993

The distribution of disyllabic variants of the past participle of break compared to monosyllabic variants in a series of prose corpora (HC ME section, EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD and BNC wridom 1)

94

Analysis ofattributive structures

Two out of the three curves in this diagram show a decline of the disyllabic variant broken until the eighteenth century, followed by a renewed rise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Significantly, the curves in which the monosyllabic variant can find a foothold are those which do not belong to the single unmodified attributive category, i.e. those where the threat of a stress clash is minimal. This tendency is most obvious among the non-attributive uses, of which one third are already suffixless before 1500. The loss of the suffix proceeds in EModE and in the eighteenth century reaches two thirds of the non-attributive uses. In the nineteenth century, the trend is almost completely reversed and peters out in the late twentieth century.25 These results support Stein's (2000) claim to the effect that language change can describe a V-turn: an evolution that has manifested a certain trend for some time may become reversed and change in the opposite direction in a later period. This will not remain the only example of this type. Further instances will be seen in sections 4.4.3, 4.4.5, 5.3.1, and 5.3.2. Figure 9 does not differentiate between dramatic and non-dramatic works. If these genres are contrasted, the language of the dramatic works clearly leads the way in the replacement of broken by broke. For the three chronological corpus sections 1518 to 1700, 1701 to 1780 and 1781 to 1903 it yields proportions of 35, 16 and 73 percent for the disyllabic variant, which correspond to 77, 48 and 89 percent in the non-dramatic works. 26 Any conclusions based on this difference can only be tentative, bearing in mind that drama does not represent authentic spoken language, but a type of written-to-be-spoken language strongly filtered by the dramatists. Nevertheless, we may infer that the spoken language of the day was more prone to give up the participial suffix, while the written literary standard underwent a stronger influence of prescriptive grammarians who incriminated the use of (what they considered) past tense forms in the place of past participles (cf. Sundby, Bj0fge, and Haugland 1991: 225-236). Whether it is due to increasing literacy and the efforts of grammar writing or to a functionally motivated need to formally distinguish past tense forms from past participles (cf. the 'one meaning - one form' principle) has to remain an open question. However, the data unequivocally show that the trend towards the merger of the non-attributive participial form with the past tense form was reversed in favour of an identity of non-attributive with attributive forms. The same trend, albeit to a lesser extent, can be observed for the complex attributive structures, which are initially very rare but increase in frequency on the way to PDE. Examples include prefixed forms like unbroken tone or unbroken passage, compounded forms like half-broken heart, sighbroken dittie and heart-broke smart, adverbially premodified forms like his

Mana- and disyllabic variants afpast participles

95

already broken armour and best-broke greyhounds and multiword attributive structures like broken & corrupted soles and so broken an estate, categories which are familiar from the study of drunk and drunken in the preceding section. In addition, other attributive uses involve participles with a postposed particle of the type illustrated in (28a-b). (28) a. ... nor do I know that in his scared and broken-down state he could have done much better than he now proposed. (Samuel Butler: The Way ofAll Flesh, 1903; NCF) b. There was a time to be sure - we had our day once, that nobody can deny - but now we are as useless as so many broke up mortars, or spiked cannon - ... (Charles Dibdin: The Chelsea Pensioner, 1779; EPD) While in predicative position these verb plus particle groups have their main phrasal stress on the particles (cf. his state is broken down, the mortars are broken up), in attributive position, the Stress Shift Rule applies as in (29) to move the stress across to the participle, leaving the particle unstressed as a buffer syllable. (29) x

x x

x x x x [broke up mortars]

x

SSR ~

x x

x x x x [broke up mortars]

Thus, all subtypes of complex attributive structures are rhythmically uncritical by virtue of their multisyllabicity, enabling them to adapt to their rhythmic contexts. As a consequence, the syllabic -en-suffix is dispensable in most instances of this category. The corpus data bear this out to a limited extent,27 Among the relatively few examples in each subperiod, between 0 and 4 instances actually use the monosyllabic variant broke. In the absence of more ample data, we thus have to conclude that rhythmic alternation is to a large extent outweighed by a conventional use of broken in all kinds of attributive contexts, which is suggestive of a relatively high degree of grammatical fixation. Single unmodified attributive uses have never given up the syllabic suffix even in the phase when non-attributive uses have no more than 16 percent of broken in the written-to-be-spoken register. There are only two exceptions to this rule, wide apart in time, which are quoted below as (30a-b).

96

Analysis ofattributive structures

(30) a. ... and let sir Gozlin (because he has bin in the low Countries) swear gotz Sacrament, and driue e'm awtry with broke Dutch. (Thomas Dekker: West-ward Hoe, 1604; EPD) b. I'm just a broke student trying to earn some money over the summer, and I don't think I'm all that articulate. (Quinn Wilder: One Shining Summer, 1993; BNC) In the first instance, attributive broke is one among a number of devices used on purpose to stigmatize a character as a nonstandard speaker confusing past tense and past participle forms. The second instance is a more interesting example from present-day colloquial English. The meaning 'bankrupt, penniless' has long been one of the senses of the participles: the OED 2 (1994: s.v. broke and broken) quotes examples from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Throughout our database, instances carrying this meaning are distributed among suffixed and suffixless participles in a way that is fully in line with their syntactic function and the rhythmic requirements contiguous upon it. The examples in (31 a-b) from eighteenthcentury drama exemplify this. (31) a. Your Father laid ont all his ready Money to buy the Regiment if there should come a Peace - 'tis a young one: He'll be broke, and halfPtry will not maintain us - ... (Charles Shadwell: The Humours ofthe Army, 1713; EPD) b. In short, my House is haunted by all the underling Players, broken Booksellers, halfvoic 'd Singing-Masters, and disabled Dancing-Masters in Town. (John Gay: Three Hours after Marriage, 1711; EPD) In the twentieth century, as mentioned above, the form broke 'bankrupt' perpetuates the suffixless participle, but is largely restricted to predicative use, just as the form broke has always been (cf. OED 2 1994: s.v. broke). The "broke student" speaking in example (30b) is obviously not able to use the form broken, which does not cover the intended meaning, and therefore has to produce an unrhythmic structure. None of the total of 2674 occurrences of broken in the fictional prose section of the BNC unambiguously exemplifies the meaning 'bankrupt', which suggests that broken is hardly available in this sense in the late twentieth century. In contrast, as many as 32 out of the 44 non-attributive occurrences of broke have this sense. This indicates that the semantic split observable in PDE between broke and broken may ultimately be due to the different syntactic positions habitually occupied by the two variants and the effect of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation upon them. Roughly speaking, the meaning 'bankrupt' was

Mono- and disyllabic variants ofpast participles

97

restricted to the form broke because bankruptcy is usually a temporary state that is therefore predicated of a person, and broke was for a while the majority option in the rhythmically uncritical predicative position. In comparison to earlier stages, the present-day situation offers the advantage of having the meaning of 'bankrupt' restricted to a single form, but entails the inconvenience of rhythmic inflexibility, thus giving rise to awkward structures like the one in (30b). In conclusion, though the participle of break has preserved its suffix in standard PDE, there was a period in which the suffix was variably present, and in this phase its distribution conformed to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. In non-attributive and complex attributive structures, rhythmic alternation was secured by other means and thus, the participle assimilated to the past tense form broke. The reversal of this functionally motivated tendency has been ascribed to the influence of prescriptive grammar, enforcing the discriminability of past tense and past participle forms. The remnants of the rhythmic distribution can be seen in the semantically specialized typically predicative form broke, which however leads to rhythmic inconvenience when applied attributively. Other occurrences of broke in late twentieth century prose are usually indicative of nonstandard speech, where the rhythmically motivated distribution is apparently still in effect (cf. example (32)) and would provide a worthwhile topic for further research. (32)

Oh, yer clumsy elephant, El/a, yer sittin' on top ofme, an' yer 've broke the cups an' saucers. (Mary Jane Staples: Sergeant Joe, 1992; BNC)

4.4.3.

Struck vs. stricken from ME to PDE

The last originally strong verb to be analyzed for effects of rhythmic alternation on the presence or absence of its -en-suffix is the verb strike. In PDE, the usage varies between struck and stricken: Quirk et al. (1985: 112) discern a semantic distinction between struck as the past participle in literal use and stricken as the adjectival form competing with struck in figurative uses (e.g. struck/stricken by terror). The OED 2 (1994: s.v. strike) also gives struck as the normal participial form, but names stricken as an archaic form, which is also common in American (especially legal) usage. In contrast, Fijn van Draat (19l2a: 32) considers rhythm to be the main determinant in the selection of the variants. These contradictory claims will now be subjected to an empirical test, extending the perspective to the historical context of the phenomenon.

98

Analysis ofattributive structures

For this purpose, all spellings of the past participle of strike were retrieved from the large diachronic corpus of written English already familiar from the preceding analyses. Since variation in the stem vowel (which can be u or 0 in the short form and i, u, 0 or even e in the long form) is not of the same interest as the length of the variants in terms of number of syllables, the following data in figure 10 distinguish only between mono- and disyllabic variants. Furthermore, as before, single unmodified attributive uses, other more complex attributive uses and non-attributive uses are kept separate. As the absolute figures included in the diagram show, there is a single instance ofa participle in the corpus of ME, quoted as (33).

(33)

Weche weight makyth a pynt ofwhete, and ii pyntys makith i quarte, ii quartis makith a pote!!, and ii potellys makith i galon, and viii galons makith a busshell; and to be strekyn with a rased stryke, and neyther hepe nor cantell etc. (Reynes: The Commonplace Book; HC ME IV)

The form strekyn is part of a passive predicate here and is reminiscent of the obligatory status of the -en-suffix in OE. Soon after the end of the ME period, the suffix however becomes the minority option in non-attributive uses, as can be seen in figure 10. To stick with the rhythmically uncritical non-attributive uses for a while, figure 10 shows that the disyllabic variant rapidly falls out of use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a development that is once more spearheaded by the written-to-be-spoken genre for the period from 1518 to 1700: in the EPD corpus, the share of struck is already reduced to 9 percent, whereas the non-dramatic texts still use it in 56 percent of the cases. In the eighteenth century, both genres hardly differ any more (3 percent in the ECF corpus and 4 percent in the corresponding section of the EPD corpus), but in the nineteenth century, the dramatic genre is more reluctant to reintroduce the full form (11 percent in the NCF corpus as opposed to 6 percent in the EPD corpus).28 Once again, the written literary standard appears to be more immediately exposed to the influence of prescriptive grammarians criticizing the use of apparent past tense forms in the place of past participles (cf. Sundby, Bj0rge, and Haugland 1991: 225-236). All in all, the reintroduction progresses only slowly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is mainly accounted for by the massive increase of compounded participles of the type awe-stricken, conscience-stricken, horrorstricken, panic-stricken, poverty-stricken, terror-stricken, etc. In the BNC data, for instance, 54 out of the 110 non-attributive occurrences of stricken belong to this type. The short variant struck is likewise used in compounds, awe-struck, horror-struck and thunderstruck being among the most fre-

Mono- and disyllabic variants ofpast participles

99

quent exponents. However, these compounds make up only 15 out of the 522 non-attributive uses of struck in the BNC data. Since all compounds of this type employ stricken (and, more rarely, struck) in a figurative sense, Quirk et a1.'s (1985: 112) hunch as to the semantic difference between the variants is confirmed as far as non-attributive uses are concerned, although the reason why stricken, not struck, should be selected for this purpose remains in the dark. 100% 90% i::

~

.:: ~ '+-< '" 0

80% 60%

Q)

50% 40%

.,

30% 20%

0..

-\

70%

....~ c::: Q) u ....

1/1=100%

110/632=17%

10% I

0%

--I

HC ME EEPF + EPD ECF + EPD NCF + EPD 1150-1500 1518-1700 1701-1780 1781-1903

--e- single unmodified attributive uses ~ other

BNC wridom 1 1960-1993

attributive uses

··other (non-attributive) uses

Figure 10. The distribution of disyllabic variants of the past participle of strike compared to monosyllabic variants in a series of prose corpora (HC ME section, EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD and BNC wridom 1)

Complex attributive structures do not yield any deeper insights into this question either. The examples assembled in this category are almost exclusively constituted by compounded forms; prefixed forms of struck and stricken do not occur at all, and adverbially modified and coordinated forms are extremely rare. Under these conditions the emergence of other attributive structures in figure 10 directly translates into a substantial rise of compounds of exactly the same kind as those occurring in predicative position. In the BNC, of the 47 instances of stricken in this category, 45 are of the compounded type, and of the 20 instances of struck another 18 are compounded, the remaining four being evenly divided between adverbial premodification and coordinated attributive structures. Compare examples (34a-b).

100

Analysis ofattributive structures

(34)

a. He reminded Dexter ofa panic-stricken mole who had suddenly found himselftrapped outside his burrow. (Trevor Barnes: Taped, 1993; BNC) b. Corbett was about to investigate further when he heard Ranulf's panic-struck voice. (P.C. Doherty: Crown in Darkness, 1991; BNC)

The general diachronic development of the complex attributive uses mirrors that of the non-attributive uses, including the minimum frequency of stricken reached in the eighteenth century and its renewed rise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The difference between the two curves in figure 10 is, however, clear and constant and is therefore in need of an explanation. 29 As examples (34a-b) illustrate, due to the workings of the Stress Shift Rule, neither of the two possibilities gives rise to an intolerable stress clash; thus, the use of the monosyllabic variant would be fully licensed in these attributive contexts. Possibly, the suffixed form stricken has a more adjectival ring to it, inherited from its frequent occurrence in attributive position, and is therefore preferred in compounds of this type. Furthermore, stricken with its unstressed second syllable can contribute to a perfectly alternating rhythm if combined with di- or plurisyllabic nouns with non-final stress (e.g. panic-stricken in example (34a) and most of the other compounds except awe-stricken and a few less frequent monosyllables combined with stricken). A final avenue for explaining the rarity of struck in this relatively recent type of compound may be the fact that the form had been discredited as a participial use by the prescriptive currents in eighteenth-century grammar writing and was therefore avoided in newly formed words. Eventually, whatever the motivation may have been, the regularization of stricken as an attributive form was obviously grammatically fixed to a moderate degree, thus limiting the monocausal account for the distribution in terms of rhythmic considerations. If multiword attributive structures yield a somewhat blurred picture, the behaviour of single unmodified attributes is all the more clear. The relevant curve in figure 10 does follow the down-and-up movement of the two other curves, but on a constantly higher level (neglecting the minor crossover with other attributive uses in the statistically insufficient data for EModE).30 The remarkable resistance of the disyllabic variant stricken to the tendency, widespread in the more numerous other contexts, to be replaced by monosyllabic struck argues strongly in favour of the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. It has a conservative effect perpetuating the use of stricken while its overall frequency declines, and leads to a faster reintroduction as soon as the overall frequency rises again. The cause for the marked affinity between simple attributive position and the

Mono- and disyllabic variants ofpast participles

101

suffixed variant stricken is unquestionably the fact that its monosyllabic counterpart struck would on its own offer no way of neutralizing the threatening stress clash. As a result, the avoidance of stress clashes has been shown to be a powerful determinant in the distribution of the mono- and disyllabic variants of the past participle of strike. Wherever there is no way of avoiding a direct confrontation with a noun, the suffixed form stricken is chosen. Wherever stress shift can prevent a succession of two stressed syllables or where no noun follows, the use of the suffixless form struck is licensed and exploited to a degree dependent on extra-phonological factors. Comparing the datasets in figures 8, 9 and 10, the case of struck/stricken turns out to be intermediate between the cases of drunk/drunken and broke/broken: while the participle of drink has given up the suffixed form in non-attributive uses, that of break has preserved it in all functions to the present day. The participle of strike began to dispense with its suffix later than that of drink and has not seen the development through to the end. The disyllabic form is nowadays not restricted to attributive uses but relatively uncommon in others. Beyond the attributive-predicative divide, all three participles show a significant sensitivity to the special status of multiword attributive structures. Since the rhythmic structure of these is for various reasons less precarious than that of noun phrases involving a single attribute, the suffixless participles of all three verbs are rhythmically less problematic and used clearly more often, thus providing further evidence for the efficiency of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation.

4.4.4.

Knit vs. knitted from ME to PDE

Variation in past participle forms also extends to the class of weak verbs, despite the fact that the use of the dental suffix has since ME times been the dominant pattern in the regular formation of past tense and past participle forms. For one thing, the -ed-suffix can be contracted if the verb stem itself ends in an alveolar stop. This has happened to the two verbs that will be investigated in this and the next section: both knit and light possess a disyllabic variant involving the -ed-suffix, which is syllabic since it follows an alveolar stop, and a monosyllabic variant, in which the suffix loses its syllabicity, becomes fused with the stem-final stop and is therefore indistinguishable from the latter. For another, the QED 2 (1994: s.v. knit (v.), light (v. 2) and litten (ppl.a.)) lists a few attestations of forms resuffixed with the -en-suffix by analogy with the strong verbs. The form knitten was thus used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in the twentieth century occurs in dialectal or archaic usage (QED 2 1994: s.v. knit). The

102

Analysis ofattributive structures

form litten (including its compounds moon-litten and star-litten) is only attested in the second half of the nineteenth century and is described by the OED 2 (1994: s.v. litten) as a "pseudo-archaic" past participle of light (cf. also Fijn van Draat 1912a: 38, who attributes the form to E.A. Poe). Neither knitten nor litten occur in the corpora that are at the basis of the following analyses and thus are left out of consideration, although a study of their distribution would be of considerable interest in the present context. Turning first to the verb knit, standard references like the OED 2 (1994: s.v. knit) and Quirk et al. (1985: 111) restrict themselves to giving knitted as the regular past participle form and adducing knit as a contracted variant. No hint as to their synchronic or diachronic distribution is given. Bolinger (1965b: 147), for one, assumes that the variants are at least partly selected for rhythmic reasons. This hypothesis will be pursued in a study of a large diachronic database encompassing, as in the preceding studies, the ME section of the Helsinki Corpus, the three fictional prose corpora covering the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the dramatic prose corpus for the same periods and the fictional prose section of the BNC. The categories of single unmodified and complex attributive uses and non-attributive uses are likewise familiar and do not require any more exemplification. Figure 11 makes the results of the analysis visible. 100%

-I

90% ~ 80%

~

------=~~~---59/63=94o/q

--e-single unmodified attributive uses --t.I- other

62/67=93%

I

attributive uses

35/39= 90

other (non-attributive) uses

39/50=78%

i

to I

'

10% 0%

+-----.----{M'---.,----------,----------.----

HCME 1150-1500

EEPF + EPD 1518-1700

ECF + EPD 1701-1780

NCF +EPD 1781-1903

BNC wridom 1 1960-1993

Figure II. The distribution of disyllabic variants of the past participle of knit compared to monosyllabic variants in a series of prose corpora (HC ME section, EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD and BNC wridom I)

Mono- and disyllabic variants ofpast participles

103

Concentrating on the general picture first, the data allow no unambiguous conclusions as to the chronology of the two variants. While the EModE data seem to indicate a complete absence of the disyllabic form knitted, suggesting that the addition of -ed is a later resuffixation of the contracted form, the earlier ME corpus already features the form in three out of its ten occurrences. Thus, we can provide no conclusive answer to the question of whether the disyllabic variant knitted represents a secondary regularization of a formerly contracted form knit or whether knitted has held its ground all through OE, ME and EModE, where it is not visible on account of the limitations of our corpus. This issue is, however, only subordinate to the question of what factors play a role in the massive rise of the disyllabic form that is clearly observable from LModE onwards. The picture that emerges in figure 11 deviates in an intriguing way from the expectations that have arisen on the basis of the preceding analyses. For a start, the increase in single unmodified attributive instances of knitted is enormous between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it fails to surprise since the presence of the unstressed additional suffix offers a highly welcome solution to the constant threat of stress clashes between the attributive participle and the typically initially stressed nouns. Thus, unrhythmic collocations like knit nightcap, knit gloves and knit brows, common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, almost belong to the past by the turn of the eighteenth century. The fact that single attributes are the first to accept the disyllabic variant testifies to the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation as an accelerator of morphological changes resulting in a greater rhythmic well-formedness of the structures concerned. 31 A development unaccounted for by rhythmic considerations is the similarly rapid rise of the disyllabic form outside of attributive uses a century later. The difference between single attributive uses and non-attributive uses is statistically highly significant for the eighteenth century, only moderately so for the nineteenth century and statistically insufficient for the late twentieth century.32 The general trend towards the disyllabic form is all the more astonishing since some eighteenth-century grammarians reportedly criticized the redundant resuffixation of participles like knit (cf. Sundby, Bj0rge, and Haugland 1991: 304-313). Like many other idiosyncratic developments in the domain of verbs, the relatively sudden establishment of knitted across (single) attributive and non-attributive contexts cannot be explained in the present framework (and it is, by the way, doubtful whether developments in such "messy categories" (Lass 1994: 91) can be fully explained at all). In the twentieth century, the development however results in an almost unexceptional dominance of the disyllabic form in

104

Analysis ofattributive structures

these contexts, which is an advantageous state of affairs as far as the 'one meaning - one form' principle is concerned. The third type of context represented in figure 11, the more complex attributes, are, however, far from conforming to this ideal. In sharp contrast to the two other categories, these do not simply switch over to the disyllabic variant. Rather, the percentage of knitted rises constantly but very slowly and the form is still in the minority as late as the end of the twentieth century. As a result, complex attributive structures are now almost the only place in the sentence where the monosyllabic variant is still to be found. Some illustrative examples are given in (35a-e). (35) a. Victoria, bored, pulled up her smock and tucked down her white LOck-knit knickers to make sure her navel was still there. (Angela Carter: The Magic Toyshop, 1993; BNC) b. The seeds ofhilarity springfrom within me. I run after this closeknit panic, laughing. (Eroica Mildmay: Lucker and Tiffany Pay out, 1993; BNC) c. We've always been a rather LOosely-knitjamily, and I've never seen him. (Ellis Peters: City ofGold and Shadows, 1989; BNC) From a rhythmic standpoint, the conservatism of these compounded or adverbially premodified attributive structures is advantageous since the participle is destressed and the use of its monosyllabic variant is appropriate to avoid a sequence of two or more unstressed syllables. What is more, unlike the case of struck and stricken, attributive compounds do not seem to be adapting their selection of the participial form to the usage in the simple attributive category.33 Instead, despite the overwhelming trend not only in simple attributive structures but also in non-attributive positions, multiword attributes preserve the outgoing variant to a large extent. The crucial asset of knit is - in all probability - the fact that it is rhythmically superior in these contexts. Presumably, the relative frequency of combinations like tight(ly)-knit, close(ly)-knit, loose(ly)-knit, etc. facilitates their conservative behaviour. Yet, compounds formed with knit or knitted are an open-ended class and far from being lexicalized. This finding disagrees with a division of work between monosyllabic participles in non-attributive functions and disyllabic participles in attributive uses (whether simple or complex) which was partly realized in the cases of drunk/drunken, broke/broken and struck/stricken. The distribution of knit and knitted between simple and complex attributive constructions in contrast shows only moderate signs of a grammatical fixation (accounting for 38 percent of the complex cases in the latest subperiod investigated). Rather, it is productively guided by the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation,

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which also had an important impact on the differential rates of change at which the incoming form knitted has established itself in different syntactic contexts. While the data shown in figure 11 are confined to British English, these conclusions are reinforced by the situation in American English analyzed in Schliiter (to appear): the relative frequency of knitted varies systematically in accordance with rhythmic constellations, but its overall frequency remains below that reached by present-day British English.

4.4.5.

Lit vs. lighted from ME to PDE

The past participle variants of the verb light present an instructive case of morphological variation that has so far hardly received any attention in the literature. The scanty remarks on the subject that can be found are often no more than guesswork and need to be disentangled and enriched by empirical data. For our purposes, three spelling variants representing two different pronunciations have to be taken into consideration. The regularly suffixed form of the weak verb is lighted, pronounced with a diphthong and syllabic suffix. The diphthongal realization developed regularly out of the early ME pronunciation Ihyt/ with a short hi and a strong fricative, which by late ME had turned into a lengthened vowel followed by a weak fricative. The vowel subsequently underwent the Great Vowel Shift, becoming first lell and then laIl (cf. Skeat 1894: xxv; cf. also Vachek 1964: 12). In PDE, the form alternates with a monosyllabic variant lit, whose vowel is a short monophthong and whose participial suffix has been contracted with the stem-final stop. What is more, in older texts, a spelling light is also attested as a past tense and past participle form: the OED 2 (1994: s.v.light (pp1.a.)) lists relevant quotations from works dated 1495-1632. According to Sundby, Bj0rge, and Haugland (1991: 309), this variant is no more than an allograph of the form lit and was also realized with a short!I/. The monophthong in both lit and light indicates that these forms must have been shortened prior to the Great Vowel Shift since they preserve the original vowel quality. A contraction posterior to the Great Vowel Shift would have produced a form identical to the infinitive. Finally, as mentioned at the beginning of section 4.4.4, in the nineteenth century, the additional disyllabic form litten was created by means of resuffixation. This variant does, however, not occur in the database and can therefore be neglected. A question distinct from that of the origin of the short and long variants is the diachronic distribution of the two. Bauer (1997: 553) is the only source in which an opinion on the question can be found: "although lighted is historically older than lit, in many varieties of English lit now appears to be being replaced again by lighted." This statement suggests that lit is a

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Analysis ofattributive structures

relative newcomer that has become general usage and has only recently come under renewed pressure from its disyllabic competitor. As the following diachronic study will reveal, this is a misrepresentation of reality. In a similar vein, Biber et al. (1999: 396) allege that the historical trend in the choice between regular and irregular verb forms, expressly including lit and lighted, is towards more regularity. More specifically, Biber et al. (1999: 396-397) propose the undifferentiated but corpus-based finding that the irregular form lit is generally preferred to the form lighted. In British news texts, for instance, they find lit in over 75 percent of the cases. However, according to Biber et aI., American news texts feature the irregular form in only 15 to 50 percent. This supports their conclusion (generalized across several variant participles) that American English is more advanced in the alleged trend towards regularization. Prescriptive grammarians of the eighteenth century of course had something to say about the participial variants. In this case, the monosyllables lit and light attracted their criticism because they were considered to be no proper participial forms (cf. Sundby, Bj0rge, and Haugland 1991: 309; see for instance the judgement in Devis 1775: 47). If their efforts had set the trend for the following centuries, the resultant evolution would have been one towards increasing regularization, as claimed by Biber et al. (1999: 396). The data that will be presented however tell a different story. The following study traces the distribution of the participial variants through a set of prose corpora covering the sixteenth to twentieth centuries (EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD, BNC wridom 1), complemented by the more diverse types of written English included in the ME section of the Helsinki Corpus. The focus of the study is again on the rhythmic conditioning ofthe alternation between lit/light and lighted. While Quirk et al. (1985: 113) and Bailey (1987: 150-151) do mention lighted as a particular adjectival or attributive form, they do not propose an account for this. The discussion of our corpus data will test the hypothesis, gleaned from Fijn van Draat (1912a: 37-38) and Bolinger (1965b: 147), that the affinity of lighted with the attributive position is rhythmically conditioned. The analysis promises to be particularly instructive since the participles are frequently prefixed (36a), compounded (36b) or premodified by adverbs (36c). One example of each subtype has been extracted from the NCF corpus to illustrate the range of possibilities. (36) a. ... candles were not allowed to be carried about, and the teacher who forsook the refectory, had only the unlit hall, school-room, or bed-room; as a refuge. (Charlotte Bronte: Villette, 1853; NCF) b. ... he ushered Robert Audley into the fire-lit library, which seemed desolate by reason ofthe baronet's easy chair standing

Mana- and disyllabic variants afpast participles

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empty on the broad hearth-rug. (Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Lady Audley's Secret, [year unknown]; NCF) c. '" all formed in file, two and two, and in that order descended the stairs and entered the cold and dimly lit school-room: ... (Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre, 1847; NCF) It is no coincidence that examples involving the monosyllable lit were chosen. They have recently begun to represent the majority of complex attributes, as will be seen immediately. In this respect, Bailey (1987: 150151) conjectures that lit can appear as an attributive form when used in figurative senses. That attributive lit is restricted to figurative senses can be rejected on the basis of examples (36a-e) and there is no lack of further counterevidence. A better explanation is given by Fijn van Draat (1912a: 38; cf. also Bolinger 1965b: 147), who surmises that the acceptability of lit in multiword attributive structures depends on the rhythmic changes brought about by the addition of further attributive materia1. 34 The processes have already been expounded in section 4.3; the resulting rhythmic constellations are sketched out in the stress marks in examples (36a-e). Figure 12 displays the diachronic evolution of the three categories of syntactic uses under consideration. 35

100% 90%

-S- 19/19 -S- 42/42 =100% =100%

348/353=99%

-6-2/2=100%

80% "l::l

.:?:

...s::

70%

~ 60%

'+-< 0

Q)

50%

E Q)

40%

Q)

30%

eo o:l u ....

0.

-S-single unmodified attributive uses -6-other attributive uses ""(Y'M,,[)thl~r (non-attributive) uses

20% 10%

33/683=5% I

0% +---;;i---,------r----,-----..,-----12/548=2% HCME EEPF + EPD ECF + EPD NCF + EPD BNC wridom 1150-1500 1518-1700 1701-1780 1781-1903 1 1960-1993

Figure 12. The distribution of disyllabic variants of the past participle of light compared to monosyllabic variants in a series of prose corpora (HC ME section, EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD and BNC wridom 1)

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Analysis ofattributive structures

At the outset, a caveat has to be put in concerning the ME data. The moderate size of the Helsinki Corpus leads to a complete absence of attributive examples, and the two occurrences appearing in passive predicates are by no means statistically satisfactory.3 The data point in the earliest subperiod is only included to indicate that a monosyllabic, contracted form did already occur in ME. Three instances of lihte in past tense uses (opposed to one instance of lihtede) corroborate this finding, but are not included in this figure. In addition, it should be noted that all of these examples stem from the earliest subperiod of the ME section in the Helsinki Corpus (1150 to 1250). These data provide no means of knowing what happened in the almost three centuries in between this and the onset of the EEPF corpus. The overall development in the five centuries for which sufficient data are at hand is a replacement of lighted by lit. Contrary to the claims made in the literature, we are thus not witnessing a process of regularization, but one of irregularization. In the EModE period, the share of lighted was already very high. Moreover, in the eighteenth century, the form lit had almost disappeared: only 10 instances remain in a total of 13 8 occurrences. Of these, 6 come from the non-dramatic subcorpus and 4 from the dramatic subcorpus. This suggests that the incriminations of prescriptive grammarians may have had a short-lived success in the century of their greatest influence, but as soon as the nineteenth century the irregularization sets in. As has been pointed out, the form lit can hardly be a new creation of the nineteenth century. It must have fed on some source that perpetuated the ancient monosyllabic form that had escaped diphthongization. This source may have been the small margin of monosyllabic variants maintained all through the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it may also have been some other, larger reservoir, for example in the spoken language. 3? A look at the data for the syntactically and rhythmically different uses will prove revealing. In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the monosyllabic variants never appear in attributive uses of either type, the more complex attributive structures being extremely rare anyway. A comparison of single unmodified attributive uses with non-attributive uses yields significant results from the eighteenth century onwards (which is when the attributives become sufficiently frequent).38 Thus, disyllabic lighted has always been clearly favoured in rhythmically critical contexts preceding nouns. The syllabic suffix is evidently employed as a rhythmic buffer. As a consequence, lighted is maintained in virtually 100 percent of the single attributive uses all through the nineteenth century, when it begins to decline in non-attributive uses, and is only reluctantly abandoned in 29 per-

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cent of the single attributes in the late twentieth century, when it has already fallen into obsolescence in non-attributive contexts. Even more informative is the situation in the more complex attributive uses. The frequency of these structures, illustrated in examples (36a-e), soars immensely from a single instance in the eighteenth century to as many as 353 instances in the nineteenth century, only to climb further to 548 in the comparatively small fictional part of the BNC. What is more, these multiword attributives exhibit an extraordinary instantaneous affinity with the monosyllabic variant lit that by far outstrips the changeover not only in the single attributive uses but also in the non-attributive cases.3 9 If these new structures anticipate the rise of lit, they are licensed to do so by their rhythmic shape, and in the course of the twentieth century, a distribution develops that is wholly in accordance with rhythmic requirements. Lighted is only preserved where its syllabic suffix is required as a stress clash buffer. In all other cases, lit prevails. That this distribution is not congealed into a grammatical rule prescribing the use of lighted in attributive functions, but productively implemented on the basis of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is betrayed by some suggestive observations. First, if lighted were the obligatory attributive form (as is the case with drunken, broken and stricken to various degrees), it would have to occur in complex attributive functions as well. Obviously, the reverse is the case. Second, among the 146 nouns following single unmodified uses in the ENC, 14 have noninitial stress. Of these, 8 select the monosyllable lit against the general trend in this category, but in accordance with rhythmic preferences. Thus, 19 percent of the nouns collocating with lit are noninitially stressed, but only 6 percent of those collocating with lighted. Third, though lighted is very infrequent in all other uses, sporadic instances occur across all syntactic categories. In sum, there is ample evidence in favour of the impact of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation on the selection of the participial variants in synchrony and diachrony. In both attributive and predicative functions, users of PDE have a real choice between lit and lighted and in the majority of cases select the variant that is appropriate to secure rhythmic alternation. In earlier stages of English, the same has been done to the extent that limitations in the availability of the monosyllabic variant permitted. Furthermore, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has manifested its influence on language change insofar as it has promoted the rise of the monosyllabic variant in multiword attributive structures and in non-attributive functions, but retarded the loss of the disyllabic variant where it constituted the unique attribute. One question has so far remained unanswered, that is, how the variants are distributed in American English, which is known to tend to greater

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Analysis ofattributive structures

regularity in its grammar (cf. Kovecses 2000: 189). Data analyzed and described in more detail in Schltiter (to appear) show that the latter variety lags behind British English in the establishment of lit by 20 to 30 percent across all syntactic uses. The distribution of lit and lighted in American English represents a state that the British variety left behind a number of decades earlier. Thus, the difference between the two national varieties turns out, contra Biber et at. (1999: 396-397), not to result from an advantage of American English over British English in a general move towards more regular verbal morphology, but from American English lagging behind British English in a centuries-old tendency to generalize the use of the irregular form.

4.4.6.

Summary

The five pairs of mono- and disyllabic participial variants treated in the present section 4.4 were selected to illustrate some of the variety observable in the verbal morphology of earlier stages of English as well as PDE. Drunk/drunken, broke/broken and struck/stricken exemplify some disparate developments within the class of strong verbs: the first has long since given up its old participial suffix in non-attributive functions, the second has undergone a period of vacillation but has converged again on the ubiquitous presence of the participial suffix in the PDE standard, and the third is still subject to variation. In the domain of weak verbs, knit/knitted and lit/lighted have come under scrutiny, both having a contracted monosyllabic form and a disyllabic form with a regular, syllabic suffix. The directions of the development however differ maximally: while disyllabic knitted is progressively establishing itself, monosyllabic lit seems to be gaining the upper hand. An additional criterion for the selection of these five participles was their frequent premodification by prefixes and adverbs and their occurrence in compounds, which have turned out to be very instructive. Given the multiplicity of past participle variants, the number of studies might have been greatly increased. Actually, in a set of pilot studies, the pairs stole/stolen, forbidlforbidden and shrunk/shrunken have revealed patterns that resemble that for broke/broken in the former two cases and that for struck/stricken in the latter: single attributive occurrences are more likely to be suffixed and non-attributive ones to be suffixless, but attributive structures involving more than the participles themselves are rare. Contradictory though the individual evolutions may be, they reveal a common foundation which is a striving for rhythmic alternation wherever other factors permit. In some cases, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has ended up becoming the major determinant of the distribution or has

Mono- and disyllabic variants ofpast participles

III

assumed this role for a limited interval. What is more, reviewing figures 8 to 12, we find that this dominance has partially and temporarily led to a more or less complete grammatical split: the tendency for disyllabic forms to occur in attributive position preceding initially stressed nouns has congealed into a rule of the shape 'use the disyllabic variant in all attributive uses.' The result of such a fixation is that the disyllabic variants are employed attributively irrespective of whether the threatening stress clash is rendered innocuous on account of the stress shifts regularly taking place in complex attributive structures. In the data presented in this section, we are thus witnessing a continual competition between the productive implementation of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation through the rhythmically motivated choice between two freely available variants, and the reinterpretation of the prevailing distributional tendency, leading to the formation of a new grammatical rule. The relative weights of both factors vary from verb to verb and from one period to another. Both rhythmic well-formedness and rule generalization are well-motivated preferences and both lead to a large overlap in the distribution of mono- and disyllabic participial variants. They can, however, be disentangled by looking at complex attributive uses where the two can be predicted to result in different distributions. In naturalistic data, one can of course hardly expect an exceptionless regularity, but allowing for a narrow margin of variation, a high degree of grammatical specialization has been shown for drunken from EModE to nineteenth-century English (though the fixation has been reversed in the late twentieth century), for broken throughout the subperiods investigated (with negligible restrictions in the EModE and LModE corpora), and to a considerably more limited extent for stricken between the eighteenth century and the late twentieth century. For knitted we have only witnessed the initial stages of its generalization to multiword attributive structures, and attributive lighted, finally, has never outnumbered lit in the data investigated ever since the massive rise of complex attributive structures in the nineteenth century. The grammatical fixation of an optional syllabic participial suffix as a compulsory element in attributive uses is only the second step, taken by just some verbs and to differing degrees of perfection. All verbs under consideration have, however, completed the first step, which consists in the reanalysis of a grammatically motivated morpheme as a stress clash buffer. Crucially, this change in function goes hand in hand with a change in distribution, which is the only way we can find evidence of a functional change, at least for earlier forms of a language. Thus, while at the outset all participles of strong verbs carried the -en-suffix, it was then lost in some or all cases in which its new buffer function was irrelevant, but preserved

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Analysis ofattributive structures

where where it was usefu1. 40 As a consequence, for all participles under investigation, there has been or still is a situation in which simple prenominal uses exhibit a higher proportion of disyllabic forms than other uses. In conclusion, the evolution of past participles occurring in a monosyllabic and a disyllabic form has provided evidence for two pathways of linguistic change, both of them massively influenced by the tendency to avoid sequences of stressed syllables and described by the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. In a first step, the form of participles began to vary between suffixed and unsuffixed variants, and this freedom was exploited for rhythmic purposes. In a second step, for some of the participle pairs concerned, the rhythmically motivated distribution was cast into a new grammatical rule, offering the advantage of greater generality, but the disadvantage of a reduced adaptability to rhythmic constellations. Finally, it has been shown that both processes can be only partially completed and are reversible. The situation is never straightforward in the "messy categories" (Lass 1994: 91) of verbal morphology, but the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation can contribute some insights into the motivations underlying a considerable number of processes.

4.5.

A quite vs. quite a from EModE to PDE

With the following study, we leave the domain of morphological variants for a while and turn to the syntax of attributive structures. As will be shown, the sequencing of words, which is traditionally described in purely syntactic terms, is in addition sensitive to the rhythmic preference for alternating strong and weak syllables. Consider, for a start, some multiword attributive structures in English that exhibit a non-canonical structure: the article may change places with a premodifying adjective or adverb, and certain intensifiers may occur in places that seem structurally inappropriate. Examples include the following (cf. Bolinger 1965b: 151-153; 1972: 139-145; 1980a: 56-57; 1986a: 55; Christophersen 1974; Seppanen 1978: 523-537; Allerton 1987: 15-16): (37) a. b. c. d. e. f. g.

quite a long report rather unusual a person halfan hour so pretty a girl that good a teacher too remote a place how good a lawyer

A quite vs. quite afram EMadE ta PDE

113

h. as old a man as Henry I. a good enough reason

While Christopersen and Allerton do not recognize a rhythmic aspect to these attributive structures, Bolinger considers the avoidance of dysrhythmic sequences of stressed syllables to be responsible for their existence. In the following analysis, the focus will be on attributive structures involving the adverb quite modifying an attributive adjective. What makes the structure interesting in the present context is the fact that the non-canonical structure exemplified in (37a) alternates with the canonical version in which the indefinite article precedes the adverb. With a view to establishing a rhythmic influence on this alternation, we need to differentiate between initially and noninitially stressed adjectives that can be modified by the monosyllable quite. The examples in (38) and (39) illustrate the different constellations that will come under scrutiny. (38) a. She is a quite unusual person. b. She is quite an unusual person. (39) a. ?f*It is a quite new house. b. It is quite a new house. As the stress marks indicate, with noninitially stressed adjectives like unusual in (38), neither the post-determiner use of quite (as in the (a)example) nor its pre-determiner use (as in the (b)-example) causes any problematic stress clashes. In contrast, if an initially stressed adjective follows uninverted a quite, as in (39a), a stress clash arises. By hypothesis, examples like (39a) ought to be absent or strikingly infrequent in a corpus of naturalistic language, and Bolinger (1972: 137) marks them as unacceptable. However, the variation between a quite and quite a has received considerable attention from linguists who have attempted to explain it without reference to rhythm. Their arguments are semantic in nature and will be briefly reviewed here. - For one thing, the pre-determiner use of quite appears to be more emphatic or exclamatory and can, but need not, imply surprise (cf. Bolinger 1972: 105; Allerton 1987: 25). - Second, a long tradition has distinguished the pre- and post-determiner uses of quite by their respective scopes. Accordingly, quite immediately preceding the adjective as in (38a) modifies only this, whereas quite preceding the determiner as in (3 8b) or (3 9b) has a larger scope, encompassing the whole noun phrase (cf. Bolinger 1972: 137). In the latter case, it can even be understood as a sentence modifier with a modal

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Analysis ofattributive structures

sense, meaning something like 'One can justly say that she is an unusual person/it is a new house' (cf. Stoffel 1901: 43; Borst 1902: 103; Bolinger 1972: 10 1). If Bolinger is right in claiming that (39a) is unavailable, (39b) has to unite both functions in one form. Third, not only do the different positions of quite correspond to different scopes, but to complicate things further, quite itself can have different meanings. Allerton (1987: 25-26; 2001: 186), Ungerer (1988: 292) and Paradis (1997: 17-18) distinguish between quite as a maximizer meaning 'absolutely, totally' and as a moderator meaning 'rather, somewhat'. What is more, the two meanings are claimed by Allerton to have different syntactic behaviours: the maximizer meaning preferably occurs in post-determiner position and the moderator meaning in predeterminer position. Thus, in (3 8a) quite would presumably reinforce the meaning of unusual, whereas in (38b) it would be understood as a downtoner, attenuating its meaning. In a refined attempt to paraphrase the examples in (38), we arrive at the following interpretations. (38) a.' She is an absolutely unusual person. b.' One can justly say that she is a somewhat unusual person. Fourth, these generalizations have to be taken with the due caution. Allerton (1987: 25-26) and Paradis (1997: 79-87) demonstrate that not all adjectives modified by quite are compatible with both its maximizer and its moderator meaning. Roughly, adjectives that can only have a gradable meaning (similar is a good example, but also good, funny, pretty, etc.) always trigger the moderator meaning, while adjectives whose meaning implies an extreme degree of a quality can only activate the maximizer meaning (identical is the best instance, and furthermore excellent, ridiculous, lovely, etc.). As a consequence, variation between pre- and post-determiner positions is only possible with adjectives that have both gradable and extreme senses (e.g. different, beautiful, etc.). Even so, the underlying preference of maximizer meanings for postdeterminer position and of moderator meanings for pre-determiner position makes the question-marked sentences in (40) and (41) doubtful (cf. Allerton 1987: 26; cf. also Allerton 2001: 186). (40) a. She's quite a good cook. b. (?)She's a quite good cook. (41) a. ?She's quite an excellent cook. b. She's a quite excellent cook.

A quite vs. quite a from EModE to PDE

115

All of these points help to elucidate the semantic aspects that play a role in the word order alternation under consideration. But though semantic accounts certainly have more than a grain of truth in them and are convincing when applied to a limited number of prototypical examples, a corpus of naturalistic language is bound to hold some insurmountable problems for the analyst forced to impose a set of hard and fast categories. Thus, Paradis (1997: 87) has to admit that the disambiguation of the meanings of her corpus examples according to her scheme is sometimes impossible. 41 Likewise, Bolinger (1972: 137) concludes that quite a and a quite "form an alternating pattern with so slight a difference in meaning that outside factors may decide the choice.... The outside factor is the prosody." On his account, the indefinite article intervenes between quite and an attributive adjective if the latter begins with a stressed syllable. This account however only works for the indefinite article which is liable to shift, just as in the other examples under (37). In the case of the definite article and the zero article of mass nouns and the indefinite plural, however, stress clashes have to be tolerated (cf. Bolinger 1972: 140-141). As a consequence of these complications, the following analyses will only seek to demonstrate that rhythmic alternation can, after all, influence the distribution of a quite and quite a within a margin underdetermined by the semantics or, in a more optimistic estimate, cancel out the effect of the semantic distinction to a certain extent. No attempt will be made to disentangle the different senses of quite; rather, a number of examples will be given that indicate that the dividing line is hard to draw in a realistic assessment. It is not only the unclear semantic relationships that confuse the picture; diachronically, the two meanings and the alternant word orders of quite are not equal either. As far as the meanings are concerned, the maximizer sense 'completely, wholly, altogether' is commonly assumed to have been the primary one, being also most in line with the original sense of French quite 'unmolested, free, clear' (QED 2 1994: s.v. quite; cf. furthermore Ungerer 1988: 291; Paradis 1997: 72, 87). The moderator sense 'rather, to a moderate degree, fairly' was a secondary development out of the maximizer sense, but is often difficult to distinguish from the former. While the QED 2 dates the first unambiguous instance of the moderator sense to 1854, Ungerer (1988: 292) claims that this meaning developed in the early eighteenth century. At any rate, the second sense is supposed to have spread at the expense of the former, which is now perceived as oldfashioned, formal or stilted (cf. QED 2 1994: s.v. quite; Allerton 2001: 188), and is now more frequent in a corpus of spoken British English than the former (261 to 161 instances; cf. Paradis 1997: 38).

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Analysis ofattributive structures

Regarding the word order, the two variants are not assumed in the literature to be derived one from another. The post-determiner use is the canonical one for adverbs modifying prenominal adjectives. The predeterminer use, according to Bolinger (1972: 101, 145) and Allerton (1987: 25-26), arose as a consequence of its origin as a sentence adverbial. In a sentence like She is quite a belle 'One can justly say that she is a belle', quite could be reinterpreted as an intensifier and part of the noun phrase. Of course, additional attributive adjectives could be placed between the determiner and the noun, e.g. She is quite a beautiful girl, in which quite could be interpreted as an intensifier of beautiful. This explanation is buttressed by the fact that quite in pre-determiner position is practically limited to predicative uses (cf. Allerton 1987: 27). The literature does not provide any hints as to the dating of the incorporation of the original sentence adverbial into the noun phrase. The semantic weakening from maximizer to moderator and the emergence of the pre-determiner position of quite are of course interrelated changes, although the dependence of the one on the other is not a logical necessity. Yet, the original maximizer meaning coincides chronologically with the historically older post-determiner position with which it has an affinity, and the evolution of the moderator meaning chimes in with the acquisition of the pre-determiner position in which the moderator preferentially occurs. In a diachronic corpus analysis like the following, we can thus expect a parallel rise in numbers of the pre-determiner use and of the moderator sense. The corpus analysis focuses on a potential rhythmic co-determination of the competition between a quite and quite a. Therefore, no attempt was made to classify adjectives according to whether they have gradable, extreme or both meanings. A few examples from the imaginative prose section of the BNC may suffice to illustrate the variability that exists despite these semantic tendencies. The adjective separate would probably be assigned to the extreme or absolutive class; new undoubtedly belongs to the s.calar class; and different can occur in both senses. The corpus yields instances of the canonical and non-canonical positional variants of the determiner and quite cutting across these distinctions. Consider the examples in (42) to (44). (42) a. This is a quite separate intelligence report on a new, lightweight air-to-air missile the Russians are known to have developed recently. (Peter Cave: Foxbat, 1979; BNC) b. It would still be a scandal even ifit was quite a separate scandal. (Gavin Lyall: Conduct ofMajor Maxim; 1982; BNC)

A quite vs. quite a from EModE to PDE

117

(43) a.... the washboard at the top rolled out ofsight and a quite new reach ofsky appeared. (Penelope Fitzgerald: Offshore, 1988; BNC) b. It would add quite a new dimension to how I viewed this boldly awful hall. (E. Nash: Strawberries and Wine, 1993; BNC) (44) a. After some time one became aware that members ofa quite different clan were also to be found scattered in little clusters ... (Michael Dibdin: Dirty Tricks, 1991; BNC) b. In a month, she thought, in just a month, I might be looking at quite a different view. (Joanna Trollope: The Rector's Wife, 1993; BNC) While the analysis does not discriminate between scalar and extreme adjectives, certain types of adjectives were excluded from the count. This concerns all non-gradable adjectives whose meaning renders them inappropriate for maximization or moderation. The examples in (45a--e) are cases in point. (45) a. This compleated my design, beyond a possibility ofdetection, and even raised a new one against the poor pittance I had left her, though it was not quite afourth part ofwhat was really her right: ... (C. Johnstone: Chrystal, 1760; ECF) b. ... it was his oldfriend Andrew Tipple, who had workedfor Jerry in his prosperity as a journeyman; but was now become quite an itinerant Cobler and peripatetic Politician. (R. Graves: The Spiritual Quixote, 1773; ECF) c. It is quite a public calamity, Mrs. Turner being so very prolific -; ... (Lady Caroline Lamb: Glenarvon, 1816; NCF) In these uses, quite functions as a modifier of the entire unit consisting of the determiner, the attribute and the noun. Quite does not modify the adjective but asserts the truth of the proposition and can therefore not assume the post-determiner position. Although the examples structurally and semantically resemble constructions of the type She's quite a belle or He's quite a hero, which are taken to be the source of the pre-determiner use of quite, no variation is possible with non-gradable adjectives, which were therefore excluded from consideration (cf. Bolinger 1972: 137). To investigate the diachronic evolution of the positional variation, the already familiar databases of dramatic and non-dramatic prose stretching from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries were chosen. Figure 13 displays the results of the analysis. For each subperiod, the proportions of the

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Analysis ofattributive structures

innovative positional variant quite a are given for initially and noninitially stressed adjectives. In contrast to the standard usage in PDE, the adjective contrary, which accounts for a large number of tokens in the earlier corpus subsections (16 occurrences between 1518 and 1700, 20 between 1701 and 1780, and 7 between 1781 and 1903, but none between 1960 and 1993), was classified as a noninitially stressed adjective. According to the sources quoted in the OED 2 (1994: s.v. contrary), contrary was the most widespread pronunciation well into the eighteenth century and still alternates with contrary in present-day nonstandard English. Since contrary is only weakly represented in the nineteenth century and absent in the BNC data, it was left in the noninitially stressed category throughout.

0/17=0%

EEPF+EPD 1518-1700

ECF+ EPD 1701-1780

NCF+EPD 1781-1903

BNCwridom 1 1960-1993

Figure J3. The distribution of quite a(n) compared to a quite before attributive

adjectives in a series of prose corpora according to the stress pattern of the adjectives (EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD, BNC wridom 1) In accordance with claims made in the secondary literature, it can easily be seen that the pre-determiner position of quite is a relatively late development. Additionally, the data permit an exact estimate of the time frame during which the establishment took place. While the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries yield only four instances of the novel construction, its rise gathers speed in the eighteenth century and it has almost ousted the postdeterminer variant in the nineteenth century. On the basis of the previous literature on the subject, we may assume that the spread of the positional variant quite a goes along with the emergence of the moderator meaning. Due to the fuzzy delimitation of the two meanings, we can, however, capi-

A quite vs. quite a from EModE to PDE

119

talize on a considerable margin of free variation between a quite and quite a, which can be put to use to improve the rhythmicity of the construction. In fact, this is exactly what the data show. Not only are initially stressed adjectives the first to collocate with pre-determiner quite, but they also spearhead the transition towards this word order and lag behind when the development reverts somewhat towards the old order in the twentiethcentury data. The statistical reliability of the margin between initially and noninitially stressed adjectives depends on the availability of sufficiently ample data, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the influence of rhythm cannot be denied. 42 In sum, the evolution of attributive structures involving quite has been towards greater rhythmic well-formedness since the sixteenth century, thus forming an exception to the general trend that revealed itself as counter-rhythmic (cf. Minkova 1990: 332; 1991: 180).43 The changeover from a quite to quite a as a prevailing pattern takes care of a likely source of stress clashes through the transfer of the indefinite article as a buffer between the stressed monosyllable quite and the following adjectives (which have been shown in the introduction to the present chapter to tend towards initial stress - and the relation between initially and noninitially stressed adjectives in figure 13 supports this). In the BNC data, for instance, the proportion of constructions involving a stress clash between post-determiner quite and initially stressed adjectives is only 12 percent, while post-determiner quite still accounts for 30 percent of the cases combining with the rhythmically uncritical noninitially stressed adjectives. The data appear all the more remarkable if we give credence to sources like the OED 2 (1994: s.v. quite) and Allerton (2001: 188), which affirm that the maximizer meaning has become rare in PDE. If this is true, the semantic influence distinguishing a quite and quite a ought to be negligible in the latest corpus section and the divergence between the rhythmically distinct context can be more or less exclusively ascribed to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. Before we leave the diachronic development of attributive structures modified by quite, we may take a brief look at the differences between the corpora of dramatic and non-dramatic prose, which have so far simply been cumulated to enlarge the empirical basis of the study. If stressed and unstressed adjectives are not separated, but the data from the EPD corpus containing dramatic works are opposed to the data from the EEPF, ECF, NCF and BNC corpora, the following figure 14 results. This juxtaposition shows that the written-to-be-spoken prose of the EPD corpus is on the whole more progressive in the introduction of the quite a-variant. On the way to the late twentieth century, its frequency drops again. The difference between the two genres is significant for the eighteenth century only, which is the only phase for which the curves pre-

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Analysis ofattributive structures

sent a noticeable divergence. 44 This is exactly the phase during which the substitution of a quite by quite a is catching up. It can be concluded that the dramatic prose reflects a trend in the spoken language of the eighteenth century that provided the impetus for change in the written literary standard. 45 Thus, we have witnessed a change from below that had a massive impact on the syntax of attributive structures involving quite. While it seems bold to claim that the innovation was initiated in spoken language because it facilitated the articulation of quite + adjective sequences by inserting a buffer, it has, however, been shown that the semantically and syntactically determined changeover was sensitive to rhythmic preferences. 100% ,..-

176/181=97%.

90%

:§: 80%

'1 "0

70% 60% 50%


40% 30%

<::l

i

~

0..

20% 10%

_

-I

388/456=85ta

I

"""+"""total dramatic prose -9-total non-dramatic prose

-9-3123=13%

0%

EEPF+ EPD 1518-1700

ECF+ EPD 1701-1780

NCF+ EPD 1781-1903

BNC wridom 1 1960-1993

Figure 14. The distribution of quite a(n) compared to a quite before attributive adjectives in a series of prose corpora according to genre (EEPF, ECF, NCF and BNC wridom 1 contrasted with EPD)

Instead of disappearing completely, as one might have predicted from its rapid decline in the nineteenth century, the positional variant a quite comes back to a limited extent in the late twentieth century.46 As figure 13 indicates, this renewed rise is hardly detrimental to the rhythm, because it is largely limited to adjectives with an unstressed initial syllable. However, this does not explain why we see a reversal of the trend which, if continued, would result in a U-turn development. This would support Stein's (2000) refutation of theories of language change according to which a change, once undergone, cannot be undone. Unfortunately, we have no drama corpus for the twentieth century at our disposal paralleling the BNC imaginative prose section. But since PDE has turned out to provide a fertile ground for influences of the Principle of

A quite vs. quite a from EModE to PDE

121

Rhythmic Alternation with regard to the alternation between a quite and quite a, it is worthwhile to take a snapshot of the distribution of the variants in some other selected registers of contemporary English. For this purpose, the study of late twentieth-century fictional prose from the BNC is complemented by analyses of spoken British English and British newspaper language. Above and beyond a simple comparison of the relative frequencies of a quite and quite a preceding attributive adjectives in the different text types, initially stressed and noninitially stressed adjectives were again kept separate in order to obtain further evidence for the margin of choices determined by the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. The category of adjectives had to be extended to include additional adverbs premodi:f)ring attributive adjectives, as in examples (46a-b). (46) a. "It's interesting that a judge ofa quite clearly conservative tendency has said this to Howard " (The Guardian 1995) b. ... a man in Kilburn who claimed that he was being controlled by electronic rays from outer space - this is quite a surprisingly common complaint in letters ofthis kind. (The Guardian 1994) For ease of reference, the categories of initially and noninitially stressed adjectives in the following discussion refer both to adjectives and the small number of adverbs, even though adverbs are not explicitly mentioned. Figure 15 summarizes the results of the count. When comparing the overall frequencies of the more recently introduced variant quite a in the three registers, we find a distinct decline from left to right. The structure is most widespread in spoken registers (95 percent of the total), somewhat less frequent in fictional prose (85 percent on average) and least used in newspaper language (73 percent of the total).47 The differences between the text types can presumably to a large extent be related to differences in the frequency of the different senses of quite. It has already been mentioned that the maximizer uses of quite that have affinities with the postdeterminer position have nowadays acquired a stylistic marking as formal or stilted. In the most informal spoken register, the moderator meaning can be assumed to dominate, which leads to an extremely high rate of occurrence of the pre-determiner variant. The fictional prose corpus, which has already been included in the previous diachronic study, displays an intermediate rate of quite a and, by hypothesis, a moderate proportion of maximizer uses. The newspapers are most liable to use the maximizer meaning, which is characteristic of a relatively formal, elevated style and correlates with the post-determiner use of quite. Within the British newspaper corpus, there is even a highly significant difference between the tabloid The Daily Mail with a share of 81 percent of quite a, and the quality paper The

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Analysis ofattributive structures

Guardian with a share of only 70 percent of quite a. 48 As a result, we can detect a clear gradient between the text categories and even within them that strongly argues in favour of the thesis, proposed in the literature (cf. OED 2 1994: s.v. quite; Allerton 2001: 188), that the post-determiner use of quite correlates with different degrees of formality, a correlation that can ultimately be ascribed to the more frequent maximizer use of quite in formal styles. • before initially stressed adjectives

!ill before non initially stressed adjectives

100%

,------------~

90% ~ ";i

80% 70%60%

'c5

50%

~

.::t ~


~ 40%
~

Po.

20% 10% 0% spoken language

fictional prose

newspapers

Figure 15. The distribution of quite a(n) compared to a quite before adjectives in attributive position in spoken British English (RNC spokcont, RNC spokdem), in British fictional prose (RNC wridom 1) and in British newspapers (The Guardian 1994-1997, The Daily Mail 1993-1995)

Further support for the importance of the level of formality in the choice of pre- or post-determiner quite comes from a parallel study of spoken American English and American newspapers, described in Schltiter (to appear). In addition, it emerges from this study that both text types have a significantly higher proportion of quite a in American English. This could be interpreted as a relatively lower degree of formality compared to their British counterparts, but it might also be due to a more general reluctance in American English to employ quite in its maximizer function, with the newspapers maintaining a comparatively high stylistic level. To come to an empirically founded answer, a semantic analysis of the examples would have to be performed, which is however beyond the reach of the present project. What is more important in the context of a possible phonological determination of the alternation between word order variants is, however, the

A quite vs. quite a from EModE to PDE

123

contrast between occurrences of a quite and quite a preceding stressed or unstressed syllables. In this respect, each pair of columns in figure 15 exhibits a more or less marked divergence: stressed syllables constantly attract a higher percentage of quite a than unstressed syllables. The width of the discrepancy depends very obviously on the overall level that the positional variant quite a has reached in the respective text types. In spoken British English, the competing structure a quite is practically unavailable since the maximizer meaning that is associated with this construction in formal usage is stylistically inappropriate in the relatively informal spoken registers. As a consequence, the difference between stressed and unstressed following contexts fails to reach the first level of significance. However, the higher the average frequency of a quite, the greater the ease with which this variant can be applied in particular in rhythmically uncritical contexts, and the greater the statistical significance of the rhythmic effects on the distribution. 49 The variable width of the margin within which the positions of the determiner and the indefinite article alternate furnishes an additional argument for the semantic underdetermination of the phenomenon. In the British newspapers, which display the most remarkable discrepancy between following initially and noninitially stressed adjectives, it is unlikely that 8I percent of the initially stressed adjectives trigger the moderator use of quite that preferentially precedes the determiner, while noninitially stressed adjectives do the same only half as often (in 43 percent of their occurrences). The divergence is more likely to be due to the avoidance of stress clashes in connection with initially stressed adjectives (and adverbs). The comparison between written and spoken registers provides an approach to the question of the difference between the processing of phonology in the two linguistic modes. Since the variation between a quite and quite a is relatively little codified, we do not have to take into account any major distorting influences. The data in figure 15 leave us with a contrast that is basically the same in the written and spoken modes. In both registers, the contrast is arguably motivated by the avoidance of stress clashes and there is nothing to support the allegation that the written mode is less subject to constraints that are related to the pronounceability of its structures. Quite to the contrary, in this case the written text types provide stronger evidence in favour of stress clash avoidance. On the synchronic level, this can be accounted for by a difference in formality. More precisely, in the light of the diachronic findings shown in figures I3 and 14, we have to conclude that the spoken language is further advanced in the decline of the maximizer function of quite and the syntax associated with it. The resultant advantage of the spoken registers is in line with the progressiveness of the written-to-be-spoken register of dramatic prose demon-

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Analysis ofattributive structures

strated in figure 14. Like the rhythmically motivated variation, the stylistic variation is therefore diachronically stable. Having revealed that semantic and syntactic accounts seriously underdetermine the selection of the pre- or post-determiner positions of the adverb quite in attributive structures, we have outlined the evolution of the two constructions which amounted to a relatively speedy extension of the former at the expense of the latter. At every synchronic stage of this evolution, in each of the genres (drama vs. fiction vs. news texts) and in both linguistic modes (written vs. spoken language) - and by the way also in both national varieties (British vs. American English; cf. Schltiter, to appear) - that were studied, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has been shown to account for a significant divergence between initially and noninitially stressed adjectives. Yet, the tendency does not go so far as to categorically exclude examples involving a stress clash, such as sentence (39a), which is considered by Bolinger (1972: 137) to be unacceptable. This adds an important aspect to the already substantial amount of insights reported in the literature on the subject. Moreover, it falsifies modular conceptions of the language system which exclude the possibility that phonological factors co-determine the syntactic arrangement of words in a sentence, be it only the placement of the indefinite article.

4.6.

The order of coordinated colour adjectives in PDE

The following analysis focuses on the sequencing of coordinated colour adjectives of the type red and yellow/yellow and red in contexts where stress clash avoidance plays a role and compares it to the situation in rhythmically uncritical contexts. The dataset that will be presented is an extract from a larger study described in detail in Schltiter (in preparation C).50 Coordinations of colour adjectives represent a type of binomials, i.e. syntactically coordinated words of the same class (nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs) that are usually in a semantic relationship of synonymy, opposition or complementation (cf. Gustafsson 1976: 623). The topic of the ordering of the conjuncts in such binomials, whether fixed or variable, has spawned an impressive number of treatments in the secondary literature, which can only be surveyed summarily here (for more details, see Schltiter, in preparation c, and the references therein).51 The studies have centred around two complexes of interacting factors determining the sequencing, one semantic and one phonological. The semantic (or pragmatic) influences can be subsumed under the "Me First" principle (Cooper and Ross 1975: 67): Me refers to the prototypical egocentric speaker, who refers first to himself (more rarely, herself)

The order ofcoordinated colour adjectives in PDE

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and then to persons, things and concepts removed in time and space. This leads to the ordering of the first or second before the second or third person, the positive before the negative, the adult before the child, the male before the female, the agent before the patient, the friend before the foe, the singular before the plural, the here before the elsewhere, the present before the past and future, etc. For details and exceptions to these rules, see the sources quoted in Schlliter (in preparation c). - The phonological determinants can be reduced to the order of short and simple before long and complex. Thus, the first conjunct tends to have less phonetic content than the second (fewer before more syllables, short vowels before long vowels, fewer before more initial consonants, fewer before more final consonants, more sonorant before more obstruent segments, more closed or front before more open or back vowels). All of these sequencing principles have been claimed to be linguistic universals. What is more, while a particular binomial is usually affected by more than one factor, various factors do not necessarily favour the same ordering and conflicts arise. The way these conflicts are resolved can be taken as an indication of the relative factor strengths (cf. Huber 1974: 61; Benor and Levy, to appear). In many cases, the order of the conjuncts has been conventionalized and the binomials concerned have become part of the phraseological inventory of English. In other cases, for example that of the coordinated colour adjectives (except for the frozen sequence black and white), the sequencing is as yet free and implemented online in language production. In the latter case, a variable order of the conjuncts can result from conflicts between a number of incompatible constraints. 52 For the purpose of a corpus-based study of coordinated colour adjectives, the semantic and phonological criteria can be given a considerably more specific interpretation. The "Me First" principle, for one, translates into the insight that the retrievability or accessibility of a lexeme in memory plays an important role in word order. McDonald, Bock, and Kelly (1993: 189, 196) state that conceptually accessible words tend to precede less accessible words, and the accessibility of a word depends a good deal on such parameters as the perceived psychological nearness to the speaker's mind. This cognitively based salience factor has been shown to be a major determinant in the ordering of binomials (cf. Benor and Levy, to appear). In the case of colour adjectives, this psychological principle gives rise to a noticeable tendency to name central colour adjectives characterized by a high frequency such as blue, brown, green, pink, red and yellow before less central and frequent ones such as crimson, russet, scarlet, golden and silver (cf. Schlliter, in preparation c). To minimize the distort-

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Analysis ofattributive structures

ing effects of different degrees of retrievability, the present study focuses exclusively on the central colour adjectives given above. Even though this procedure takes care of some general sequencing preferences, it is impossible in a large-scale corpus study to monitor all semantic and pragmatic influences impinging on the order of pairs of colour adjectives. In the majority of cases, this will be determined by uncontrollable situation-dependent effects such as the dominance of one colour over the other, the relative salience of the two colours, the chronological sequence of their appearance, etc. A case in point is the collocation yellow and red cards vs. red and yellow cards. The temporal order in which yellow and red cards are shown to offending players in team sports strongly favours the former version. Schliiter (in preparation c) shows that the distribution is noticeably skewed on account of this semantic interference, which is why combinations of red and yellow premodifying the noun card(s) were excluded from the following count. However, similar effects can be assumed for most of the instances that have entered the analysis. The situation becomes more intricate when phonological factors come into play. Vendler (1968: 121-122), for one, invokes a principle making reference to the (phonological) length of the conjuncts involved: "in joining words by and or or, the shorter element comes first." This amounts to a version of the universal Law of the Increasing Constituents first formulated by Behaghel (1909: 139).53 In Vendler's opinion, as in that of many other linguists (cf. for instance Gustafsson 1976: 636-637; Landsberg 1994: 30), this satisfactorily accounts for the preference of the short-before-long order in (47b) over the long-before-short order in (47a) quoted here from Vendler (1968: 121; stress marks added). (47) a. yellow and redflowers b. red and yellow flowers Going beyond the length factor, Jespersen (1972: 220-221), Bolinger (1965a: 133-134; 1965b: 153) and Benor and Levy (to appear) provide a more precise and compelling analysis of this preference in terms of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. They assume that coordinated attributive adjectives like those in (47) are regularly arranged so as to place the member of the pair having an unstressed final syllable last, as is the case in the (b)-example. The motivation behind this tendency is alleged to be the avoidance of stress clashes between stressed monosyllabic adjectives and the typically initially stressed nouns, as the (a)-example above demonstrates. However, stress clash avoidance cannot be easily separated from the effect of the Law of the Increasing Constituents.

The order ofcoordinated colour adjectives in PDE

127

To isolate the effect of the preference for rhythmic alternation from such cross-cutting influences, the present study compares combinations of the only disyllabic central colour adjective in English, viz. yellow, and the monosyllabic colour adjectives blue, brown, green, pink and red in rhythmically critical and uncritical contexts. 'Critical' contexts refer only to cases in which coordinated colour adjectives immediately precede an initially stressed noun, as is illustrated in examples (48a-b). 'Uncritical' contexts, exemplified in (49a-b), provide a control group, comprising all nonattributive coordinations of colour adjectives as well as instances preceding a noninitially stressed noun. (48) a. ... sunlight filtered through interlaced leaves ofpalms, rubber trees, banana trees and giant ferns, and brilliant green and yellow butterflies rose in shimmering clouds. (The Times 1995) b. That really is quite an extraordinary place, in spring it is a mass ofwildflowers and these little yellow and green frogs. (The Times 1998) (49) a. Then he wore the sweater banded by green and yellow and a full house applauded him: ... (The Daily Telegraph 1998) b. ...1 was pretty disturbed to find, when I sat down in the driver's seat, that my green polo shirt perfectly matched the car's green and yellow upholstery. (The Guardian 1998) While the examples forming the control group are influenced by the Law of the Increasing Constituents, favouring the shorter monosyllabic colour terms in the position of the first conjunct, the cases preceding initially stressed nouns are additionally exposed to the pressures exerted by the requirement for rhythmic well-formedness. By hypothesis, an excess of short-before-long sequences in this group will thus be due to the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. This hypothesis was tested in Schliiter (in preparation c) on a corpus of 40 years of British newspapers, totalling no less than 1,444,000,000 words, in which all combinations of yellow with any of the monosyllables blue, brown, green, pink and red was retrieved and categorized. Figure 16 summarizes the results of this analysis in a condensed form. To start with the 'other uses', i.e. those that do not pose a rhythmic threat independently of which order is chosen, the data show a clear preference for the short-before-long sequence (57 percent), which is in accordance with the Law of the Increasing Constituents. However, the same preference is significantly stronger in cases where the coordinated structure occurs in attributive function before an initially stressed noun (69 percent).54 In

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Analysis ofattributive structures

rhythmically critical contexts, the general effect of Behaghel's law is thus enhanced by the workings of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. 100% 90%

.X and/or yellow

liIyellow and/or X

80%

..,

~

1:J ..,u ....


0.

70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

attributive uses before initially stressed nouns

other uses

Figure 16. The order of pairs consisting of yellow and a monosyllabic colour adjective in rhythmically critical and uncritical contexts in British newspapers (The Daily Telegraph 1991-2000, The Guardian 19902000, The Daily Mail 1993-2000, The Times 1990-2000/ 5

This is not to deny that the quantitative data in figure 16 conceal a number of general or specific semantic and pragmatic tendencies that may in every single instance play a much more important role in the determination of the order of the conjuncts. However, these factors are relevant in attributive as well as other uses and can be assumed to cancel each other out in a large dataset. What the present survey allows us to conclude is that the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation exerts a constant pressure on binomials occurring in rhythmically critical positions, which is statistically responsible for a considerable margin of cases. Beyond the accumulation of more evidence for the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, the investigation of pairs of colour adjectives and the multiple determinants of their sequencing has implications for grammatical theory-building. A phonological (or, more precisely, rhythmic) factor has been shown to exert an influence on the sequencing of lexemes and thereby to impinge on the domain of syntax, which is in formal theories of grammar viewed as an autonomous component of language. As Gil (1989: 376383) points out, this interplay of phonological and semantic factors determining syntactic sequencing is a "massive violation of a central property of grammar, namely, modularity." Not only does it undermine the alleged

Negated attributive adjectives in PDE

129

strict separation of work between the components, but it also discredits the conception of phonology and semantics as interpretive components. In the present case, the syntax clearly underdetermines the realization of a construction, leaving the order of constituents to be decided by semantic and prosodic preferences (cf. Gil1989: 377; see also Gi11987: 131,135).

4.7.

Negated attributive adjectives in PDE

At the end of this series of case studies concerning different types of attributive structures, the intricacies connected to the negation of attributive adjectives will come under scrutiny. The following analysis is thus concerned with licensing conditions bearing on syntactic constructions proper and reaches deeper into the domain of syntax than any of the preceding studies. The authors of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language assert that "In general, attributive adjectives cannot be negated by not" (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 809). The ungrammatical example in (50a) illustrates this. However, as (SOb) shows, there are certain exceptions to this rule. (50) a. *a not happy person b. a not unhappy person (Langendoen and Bever 1973: 393) The structure in (SOb) has been frowned upon by prescriptive stylisticians due to the alleged redundancy involved in the negation of an adjective carrying a negative prefix, but Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 810) discern a clear difference in meaning between structures like a happy person and a not unhappy person: in contrast to the former, the latter is only "guardedly positive", not necessarily implying a high degree of happiness. The main problem and the one which the present analysis will subject to further scrutiny, does, however, not consist in the semantic contrast between a not unhappy person and a happy person, but in the grammaticality contrast between *a not happy person and a not unhappy person. In other words, the question is what qualifies unhappy to be directly negated by not, whereas happy and many other adjectives are disqualified? In the first place, both adjectives fulfil a condition that linguists agree is an indispensable one for direct negation: both are gradable (cf. Bolinger 1980a: 62; Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 810). Bolinger furthermore claims that adjectives must have a non-temporary meaning which moreover implies a minimum amount of intensity. What is more interesting for present purposes is, however, the heated debate that has centred around the morphological make-up of those adjectives that may appear in this con-

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Analysis ofattributive structures

struction. As (SOb) illustrates, the construction seems to be possible with adjectives that carry a negative prefix (as long as they fulfil the semantic criteria). In fact, the argumentation of most authors on the subject hinges on the prefixation of the adjectives concerned. In the first systematic study of the phenomenon, which adheres to the generative paradigm, Langendoen and Bever (1973: 393-407) shift the explanatory burden from grammatical constraints to perceptual ones: they assume that both (50a) and (SOb) are ungrammatical, but that (SOb) appears acceptable on account of the application of certain perceptual strategies, misinterpreting a not [NEG}Adv Ad) N as a [slightly to moderatelY}Adv Ad) N. In a later study, Aitchison and Bailey (1979: 265) explain the unacceptability of (50a) as a result of the non-application of a rule that would regularly convert the sequence not happy into the suffixed form unhappy. In (SOb), the rule is not applicable any more, which is why the expression can stay as it is. Bolinger (1980a) is able to show that in an interactive conception of grammar, phonological factors can shed a lot more light on the resistance of many attributive adjectives to direct not-negation. Bolinger (1980a: 56) claims that the crucial difference between (50a) and (SOb) lies in their rhythmic contours. Thus, the location of the primary stress on happy is on its initial syllable, while it is on the second syllable in the case of unhappy. Following the stressed monosyllable not, initially stressed adjectives are thus practically prohibited, whereas noninitially stressed ones are licensed (as long as they meet the semantic specifications of the construction). Thus, the phonological tendency of stress clash avoidance is assumed to hold sway over the syntax of negated attributive constructions. Bolinger adduces several arguments supporting his rhythmic account and falsifying previous accounts relying on the presence or absence of a negative prefix alone. Thus, he finds the construction acceptable with any of the following adjectives: egregious, reprehensible, intermittent, surprising, pretentious, engrossing, excruciating, prepossessing, preposterous, presumptions, superlative, revolutionary, erroneous, prototypical, etc. (cf. Bolinger 1980a: 55). Moreover, he claims that the construction is grammatical even with initially stressed adjectives if the stress clash is taken care of by inserted material in the form of intensifiers or longer illocutions that are set off from the body of the sentence by pauses (cf. Bolinger 1980a: 57). Compare the (a)- and (b)-examples in (51) and (52). (51) a. *a not thrilling experience b. a not exactly thrilling experience (52) a. *a not obvious error b. a not, I grant you, obvious error (Bolinger 1980a: 57)

Negated attributive adjectives in PDE

131

This evidence suggests that the presence of a prefix, negative or other, is not a requirement for the applicability of not-negation. Furthermore, Bolinger (1980a: 58) claims that direct negation of prefixless and initially stressed attributive adjectives is possible with negative elements that due to their rhythmic structure are not conducive to stress clashes (e.g. never, neither ... nor; see further comments on never below). In his reply, Langendoen (1982: 108-110) shifts the explanatory burden to selectional restrictions anchored in the lexical entry of each adjective: accordingly, adjectives like unhappy are simply specified as [+ not _ N], while adjectives like happy are specified as [- not _ N]. The former specification is not entirely coextensive with those adjectives bearing a negative prefix, but allows for some idiosyncrasies. For instance, surprising in attributive function can be negated by not despite the absence of a negative prefix, while impious cannot, despite the presence of such a prefix. Contra Bolinger (1980a) Langendoen argues that absence of stress on the initial syllable is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the application of not-negation, witness infinite, which is [+ not _ N], while N] (cf. Langendoen 1982: 109). The fact that industrious is [- not _ Langendoen relegates the circumstances licensing direct not-negation to the lexicon makes his account unfalsifiable, but it excludes the possibility of a generalization, be it in terms of morphological or rhythmic categories. Eventually, the issue boils down to the question of whether the negation of attributive adjectives is constrained by morphological or by rhythmic factors (assuming that we do not give up the hope of finding any generalization at all). The former position has been entertained by Langendoen and Bever (1973), Aitchison and Bailey (1979), Langendoen (1982) and most recently by Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 809-810), who add the requirement that the adjective concerned must carry a productive and transparently negative prefix, thus excluding morphologically opaque loanwords like anarchic and intrepid. The latter position, however, has not had a similarly strong lobby since it did not fit into the modular conception of grammar which has long been the dominant research paradigm. The problem has never been put to an empirical test (but see the pilot study outlined in Schltiter 2003: 94-99). Therefore, a large corpus consisting of three recent years each of four different British newspapers totalling more than 500 million words was searched for instances of the determiners a and the followed by the negator not. This search strategy gave direct access not to all negated attributive adjectives but to a large and representative number of them, which were subsequently subjected to further scrutiny. Some typical examples are given in (53a-f).

132

Analysis ofattributive structures

(53) a. Expense is relative. However, this week I parted with a not insubstantial sum for a very small thing indeed. (The Times 2000) b. As a result, she could no longer blink - a not uncommon phenomenon. (The Guardian 2000) c. What's evident now is a not over-emphatic confidence in the national spirit. (The Daily Telegraph 2000) d. They are mere substitutes for the not understOod reality ofthe spirit. (The Daily Mail 2000) e. They turn up most days at nine or nine-thirty, work reasonably concientiously [sic], even at deadly boringjobs, and take a not excessive number ofdays' sick leave. (The Times 2000) f. Reardon used this instrument on Looking Good (BBC2) to convey to a not-spaghetti-thin 40-year-old ... that walking in public wearing every piece ofchunky goldjewellery she owned gave her a very high tart rating. (The Times 1999) In addition to examples of this type, the list of hits retrieved by the search contained an extraordinarily large number of instances in which the negator and the negated adjective were preceded by an additional adverbial modifier. This concerned 1748 out of the total of 2277 cases (77 percent). Thus, negated attributive structures very often tend to involve a relatively complex syntax. The types of adverbial modifiers range from simple intensifiers and downtoners as in (54a-d) to semantically more independent adverbials as in (54e-i). (54) a. I am a vegan. One ofthe not so rare breeds that A A Gill would like to see pursued by horse and hound. (The Times 1998) b. In comedy terms, Big Train was the not very versatile love child ofMonty Python's Flying Circus and Not the Nine 0 'Clock News. (The Daily Mail 2000) c. Computer chips may be able to crunch their way through millions ofcalculations per second but meeting one is a not particularly exhilarating experience. (The Times 1999) d. As a student at the Conservatoire, Lili had quite deliberately prepared herselfin the academic techniques and the not-tooprogressive harmonic idiom that would impress the jury. (The Times 1999) e. Not only was he principled, but he was politically aware and devoted to the not crazily popular Irish Communist Party. (The Daily Mai/2000) f. It is rather more than 10 years since I gave up the business of war - reporting instead on the not necessarily safer but alto-

Negated attributive adjectives in PDE

133

gether more satisfying pursuit ofskiing. (The Daily Telegraph 1998) g. At 32, the Irish singer recently became Mother Bernadette Marie in a not strictly orthodox service in Lourdes. (The Guardian 1999) h. ... I usher my bewildered tradesman out to the garden regaling him loudly on the not obviously connected topics ofArsenal and Kosovo. (The Guardian 1999) I. Arguably, her recent triumph as Queen Victoria in the film Mrs Brown was in the same category - a not naturally regal actress exploring the loneliness ofqueenship. (The Times 1998) The stress marks placed on the bold-printed expressions have to be understood as mere hypotheses about stress placement. The more independent the adverbials get towards the bottom of the list, the more likely they become to carry a primary stress of their own. Depending on the context, either the adverb or the following adjective will receive a higher degree of prosodic prominence and attract the negative meaning expressed by not. The placement of a prominent accent seems extremely unlikely on simple degree adverbs like so, very and even the pentasyllabic item particularly, but less so on semantically more substantial adverbs like crazily, necessarily, strictly, obviously and naturally.56 However, as table 1 shows, the latter type occurs only with a negligible frequency as compared to the former. Table J.

Type frequencies of adverbs intervening between not and the negated attributive adjectives in a British newspaper corpus (The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail for the years

1998-2000) so too very quite entirely particularly

666 398 256 104

74 52

especially altogether terribly wholly always exactly

at all much necessarily even all that

10

30 30 18 12 11

other adverbs

30

31

8 7 6 5

On account of their numerical importance and their rhythmic interest, intervening adverbs form an extra category in the following count. However, the analysis excludes examples where not clearly negates only the adverb and not the following adjective (e.g. the not warmly received sitcom, a not-often seen 70s Disney movie, a not routinely-armed robber) and also all examples in which not is combined with yet (e.g. the not-yet famous Tony Bullimore). Furthermore, certain set phrases were excluded in

134

Analysis ofattributive structures

which not and the following word form a closely fused unit (normally occurring in other syntactic functions) which is as a whole preposed to the noun (e.g. a not(-)guilty plea, the not(-)proven verdict, the not(-)out batsmen). In contrast, the few examples involving attributive adjectives with an ellipted head word and nominalized adjectives negated by not as in (55a-b) were included in the count since they appear to be subject to the same kind of restrictions as attributive adjectives. (55) a. What it all boils down to is that rich people are able to buy a better education for their children than the not-so-rich. (The Guardian 2000) b. John Oxford, professor ofvirology at the Royal London hospital, agreed and said it had again exposed the NHS's inability to cope with the not entirely unexpected. (The Guardian 2000) The results of the count are displayed in figure 17. In order to be able to quantify the influence of the rhythmic factor, initially stressed and noninitially stressed adjectives were distinguished. For both groups of adjectives, the percentage of cases in which they were preceded by an intervening adverb was determined. The resultant picture exhibits a widely discrepant behaviour of the two groups, which stands in need of an explanation. 100% 90%

1J

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80% 70% 60% 50%

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noninitially stressed adjective

Figure 17. The distribution of adverbs intervening between the negator not and initially and noninitially stressed attributive adjectives in a British newspaper corpus (The Daily Telegraph 1998-2000, The Guardian 1998-2000, The Daily Mail 1998-2000, The Times 1998-2000)

Negated attributive adjectives in PDE

135

Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 809) mention the possibility of negated attributive adjectives being premodified by degree words like very, and they note that all types of adjectives are licensed under this condition. This amendment to the alleged requirement that negated attributive adjectives have a transparently negative prefix is entirely unmotivated but, as the data in figure 17 demonstrate, is the rule rather than the exception. A more satisfactory account of the results is the one suggested by Bolinger (l980a). As we have seen in the introduction to rhythmic aspects of attributive structures at the beginning of this chapter, close to 80 percent of the adjectives in a naturalistic corpus have their main stress on the initial syllable. If negated by the stressed monosyllable not, these 80 percent run the risk of causing a clash of two stressed syllables. The avoidance of such stress clashes can be held responsible for the insertion of an adverb in an average of 77 percent of our corpus examples. As can be seen from the examples involving initially stressed adjectives quoted in this analysis (examples (54a, b, e, f, g, i) and (55a», the intercalation of adverbs with a lower degree of stress can buffer the sequence of two stresses, no matter how many syllables the adverbs involve. As the remaining examples quoted here show, adverbs can, however, also be inserted before noninitially stressed adjectives, where they fulfil no buffer function. At this point, some quantitative considerations permit further insights. For one thing, figure 17 shows an enormous disparity in the behaviour of initially and noninitially stressed adjectives. As many as 97 percent of the former are accompanied by intervening adverbs. Thus, the use of a buffer element is almost categorical where a stress clash threatens to arise. In stark contrast to this, only 40 fercent of the noninitially stressed adjectives take an intervening adverb. 5 Thus, we assume that the introduction of adverbs between not and the adjective is first and foremost triggered by the rhythmic requirement for a stress clash buffer and less motivated by semantic needs, since the latter would lead to an equal distribution across initially and noninitially stressed adjectives. The most frequent adverbs listed in table 1 can thus be suspected to represent no more than semantically empty dummy material inserted quasi-automatically to prevent threatening stress clashes. As the adverbs become more variegated and bulky towards the end of the list and in examples like (54e-i) above, the rhythmic motivation fades into a more and more semantic one, but the two functions can never be entirely separated. These astonishingly clear empirical results speak vigorously in favour of Bolinger's (l980a) hunch that intervening intensifiers play an important role with regard to the well-formedness of attributive constructions. For another thing, it is interesting to note that only 1462 out of the 2277 adjectives occurring in negated attributive structures (64 percent) have

136

Analysis ofattributive structures

first-syllable stress. This could be taken to suggest that initially stressed adjectives are to some degree avoided in this rhythmically precarious position, but a more likely interpretation would make reference to the semantics of the construction. The negation of attributive adjectives is a relatively elaborate stylistic means to which not all types of adjectives lend themselves equally well. In combination with adjectives carrying a negative prefix like insubstantial and uncommon in (53a-b), it creates a moderately positive evaluation that has a characteristically ironic ring to it. This stylistic function is less obvious in connection with other adjectives lacking the negative prefix. Since most adjectives that carry one of the common negative prefixes un-, in- and dis- by virtue of that fact have an unstressed first syllable, negation by not is therefore extremely frequent with noninitially stressed adjectives. Thirdly, contrary to the analyses by Langendoen and Bever (1973), Aitchison and Bailey (1979), Langendoen (1982) and Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 809-810), the corpus study yields a considerable number of attributive adjectives that have no negative prefix but follow the negator not without any intervening adverbs. Among the 491 examples of noninitially stressed adjectives that dispense with a buffer element, as many as 473 do have such a prefix, but the remaining 18 are all the more remarkable. Among them, 9 are formed with the native prefix over-, e.g. overemphatic in (53c), and one with the prefix under- (53d). Unproductive and non-transparent prefixes are to be found in 6 cases (affected (2x), approved, invented, surprising and excessive, which is quoted in (53e». The compound adjectives well-connected, not quoted here, and spaghetti-thin, quoted in (53£), are the only examples without a prefix. This finding provides further evidence against the morphological account and for the rhythmic account of the restrictions bearing on the negation of attributive adjectives. However, the situation is not as simple as the rhythmic account seems to suggest. In fact, the margin of 38 initially stressed adjectives that are negated without an intervening stress clash buffer represent important exceptions. As many as 17 out of them involve the adjective bad and one more its derivative baddish. These uses seem to refer to the litotes expression not bad frequently used as an evaluation of the quality of some person, performance, etc. In attributive uses like the one in (56), the speaker's appreciation of the book's quality (which would normally occur in predicative position) is simply transferred to an uncommon attributive position. This kind of usage is, however, by no means rare and appears to have extended to other evaluative adjectives like good, great, huge, nice and normal which likewise figure in the set of exceptions.

Negated attributive adjectives in PDE (56)

137

"It's a not bad read, and holds your attention." (The Times 1998)

Some of the exceptions are explained as a consequence of the juxtaposition of a positive adjective and its negation, in which the adjective is contextually given in the second (negated) occurrence and therefore attributed only a secondary stress. Example (57) represents one of the 4 relevant cases.

(57)

In her closing peroration, which included the questionable notion that 'it's better to have 50 pc ofa great man than 100 pc ofa not great man', Claire gazed at a Spear painting in a church and said: ... (The Daily Mail 1998)

The following five examples represent instances of syntax getting in the way of an ordinary rhythmic movement and are therefore untypical examples of the attributive structures under consideration. Due to the relatively long and substantial attributive expressions, the focus shifts away from the negator, and in cases like (58a-b) at least, it takes the prosodic prominence along so that not remains relatively unstressed. The highlighted structures in (58c-e) conspicuously resemble predicative structures simply turned into attributes for the sake of brevity. They seem to represent deliberate jokes, routine formula: or mentions of attributes conventionally ascribed to the nominal referents (along the lines of 'what others would call ... '), but are certainly no prototypical exponents of the structure under consideration. Moreover (58d-e) violate the constraint that negated attributive adjectives have gradable meanings. Thus, rhythmic and semantic anomaly coincide to a considerable extent. The stress marks on the examples indicate possible readings, but are by no means definitive. (58)

a. 'Mmm! Glmm!' I swallow, and look up, and say, in a not calm enough voice: ... (The Guardian 1998) b...., when Ifound it difficult to earn a living, the not huge, but regular, royalty cheques from Ways OfSeeing kept me going '. (The Guardian 1999) c. Marlon Wayans (from The Last Boy Scout) and David Spade are the not-famous-round-our-way leads and the great Rip Torn is on the team. (The Guardian 1998) d. In fact, it is a new line ofeveningwear created by the notScottish-at-all, Dutch-born designer Marie-Anne Oudejans. (The Guardian 1999) e. The former finished a not knocked-abOut seventh behind Jila at Newmarket in the same race that Adjutant gave the winner a real scare. (The Daily Telegraph 2000)

138

Analysis ofattributive structures

This leaves us with only 4 unaccountable exceptions, which will be presented here for completeness' sake. Examples (59a-b) resemble instances of the high-frequency collocation the not too distant future (254 occurrences), from which the too has been omitted, while examples (59c-d) look like predicative expressions transferred to the attributive position irrespective of the constraints relevant for the latter. (59) a. Lawrence ofArabia, who was present, believed that the two men could work out 'the lines ofArab and Zionist policy converging in the not distant future '. (The Daily Telegraph 1997) b. 'So my number's gone from One to Zero one and now it's going from Zero one to Zero two with the distinct possibility that it might have to become Two zero zero two in the not distant future. (The Daily Mail 1998) c. That came when the penalty was conceded, and we looked straight into the face ofPhil Neville, admired his heroic and doomed attempt to assume a not-guilty expression, while every nuance ofhis body language said mea culpa. (The Times 2000) d. Some ofthe extreme actions ofthe attack did mirror what we know are the choreographed and the not-real actions ofthe wrestlers. (The Daily Telegraph 2000) In sum, the list of exceptions in which the negator not and an initially stressed adjective meet unbuffered does not exceed the limits of normal linguistic creativity. While the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is not consistently obeyed in these cases, the morphological criterion of prefixation is not fulfilled either, and the semantic restrictions are likewise occasionally disregarded. The 38 exceptions to the rule that initially stressed adjectives require some kind of buffer adverb when directly negated can thus be regarded as truly marginal. The evidence from 97 percent of initially stressed adjectives taking a buffer as opposed to only 40 percent of noninitially stressed adjectives speaks clearly in favour of a rhythmically motivated account for the restrictions bearing on the negation of attributes. Moreover, the competing morphological account is discredited by the fact that the presence of a negative prefix (or perhaps even of any kind of prefix) is not required to make an adjective eligible for the construction. Meanwhile, semantic and stylistic factors influence the selection of adjectives and are possibly responsible for the widespread but erroneous assumption that the construction is restricted to adjectives carrying negative prefixes. Additional evidence in favour of a rhythmic determination of the negation of attributive adjectives comes from a cross-check carried out on the

Negated attributive adjectives in PDE

139

disyllabic negator never, which, in contrast to not, features a stressless second syllable. The following cross-check seeks to justify Bolinger's (l980a: 58) claim according to which the restriction of direct negation to noninitially stressed adjectives or to adjectives preceded by degree modifiers is lifted as soon as the rhythmic contour of the negator excludes the danger of stress clashes. Indeed, a search using the determiners a and the immediately followed by never as a search string retrieved numerous tokens of initially stressed adjectives dispensing with a buffer adverb. Consider the examples in (60a-c). (60) a. It stands in its own right as an exceptionally good example ofthe never easy art ofcontemporary political biography. (The Times 1994) b. Two shining torches in these dark ages: the never-dull Anthony Price, and the queen ofthe toga-and-dagger private eyes, Lindsey Davis, who must be flattered by her many imitators. (The Daily Telegraph 1997) c. These outcomes will be most pronouncedfor a particular kind of lone parent: the never-married woman. (The Times 1993) All of these examples would be unimaginable with not in the place of never, although semantically the two seem almost interchangeable, in particular when the negated adjective describes a permanent characteristic of an abstract concept or a person, as in (60a-b). Therefore, it might be asked to what extent never can be used as a substitute for not in rhythmically precarious positions. Instead of embarking on this speculative question, the present analysis aims to determine the rate of co-occurrence of never with initially and noninitially stressed attributive adjectives and the percentage of cases in which both types of adjectives are separated from the negator by intervening adverbs. As has just been shown, initially stressed adjectives do occur without preceding adverbs, and (61a-b) show that noninitially stressed ones can of course do the same. Both types of adjectives are also found in combination with adverbs of the same kind as those figuring in constructions with not. Examples (62a-d) feature some of the most typical degree modifiers. (61) a. He was made in 1908, as one ofa never commissioned sample of six coloured teddy bears for London's Harrods. (The Daily Mail 1993) b. The never-controversial Henman will have only competitive worries when he takes on Gustafsson, holding a 2-0 career edge on his opponent. (The Daily Telegraph 1997)

140

Analysis ofattributive structures

(62) a. First, however, came the blossoming ofa never really ugly duckling into a gorgeous swan. (The Daily Telegraph 1995) b. British television, according to Murdoch, and therefore according to his slanted newspapers, and therefore according to so many in the never especially upright party he's done so much to keep in power, is elitist and paternalistic. (The Guardian 1993) c. Whatever happened to the never-quite-defined things in Europe which Mr Major and Mr Hurd used to assure us were "going Britain's way"? (The Times 1994) d. The dramatic financial move instigated by the new president of Brazil, Fernando Collor, has thrown the never very serene world ofFormula One into panic. (The Times 1990)

If intervening adverbs are correctly interpreted as rhythmic buffers in connection with not, then their distribution in combination with the rhythmically unproblematic negator never can be predicted to differ markedly from the picture in figure 17. The database used in the previous study was considerably extended to include as many as 40 years of British newspapers for two reasons. Firstly, attributes negated by never are less frequent than those negated by not, and secondly, numerous examples were excluded from the count to achieve a higher degree of comparability. Thus, the extremely frequent combinations of never with verbal -ing-forrns (e.g. never(-)ending, never(-)failing, never(-)changing, never(-)ceasing, etc.) were discounted since they have a different status from ordinary attributive adjectives: they neither take intervening adverbs, whose distribution is at stake here, nor are they ever negated by not and therefore never occur in the previous analysis. Similarly, expressions involving passive infinitives like never-to-be-forgotten, never-to-be-repeated, never-to-be-fulfilled, etc. were excluded because the criterion of the presence or absence of an intervening buffer is not applicable here, either. Neither the verbal -ing-forms nor the passive infinitives can occur as non-negated attributes, which provides a further argument for their exclusion. 58 Figure 18 summarizes the results of the study. In contrast to figure 17 dealing with the negator not, these data exhibit no noticeable effect of the stress contour of attributive adjectives on the probability with which they are separated from the negator never by an intervening adverb. 59 In particular, initial stress does not have the effect of promoting the insertion of an adverb, which it had in the case of not. This does not come as a surprise, since, thanks to its second unstressed syllable, never creates no need for stress clash buffers whatever type of adjective follows. However, the low incidence (20 percent) of modifiers intervening between initially stressed adjectives and never provides an additional piece of evidence in favour of

Negated attributive adjectives in PDE

141

the rhythmic account for the extremely high incidence of 97 percent before not. Neither before noninitially stressed adjectives nor after never is the proportion of premodification as high as in the rhythmically critical contexts - a fact that argues clearly against a semantic motivation, which would predict an equal distribution across contexts with or without a potential for stress clashes. 100% - , - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - , 90% 80% 70% 60% 50%

~

00

40%

11

o o

30% 20% 10%

0% initially stressed adjective

noninitially stressed adjective

Figure 18. The distribution of adverbs intervening between the negator never and initially and noninitially stressed attributive adjectives in a British newspaper corpus (The Daily Telegraph 1991-2000, The Guardian 1990-2000, The Daily Mail 1993-2000, The Times 1990-2000)

We may note in passing some further contrasts between the data presented in figures 17 and 18. For one thing, the frequency of modifiers is considerably lower following never than following not even in the context of noninitially stressed adjectives. 60 An explanation for this is beyond the scope of a quantitative study. Possibly, the contrast is either founded in a semantically or stylistically motivated tendency towards further modification of the attributive structures, or due to a carry-over effect on noninitially stressed attributes negated by not from their initially stressed counterparts, which quasi-obligatorily require additional premodification. Secondly, the share of 66 percent of initially stressed adjectives occurring in constructions with never is not significantly closer to the expected average proportion of 78 percent of initially stressed adjectives than the share of 64 percent of the same type of adjectives in constructions with not. 61 This argues in favour of the semantic and stylistic account (proposed in

142

Analysis ofattributive structures

connection with not) for the rarity of initially stressed adjectives (tendentially expressing basic and simple meanings) in the relatively elaborate negated attributive structures under consideration. However, the presence of prefixes (negative or other) in the adjectives negated by never plays no discernible role in the corpus data. On the whole, the data for attributive adjectives negated by never contain only two examples of negatively prefixed adjectives (uncovered and unendearing), and besides numerous adjectives equipped with Germanic or Romance prefixes, there is also no dearth of noninitially stressed adjectives without a prefix or with an etymologically opaque prefix (e.g. identified,justifiable, neglected, possessed, sentimental, substantiated, sufficient). In conclusion, the group of adjectives that is licensed to appear as attributive adjectives negated by never turns out to be free of any rhythmic restrictions: initially and noninitially stressed adjectives can follow the negator without giving rise to stress clashes. It is, however, subject to semantic constraints, which have not been controlled for in the present study. Crucially, constructions involving never differ significantly from parallel constructions involving not. The latter are dependent on certain semantic or stylistic conditions, but are furthermore constrained by the strict application of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. That initially stressed adjectives are not excluded on principled grounds can be seen from the vast number of examples in which they are buffered by intervening adverbs. The same examples testify to the fact that the presence of a negative prefix is not a precondition to its occurrence in negated attributive position. In addition to semantic restrictions and stylistic considerations, the construction is highly susceptible to a quasi-categorical prohibition against stressed initial syllables in adjectives immediately following the stressed negator not. As a consequence, the use of an initially stressed adjective as a negated attribute is either completely avoided or the introduction of a more or less dummy element as a stress clash buffer is enforced. The preference for an alternating rhythm thus turns into a compulsory rule. The question raised at the outset of this study as to whether the negation of attributive adjectives by not is morphologically or rhythmically determined, can thus be answered in favour of the rhythmic account, and Bolinger's (l980a) intuitions have been confirmed as statistically highly valid. What is more, in the present study we have witnessed the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation extending a good way into the domain of syntax proper: the avoidance of stress clashes has the power to disqualify syntactic constructions involving words of a particular rhythmic shape or to prompt the introduction of an additional word which serves a rhythmic rather than a semantic or syntactic purpose. This finding of course has theoretical implications for a model of grammar. Bolinger's

Summary

143

(1980a: 63) proposal of a phonological output filter, discarding certain structures that the syntax may generate, preserves the autonomy of the syntactic component. However, in Chapter 6, two more far-reaching models of the interaction of semantic, syntactic, phonological and other factors will be proposed that provide a more elegant account of this and other phenomena.

4.8.

Summary

In this first chapter on rhythmic alternation effects, the focus has been on the morphology and syntax of attributive structures and studied phenomena of synchronic variation as well as diachronic change. The discussion has progressed from single attributes like worse(r), via attributes that can occur on their own but derive significant advantages from their incorporation into more complex attributive structures (the a-adjectives and all past participles), to complex attributive structures involving premodification by the adverb quite, coordinations of two colour adjectives or negation by not and never. What unifies them all is their susceptibility to the rhythmic constraints defined by the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. Attributive structures have revealed themselves to be a particularly fruitful ground for the study of effects of rhythmic alternation due to their close syntactic and prosodic integration. They are generally pronounced without any substantial intervening pauses, a fact that makes them particularly sensitive to the avoidance of stress clashes and lapses (cf. Selkirk 1984: 286-320). What is more, attributive structures contain two or more content words that are usually not separated by unstressed function words, which take care of stress clashes elsewhere in the sentence. There are two further aspects exacerbating the situation. To begin with, English words in the past few centuries have exhibited a decided trend towards monosyllabicity (cf. Bolinger 1965b: 179), and adjectives, which lost their inflections during the ME period, have been particularly affected. As a result, the simplest possible attributive structure consisting of an adjective and a noun has come to put the rhythmic well-formedness of the sentence at risk (cf. Minkova 1990: 332; 1991: 180). What is more, Biber and Clark (2002: 57) find that between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, there has been a steady increase in the complexity of attributive structures: the frequency of attributive adjectives and nouns as premodifiers has grown considerably. In a similar vein, Biber and Finegan (1989: 490-491,499-501) state a general drift towards a greater formality in fictional writing between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, with a moderate reversal in the twentieth century. One of the indicators that their judgement hinges on is the increas-

144

Analysis ofattributive structures

ing complexity of noun phrases that the authors find in their corpus. In fact, concurrent findings have from time to time been mentioned in the corpus studies contained in the present chapter: for instance, complex attributive structures involving premodified or coordinated past participles attain a statistically noteworthy circulation only in LModE and later periods. To conclude the empirical studies of the grammar of noun phrases, the diachronic data with a focus on complex attributive structures can be put together in a single figure and complemented by data on those attributive structures that have so far not been placed in their historical context. Figure 19 shows the frequency of different multiword attributive structures (i.e. those containing more attributive material than just a single adjective) from EModE to PDE in relation to the number of words in the respective corpus sections. The corpus is composed of all the by now familiar collections of dramatic and non-dramatic prose, stretching from the sixteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Different types of constructions are represented by distinct curves. Attributive uses of worse(r) do not figure in this diagram since premodification and coordination do not play an important part in this case, and since the data on which the diagram is based exclusively involve multiword attributive structures. The first curve refers to the full set of premodified or otherwise complex a-adjectives examined in Schltiter (in preparation b), i.e. adrift, afire, afloat, afraid, aghast, agog, akin, alive, aloof, ashamed, askew, asleep, awake, aware and awry, of which section 4.3 has looked at only two items, ashamed and awake. Like these two showcase examples, some other members of the set also depend essentially on the avoidance of a stress clash as a precondition for attributive use. The second curve lumps together all premodified or coordinated past participles and past participles of particle verbs, and the data come directly from the analyses in sections 4.4.1 to 4.4.5. The third curve delineates the evolution, studied in 4.5, of the frequency of attributive adjectives modified by the (maximizer or moderator) quite, whether preceding or following the indefinite article. The fourth represents examples of coordinated mono- and disyllabic colour adjectives (those investigated in section 4.6 in combination with yellow plus the additional disyllabic adjectives crimson, golden, fallow, orange, purple, russet, scarlet, silver and violet) in the rhythmically critical attributive position. Finally, the fifth curve sums up the frequency of negated attributive adjectives, including both negators investigated in section 4.7. The data in figure 19 make it clear why only the past participles and the attributive adjectives modified by quite were subjected to a diachronic analysis. The other three types remain relatively infrequent in the earlier corpus sections. These statistically insufficient historical data have not been treated in any detail in the above presentation. At a closer look, they

Summary

145

have, however, revealed a remarkably constant influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation throughout the centuries. CI'l

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25

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d.l

.:::::;

..c .;::

20

d.l

15

15. E 0

u 4-< 0

..... u l::: d.l

23.2 (456)

(79)

4.2 (67)

~ ~

--,!s-- 4.9

10 5

2.9 (48) --,!s-- 2.3 (39) ~1.8 (31) --,l+- lA (24)

--,l+-0.9 (14) --e-O.l (I 804 (166)

,

7.0 (138)

--e-O.O (0)

I

;:l

0'"

2.2 (44)

d.l


0 EEPF + EPD 1518-1700

ECF+ EPD 1701-1780

NCF+EPD 1781-1903

BNC wridom I 1964-1993

Figure 19. The frequency of different types of complex attributive structures per I million words in a series of prose corpora (EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD, BNC wridom 1)62

For all five types of attributive structures, the figure displays a more or less clear increase in their respective incidences per one million words. The so-called 'predicative-only' a-adjectives only begin to appear attributively in any noteworthy numbers in the nineteenth century. The fact that they are from the outset more frequent in complex attributive structures (9 single unmodified uses in the period from 1781 to 1903 and 25 complex ones; 21 single unmodified uses in the BNC wridom 1 and 44 complex ones) suggests that the presence of such complex attributive structures in the language is a precondition to their licensing in prenominal position. The currency of complex uses of past participles virtually explodes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where expressions like sleep-drunk, awe-stricken, panic-stricken, lock-knit, loosely-knit, unlit,fire-lit and dimly

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Analysis ofattributive structures

lit flourish in attributive uses. In contrast to earlier periods where these structures were hardly to be found, they testify to an increasingly creative and versatile style, encoding more and more finely differentiated meanings in attributive position. The rise of attributive adjectives modified by quite is not as sudden, but takes place at a constantly high rate. This increase is presumably correlated with the emergence of the moderator meaning of quite, asserting the truth of the proposition being made. The coding of such epistemic meanings in attributive position may also be viewed as a novel extension of the semantics of noun phrases. The remaining two types of attributive structures, coordinated colour adjectives and negated attributes, have long been part of the language. There is no particular jump in their frequencies, but they show a tendency to occur in higher numbers in the later corpus sections. Though the details for earlier centuries are not presented here, they can be shown to have been subject to the striving for an alternating rhythm to the same degree as in the present day. Speculations as to the reasons for the complication of noun phrases in the recent history of the English language are reported in Biber and Clark (2002: 62-64). The authors attribute the development, among other things, to "an 'informational explosion', resulting in pressure to communicate information as efficiently and economically as possible." Biber and Finegan (1989: 499-501) likewise make socio-economic and intellectual developments responsible for the trend towards highly informational writing styles in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The semantic content of complex attributive structures has never been the focus of the empirical studies presented so far, but it is obvious that in comparison to simple attributive adjectives they can convey a considerably wider range of meanings. Considered from a rhythmic perspective, the increasing complexity of attributive structures reveals itself to be no disadvantage, as one might have expected, but on the contrary, the presence of a larger number of syllables provides additional 'landing sites' for shifted stresses. Thus, the stress patterns become more flexible and can respond adaptively to rhythmic difficulties. Effects of this kind have been at the centre of the preceding discussion. This trend runs counter to the tendency, stated by Minkova (1990: 332; 1991: 180), towards less rhythmic attributive structures. Crucially, we have seen that the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is empirically measurable in all the constructions under investigation and at any historical stage. No general trend either towards rhythmic well-formedness or ill-formedness can be found in the English language. In contrast, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has been argued to interact with a large number of competing motivations that at times prevail against

Summary

147

it and at other times recede in favour of the rhythmic ideal. The following are the most important factors that have been referred to. - Semantics is always a factor to be reckoned with. Different meanings can (come to) be inherent in different words or word forms, and in different constructions. Thus, the scope of quite is larger in pre-determiner position than in post-determiner position, and attributive uses in contrast to predicative uses imply a non-temporary, characterizing meaning. Likewise, the gradability of adjectives plays a major role in constructions with quite and in negated attributive position. Moreover, situationdependent semantic factors (of which the ordering of yellow before red cards is only one obvious example) and perceptual effects like the relative prominence of two colours have to be taken into account since their influence on syntactic ordering can hardly be underestimated. Finally, where there is no semantic distinction between morphological variants, speakers naturally tend to infer one, which, if it becomes established, leads to the fixation of formerly variable patterns as in the cases of broke and broken or (to some extent) struck and stricken. Language users' creative treatment of linguistic structures also plays a part in the grammatical fixation of a morphological tendency. An originally rhythmically motivated distribution of suffixed and suffixless past participles may be reinterpreted as a grammatical rule. This necessarily leads to a generalization of the rule to contexts where its application is not rhythmically motivated, and the situation congeals into an inflexible pattern. Generalization effects fixing disyllabic past participles in attributive position have been demonstrated for most of the past participles studied in section 4.4. However, rhythmically motivated exceptions have been found for the pairs knit/knitted and lit/lighted. Similarly, the distribution of worse and worser has been shown to be highly sensitive to differing rhythmic situations. The latter pair, worse and worser, as well as the variant forms of past participles have given rise to actively promoted standardization tendencies that were particularly characteristic of the eighteenth century. The striving for logic and objectivity in language militated against the redundant encoding of meaning and enforced an adherence to the 'one meaning - one form' principle. As a result, free rhythmically determined variation tended to be eliminated in numerous cases. To some degree, biuniqueness as a principle of encoding represents a well-motivated functional tendency. The elimination of variants, in particular of infrequent items, reduces the memory load and simplifies processing in this respect, while it is detrimental to other adaptive mechanisms. Two similar functional principles are those of system congruity, which refers to the uniqueness of morphological means used to

148

Analysis ofattributive structures

encode a particular grammatical distinction, and constructional iconicity, which designates the preference for semantically marked categories to bear a corresponding morphological feature. In the case of the redundandy marked comparative worser, system congruity and constructional iconicity have turned out to furnish a variant that was exploited for rhythmic purposes. If these three principles had, however, succeeded in generalizing the use of worser across all contexts, rhythmic alternation would have been impaired. - The Law of the Increasing Constituents has played a part as a syntactic sequencing principle whose effects are largely in accord with those of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation in the ordering of coordinated attributive colour adjectives. In contrast to the rhythmic principle, its effects were, however, hard to ascertain in the face of overly strong semantic orientations. Furthermore, we have seen how different text types (dramatic or nondramatic prose, newspaper texts), stylistic levels (tabloids vs. quality papers), linguistic modes (spoken vs. written language) and national varieties (British vs. American English) set up different frames within which morphological and syntactic variants may adapt to rhythmic preferences. Thus, as has been shown in particular in Schliiter (to appear), American English is simply less advanced in the establishment of the irregular participle lit and in the establishment of the regular participle knitted, but further advanced in the evolution towards the predeterminer use of quite. This evolution is promoted by the spoken registers and retarded in newspaper language, especially in quality papers. Despite developmental differences, the distribution of the variants is to a certain extent determined by rhythmic requirements. What remains from the analysis of numerous kinds of attributive structures is a highly significant and constant influence of rhythmic alternation above and beyond an impressive array of semantic considerations, grammatical fixation, standardization, the preference for the uniform encoding of semantic categories, system congruity, general syntactic sequencing principles and differences related to style, register and geographical location. After all of these factors have received their due consideration, in many cases a margin remains that is still underdetermined and is put to use to improve the rhythmic movement of the structures in question. What is more, rather than feeding on the bits that other determinants leave open, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has in some cases been shown to prevail against competing motivations, and in many cases to determine the direction of diachronic change at the expense of other factors. It is most interesting to observe the range and diversity of English attributive structures that the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation impinges on.

Summary

149

The most numerous among the variants undergoing its influence are monoand disyllabic forms of past participles. These participles differ not only in their number of syllables, but first and foremost in their morphological make-up. Drunk, broke and knit can take an additional participial suffix and struck and lit are replaced by equivalents with a different morphological history. Irregular participial variants like these have to be stored in the lexical entry for the respective verbs, and the rhythmic principle responsible for the selection of the disyllabic variants in stress clash contexts must extend its influence as far as the selection of morphological variants. The case of worse and worser is a similar one. Both the simple suppletive and the redundandy suffixed comparative variants must (temporarily) be associated with the lexical entry for bad, and the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has sufficient influence to decide the choice in many cases. In the remaining phenomena treated so far we are witnessing repercussions of the preference for rhythmic alternation in the domain of syntax. The Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has been shown to co-determine the order of words in attributive structures involving the indefinite article plus the degree modifier quite and in coordinated pairs of colour adjectives. In both cases, the selection of the elements is a matter of the semantics, but their arrangement is to a significant degree subject to prosodic tendencies. Finally, the avoidance of stress clashes is an essential precondition to the prenominal occurrence of certain a-adjectives and negated adjectives. In these two cases, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has the power to bar unrhythmic expressions from the highly sensitive attributive position and thus interferes with an ordinary syntactic process. In sum, the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation extends well into the determination of morphological and syntactic choices. An adequate description of English grammar can thus achieve the greatest possible degree of generality only if it allows for the co-presence of syntactic, morphological and semantic regularities and phonological principles such as the preference for an alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. Having stated this result, it is obvious that those theories that bank on modular and derivational models of grammar will be unable to integrate this kind of generalization.

Chapter 5 Analysis of verbal and adverbial structures

Having dealt with a large variety of rhythmic alternation effects that focussed on the internal structure of noun phrases, we now turn to other syntactic constructions that can roughly be subsumed under the interrelated categories of verbal and adverbial structures. The grammatical structures that will come under scrutiny here present a varied picture; they are less homogeneous than the attributive structures and do in most cases not share the extreme sensitivity to stress clashes that is characteristic of the elements making up a noun phrase. Nevertheless, the phenomena studied in what follows and those exemplified in Chapter 4 are tied together by the generalization that threatening stress clashes are bypassed by grammatical means. Thus, the present chapter pursues the same overall objective as the preceding one, viz. to provide evidence for the role of rhythm as a determinant of grammatical variation and change.

5.1.

Introduction

Before this task can be addressed, some introductory remarks are in place. At the outset, some refinements of the binary distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables will be needed. In the present introduction, only a rough sketch will be provided; it will be further exemplified in the subsequent sections. Secondly, the structures investigated in this chapter will be circumscribed more closely and the logic behind their selection will be clarified. Subsequently, the central hypotheses underpinning this chapter will be formulated, and finally the arrangement of individual sections will be elucidated. Since grammatical constructions outside of attributive structures, for instance adverbials and various verbal structures, form less integrated wholes, their rhythmic make-up is more diverse than that of attributive structures. While a binary classification into stressed and unstressed syllables was found to be sufficient in the previous chapter, the present group of structures necessitates a refined categorization scheme. For our purposes, the familiar classification will be extended in two different ways, one referring to the stress level of a syllable and the other to the presence of a pause intervening between two syllables.

Introduction

151

The simple division into stressed and unstressed syllables, adopted in Chapter 4 from Kelly and Bock (1988: 392), classifies (monosyllabic) function words as unstressed and content words as stressed (on their most prominent syllable). However, Obendorfer (1998: 82) shows that inherently stressed words do not necessarily carry stress and that inherently unstressed words are not necessarily unstressed; these assignments only reflect the prototypical state of affairs. Thus, at least in some contexts in the following studies, the possibility has to be reckoned with that a relatively unimportant function word receives stress to avoid a stress lapse and to satisfy the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation (e.g. Jennifer has selected them/or her; cf. Gimson 1994: 230; Obendorfer 1998: 99). Since this outcome of the principle manifests itself only in the rhythmic structure, but not in the grammatical structure of the construction, as such it is of no particular interest for a study of grammatical variation and change. However, the effected change will occasionally lead to an altered rhythmic context to which a grammatical construction is sensitive. The results of such effects will be brought to bear in the studies under 5.3. A second complication with regard to Kelly and Bock's (1988: 392) classification is that the interpretation of the data will frequently necessitate a consideration of the overall prosodic shape of the sentence, which is superimposed on the rhythmic level. In particular, this involves a phenomenon for which the pictorial term prosodic overshadowing will be employed. The term refers to the fact that the stress on a syllable is downgraded if the immediately following material itself carries a higher degree of stress (cf. for similar observations Bolinger 1965b: 149-150; 1979: 56; Zwicky 1969: 429). This effect can be related to the Beat Deletion rule introduced in section 2.1.3. It is thus another consequence of the application of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, but is only relevant to the present discussion as far as the rhythmic change brought about by prosodic overshadowing affects the rhythmic context of grammatical variants. As a preliminary illustration, compare the first syllables in the three verbal structures return, go away and go home. While the initial syllable of return is clearly unstressed, the monosyllabic verb go in go away is taken to be stressed.! Crucially, in the collocation with home, the same verb is immediately followed by another stressed syllable, which moreover bears a stronger stress. In accordance with Beat Deletion, go will in this case be considered to have only secondary stress, which is intermediate between the former two constellations. The conventional indication of stress levels to be adopted below thus resorts to grave accents representing secondary stress: return, go aw4J;, go home. The outcomes of this ternary classification will play a role in the analyses from section 5.3.3 onwards.

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Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

As already mentioned, an additional extension of the categorization scheme for rhythmic contexts is the occurrence of a pause following the grammatical variants under consideration. In two of the analyses included in this chapter (sections 5.3.1 and 5.3.2), the target structures will be classified according to whether they follow a stressed syllable, an unstressed syllable or a punctuation mark. The implication is that any kind of punctuation mark represents a more or less substantial pause, Le. the end of a prosodic unit (be it a sentence, clause or phrase). In terms of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, these contexts belong to the uncritical ones since they do not provoke a stress clash; yet, as will be seen, they exhibit a deviant behaviour that singles them out from other uncritical contexts. No distinction will be made between different punctuation marks, though these may well translate into prosodic boundaries of different widths. In view of the lack of standardization of punctuation practices before the eighteenth century, this methodological trick allows no more than a crude approximation of the prosodic phrasing of a sentence, but it has the advantage of providing a quantifiable and maximally objective measure. A few words are necessary to explain the criteria that have led to the selection of the grammatical phenomena to be described. Kelly and Bock's (1988: 392) list of items that usually do not receive stress (determiners, pronouns, prepositions, contractible auxiliaries, the copula, contractible not) and the fact that typically stressed words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) are usually separated by such words when occurring outside of attributive structures, give rise to the expectation that rhythm will not be as much at stake in the body of the sentence as within noun phrases. The high incidence of unstressed function words renders the concatenation of finite verbs, infinitives, -ing-forms, verbal complements and adverbial phrases less prone to stress clashes. For present purposes, this also makes it more difficult to trace the influence of rhythmic alternation. The units that will be taken into consideration include multi-word sentence adverbials, other adverbs modifying finite verbs, infinitival complements and -ing-forms to which an a-prefix may attach. Unlike attributive structures, where the position immediately preceding the noun automatically involves a high potential for stress clashes, in these more heterogeneous parts of a sentence, a particular effort has to be made to keep the rhythmic contexts constant, both before and after the items in question. Thus, many of the following analyses will take certain measures to single out closely circumscribed constructions that represent syntactically and rhythmically tightly knit units within sentences. Within these, positions preceded and followed by a stressed syllable within the same prosodic unit represent the rhythmically critical contexts, while positions preceded or followed by at least one un-

Introduction

153

stressed syllable or a pause represent the uncritical contexts, with positions adjacent to a prosodically overshadowed word intermediate. Despite these methodological obstacles, the present chapter seeks to provide further support for the central hypotheses of this book: even in the relatively heterogeneous verbal and adverbial structures under consideration, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation exerts a quantifiable influence on the choice of grammatical variants and on the direction of linguistic change. It will moreover be shown that the strictness with which rhythmic alternation is implemented is a matter of degree. For one thing, it depends on the stress level of the clashing syllables, with adjacent primary stresses being avoided more strongly than sequences of one stressed and one prosodically overshadowed syllable. For another, it disappears with the occurrence of a prosodic boundary separating two clashing syllables. The characterization of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation and of its efficacy, begun in Chapter 4, will thus be rounded off by a more comprehensive analysis of more varied grammatical structures. The present chapter will suggest that, when certain conditions are met, the sphere of influence of the principle extends to prosodically coherent structures outside of noun phrases. By hypothesis, its influence will however be less consistent in these domains. Another related hypothesis is that the limited influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation will be counterbalanced by other functional factors that impinge on the grammatical structure of a sentence. Above all, these constraints are of a semantic nature and have received considerable attention in the secondary literature. Semantic and other constraints will therefore be assigned an important place in the description. Last but not least, the following discussion will foster the hypothesis that, being a functionally motivated, diachronically stable principle, effects of rhythmic alternation will be manifest in synchronic snapshots as well as in the evolution of English. The following analyses will indicate different historical scenarios that can insightfully be related to rhythmic influences. The sequence of the subsections making up this chapter will be as follows. The chapter opens with an analysis of sentence adverbs directly negated by not (section 5.2). These tightly knit expressions are peculiar in that they present an extremely strong impingement of stress clash avoidance. They link this chapter up with the final study of the previous one, which dealt with the highly similar case of negated attributive adjectives. More typical adverbs provide the subject of the three case studies in section 5.3. From the secondary literature summarized there we know that the marking of some adverbs with the suffix -Iy tends to be variable when these adverbs follow their verbal heads. The studies of quick(ly) and slow(ly) exploit this variability. While these two analyses take several measures to

154

Analysis o/verbal and adverbial structures

fit the widely differing kinds of rhythmic contexts into a categorization scheme, the subsequent study of scarce(ly) concentrates on a very restricted use of the adverb preceding its verbal head. This analysis provides evidence for the continued relevance of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation for adverbial marking in PDE. The following group of four analyses assembled in section 5.4 looks at the variable marking of infinitives dependent on superordinate verbs that straddle the boundary between main verbs and auxiliaries. Rhythmic alternation will thus be shown to exert an influence on categories of major grammatical relevance. Like the infinitive marker to, the variable a-prefix on -ing-forms, investigated in connection with two different superordinate verbs in section 5.5, represents a grammatical morpheme whose presence is to some extent conditioned by the avoidance of stress clashes. These two analyses involve multifarious and complex ramifications with interesting implications for linguistic theory and therefore come last in this chapter. The summary in section 5.6 integrates the findings from this chapter with those already familiar from Chapter 4 and provides a preliminary survey of the empical findings gained in this book. Thus, the summary will elucidate the nature and extent of the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation: it will delimit its domain of influence in the grammar of English, it will (re-)define the preference expressed by the principle and its scope of application, it will list the determinants of grammatical variation with which it has been found to interact, and it will consider the preference for rhythmic alternation in a larger perspective, including diachronic variation and differences between geographical and stylistic varieties of English.

5.2.

Negated sentence adverbs in PDE

The following study, dealing with negated sentence adverbs, has a direct link to the study of negated attributive adjectives outlined in section 4.7. In the context of the restrictions on the use of initially stressed adjectives negated by not, a few authors remark that the negation of sentence adverbs by not is similarly restricted. Langendoen (1982: 110), for one, abiding with his lexical account, observes that the negation of sentence adverbs by not is licensed only if the adverb is marked as [+ not _ ] in the lexicon. This reliance on lexical specifications however excludes any explanatory generalizations across the adverbs concerned, nor does it discern any logical connection between the two similarly restricted phenomena of negated attributes and sentence adverbs. In their grammar, Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 810) likewise point out that, like attributive adjectives, sentence adverbs cannot in general be directly negated by not. The exceptions to this

Negated sentence adverbs in PDE

155

rule (e.g. unexpectedly, unreasonably), they argue, correspond to those for negated attributes, i.e. they involve a productive and transparently negative prefix. An additional exception, which Huddleston and Pullum are unable to explain, is provided by the adverb surprisingly. A systematic study of the ability of sentence adverbs to take notnegation will have to take into consideration that sentence adverbs do not represent a homogeneous class. In her extensive study, Swan (1988: 3077) distinguishes four groups of sentence adverbs: evaluative adverbs expressing the speaker's evaluation of the proposition (e.g. curiously, fortunately, sadly, surprisingly), modal adverbs assigning a truth value to the associated predication (e.g. apparently, certainly, obviously, undeniably), subject disjuncts evaluating the subject of the sentence with regard to an event (e.g. cleverly, justly, reasonably, wisely), and speech act adverbials relating to the speaker's speech act rather than reflecting his or her attitude towards the sentence uttered (e.g. bluntly, frankly, literally, roughly). While all of these groups contain adverbs that can take negative prefixes, Swan (1988: 40) points out that not-negation is (normally) restricted to the group of evaluative adverbs. However, this characteristic is not shared by all members of the group. Without offering an explanation, the author notes that not surprisingly is acceptable, that not ironically is of doubtful acceptability, and that not fortunately, not strangely and not oddly are all unacceptable. So far, an explanatory generalization across the group of evaluative sentence adverbs is at a premium. Moreover, as will become obvious, a look at corpus data suggests that the alleged restriction of not-negation to evaluative sentence adverbs is not absolutely watertight. The corpus yields several negated instances of sentence adverbs that are more adequately described as subject disjuncts, though the semantic distinction between these two groups is notoriously blurred (cf. Swan 1988: 13-23, 535-538). Two examples will be quoted below in (3). Contra Swan (1988: 65), it will be shown that this group is, under certain conditions, compatible with not-negation. For the purposes of the following analysis, instances of evaluative adverbs as well as subject disjuncts have been included, whereas modal adverbs and speech act adverbials have been excluded. 2 This study aims to test the hypothesis that, as in the case of attributive adjectives, the licensing of adverbs as negated sentence adverbs depends on the presence or absence of stress on their initial syllable. This assumption was first put to an empirical test and confirmed in Schliiter (2003: 99100) on the basis of the British newspaper The Times for 1990-1994. For the present study, a different, wider dataset was employed that includes three years each of The Times, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian. A search was carried out that retrieved all occurrences of

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Analysis o/verbal and adverbial structures

adverbs suffixed in -ly that were directly or indirectly preceded by not and immediately followed by a comma. All hits that did not represent evaluative sentence adverbs or subject disjuncts were eliminated. In this way, a random set was compiled that contained evaluative sentence adverbs and subject disjuncts occurring in sentence-initial or medial position. The analysis lays no claim to exhaustivity since those sentence adverbs occurring sentence-finally and all those not followed by commas escaped the analysis. 3 The matches thus retrieved comprise examples with and without additional degree adverbs intervening between the negator and the sentence adverb. Two illustrative examples of each category are given in (l) and (2). (1)

a. England's predicament on the field is, not surprisingly, a reflection oftheir situation off it: ... (The Daily Telegraph 1999) b. Not uncomically, the organisers insist that "at least two" ofthe five judges, chaired by Ben Okri, will be African. (The Times 1999)

(2)

a. Not altogether surprisingly, the hooligans tended to be 'suspicious ofstrangers '. (The Daily Telegraph 1999) b. She subscribes, perhaps not so unexpectedly, to astrology. (The Daily Telegraph 1999)

While the above examples all involve noninitially stressed sentence adverbs, the construction becomes problematic with initially stressed adverbs immediately following the negator, unless a degree adverb intervenes as a buffer. By drawing a distinction between adverbs with their primary stress on the initial syllable and those with their primary stress on a later syllable, the following figure 20 reveals a rhythmically conditioned difference. The figure exhibits a drastic difference between the two types of adverbs. 4 While intervening degree modifiers are relatively rare in connection with noninitially stressed adverbs, none of the 17 examples of initially stressed ones occurs without a preceding degree modifier. 5 Two examples involving different degree modifiers are given in (3). (3)

a. Portillo 's friends claim, not wholly credibly, that an integral aspect to Portillo 's politics, the compassionate social tolerance, has been obscured ... (The Guardian 1999) b. Voters also get uneasy when their governments are running huge budget deficits, so Bill Clinton has gained credit, not entirely justly, as the preSident who got rid ofthe red ink. (The Times 1998)

Negated sentence adverbs in PDE

157

As with the intervening adverbs in the case of attributive adjectives, wholly and entirely contribute relatively little to the overall meaning of the sentence. Thus, the high incidence of such modifiers before initially stressed adverbs suggests that they may be inserted for rhythmic rather than semantic reasons. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that there are extremely few degree modifiers to be found before noninitially stressed sentence adverbs: they amount to no more than 2 percent of the total, as is the case in the Schliiter (2003: 99) data. 100% -,------90% 80% 70% 60% 50% . 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

initially stressed sentence adverb

noninitially stressed sentence adverb

Figure 20. The distribution of adverbs intervening between the negator not and initially and noninitially stressed sentence adverbs in a British newspaper corpus (The Daily Telegraph 1998-2000, The Guardian 19982000, The Daily Mail 1998-2000, The Times 1998-2000)

A look at the absolute numbers of initially and noninitially stressed sentence adverbs given in figure 20 reveals a striking imbalance: on the one hand, the corpus yields as many as 3456 noninitially stressed sentence adverbs, but only 17 initially stressed ones (0.5 percent). That this is not due to a general unavailability of initially stressed adverbs in sentence adverbial function is testified by a cross-check carried out on the same corpus: out of a random selection of 1561 (non-negated) evaluative sentence adverbs and subject disjuncts, 666 (43 percent) were initially stressed, including items like curiously, fortunately, happily, interestingly, oddly, sadly, strangely and strikingly.6 Direct negation by not thus appears to be a genuine knock-out context for initially stressed sentence adverbs if occurring without a buffer.

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Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

It has to be admitted, moreover, that the types of adverbs that occur as negated sentence adverbs are not free from other limitations. By far the most frequent item is the word surprisingly, which accounts for 3161 (93 percent) out of the 3398 instances of noninitially stressed and unpremodified sentence adverbs. The remaining 7 percent involve only a limited number of lexemes. Among the most frequent items are inappropriately, uncommonly, unexpectedly, unnaturally, unsurprisingly and unusually. All of these notably belong to the class of evaluative adverbs. The entire sample of 3473 sentence adverbs contains only 58 adverbs (1.7 percent) that may pass as subject disjuncts. This number does however not deviate from the share of subject disjuncts in the random set of 1561 non-negated adverbs assembled for the cross-check, which contained 22 subject disjuncts (104 percent).? Not-negation is thus not restricted to evaluative sentence adverbs. Examples such as those in (3) show that subject disjuncts, for which, according to Swan (1988: 65), this type of negation is not normally available, can in fact be preceded by not. In many cases, they are hard to distinguish from evaluative sentence adverbs, since both types contain a component of evaluation by the speaker. The more frequent adverbs that represent good candidates for subject disjuncts in the sample are noninitially stressed: there are as many as 42 occurrences of not unreasonably, plus 5 of not implausibly, 2 of not unjustly and I of not unjustifiably. All three initially stressed subject disjuncts and some noninitially stressed ones are accompanied by a weakly stressed buffer element: there is 1 occurrence each of not entirely justly, not quite credibly, not wholly credibly, not all that controversially and not altogether unreasonably plus 3 occurrences of not entirely unreasonably. Thus, among evaluative sentence adverbs as well as subject disjuncts, negation is unproblematic with noninitially stressed adverbs, but severely limited and infrequent with initially stressed ones. The threatening stress clash can, however, be averted by an intervening degree modifier. Possibly the relatively low number of subject disjuncts as opposed to evaluative sentence adverbs is responsible for the fact that Swan (1988: 65) fails to notice their compatibility with not-negation. However, looking at her list of30 subject disjuncts (Swan 1988: 58),21 of which are initially stressed, one wonders whether the addition of a buffer adverb would not make most of them fully acceptable in combination with not. For instance, negated premodified sentence adverbs such as not very cleverly, not quite correctly, not so mercilessly, not altogether sensibly and not all that wisely seem to be perfectly natural collocations. To clarify this issue, a much larger database would have to be used to make up for the scarcity of subject disjuncts, but this task is beyond the scope of the present study.

Negated sentence adverbs in PDE

159

Crucially, the occurrence of negated sentence adverbs such as the extremely frequent surprisingly and less frequent items such as absurdly, accidentally, alarmingly and amazingly invalidates Huddleston and Pullum's (2002: 810) view that the licensing of the construction depends on the morphological shape of the adverb, and in particular on the presence of a negative prefix. The corpus data suggest a different kind of restriction bearing on negated sentence adverbs. Semantically appropriate sentence adverbs are licensed if their initial syllable does not carry the primary stress. In contrast, they are prohibited if their initial syllable is stressed. This restriction is in all probability due to the stress clash arising between the stressed monosyllable not and the adverb. Thus, the construction can be rescued by the introduction of a degree modifier intervening between the negator and the adverb. As is indicated by the stress marks in (2) and (3), these modifiers receive only a moderate degree of stress, even if plurisyllabic themselves. Their relative infrequency in connection with the rhythmically uncritical, noninitially stressed sentence adverbs suggests that they are indeed inserted for rhythmic rather than semantic reasons. Table 2 lists all the degree modifiers found before initially stressed and noninitially stressed sentence adverbs in the corpus analysis and their respective frequenCies. Table 2. Type frequencies of adverbs intervening between not and the negated sentence adverbs in a British newspaper corpus (The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail for the years 1998-2000) altogether entirely so

20 18 14

too very wholly

8 5 5

all that particularly quite

2 2 1

The frequency hierarchy is a different one than in the case of negated attributive adjectives, but the types of modifiers are strikingly similar to those given in table 1 above. In relation to the large total number of sentence adverbs retrieved from the corpus, and compared to the data for negated attributive adjectives in figures 17 and 18 of section 4.7, the number of intervening degree modifiers is, however, extremely low in the rhythmically uncritical cases. 8 The exceptionless use of intervening material in contexts with threatening stress clashes reinforces the conclusion that degree modifiers are first and foremost used as rhythmic buffers, but their semantic contribution is a negligible one. In conclusion, negated attributive adjectives and negated sentence adverbs both represent heavily constrained structures. Besides semantic restrictions, they are subject to an extreme avoidance of stress clashes that would result from an unbuffered adjacency of the stressed monosyllabic

160

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

negator not and an initially stressed adjective or adverb. While it is true that adjectives and adverbs involving a negative prefix are particularly frequent in these constructions, in contrast to most accounts in the secondary literature, it has been shown that the presence of such a prefix is not an obligatory condition. Rather, it happens to afford an unstressed initial syllable, which licenses the adjective or adverb in the construction. Alternatively, the licensing can be secured by a different unstressed first syllable not represented by a prefix or by the intercalation of a degree modifier with reduced stress. Both sections 4.7 and the present one illustrate the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation not only in the role of a preference, but of a sine qua non condition on the acceptability of two syntactic constructions.

5.3.

Suffixed and suffixless adverbs

The marking of adverbs is a longstanding case of morphological variation which has been subject to a substantial number of comments and studies in the linguistic literature. The reasons for the lack of stability of adverbial marking lie deep in the history of the English language (cf. Stroheker 1913: 49-50; Bihl 1916: 157-158; Franz 1986: 223; Jespersen [1949] 1965c: 46; Nevalainen 1997: 146-149; Nevalainen and Rissanen 2002: 378). In OE, the standard adverbial suffix was the ending -e. However, like all unstressed final -e's, the suffix had become mute by the fifteenth century and thus no longer functioned as a grammatical marker. Since its loss, many adverbs have appeared in a form identical to that of the corresponding adjective and have persisted in that form up to PDE (e.g. hard, fast, deep, right, long, loud, etc.). During the ME period, this group was enlarged by additional adjectives that were converted into adverbs, and for a while practically any adjective could be used as an adverb without any change of form. An additional source of unmarked adverbs is represented by suffixless French adverbs that were borrowed into English, such as quite, close, just, round and plain. Furthermore, drawing a line between adverbs on the one hand and adjectives in predicative function on the other is and has always been notoriously difficult: in examples like shine bright, run deep, arrive punctual, sweep the room clean, cut each other dead or take things easy, the final word can either be analyzed as an adverb modifying the verb or as an adjective predicated of the subject or object (cf. Stroheker 1913: 63; Jespersen 1965c: 46-47; Ungerer 1988: 34; Nevalainen 1997: 151). Similarly, before adjectives, the status of an unmarked form may be ambiguous between an additional adjectival conjunct or an adverbial intensifier (e.g. a great big fish, a vast big plain, a charming pleasant fellow; cf.

Suffixed and suffixless adverbs

161

Bolinger 1972: 25; Ungerer 1988: 36; cf. also Jespersen 1965c: 47). Thus, the formal distinctness of adjectives and adverbs has not always been guaranteed in the history of the English language, and PDE has inherited substantial remains of this enduring variability. As an alternative to the unavailable -e-ending, in ME the new adverbial suffix -lich(e), later shortened to -ly, was generalized, which had already been used in many instances in this function as early as OE, but was originally a suffix serving to derive denominal adjectives (cf. Stroheker 1913: 50; Franz 1986: 223; OED 2 1994: s.v. -ly (suffix2); Nevalainen 1997: 146; 2004: 18). This suffix in time became the adverb-forming suffix par excellence. Thus, suffixed adverbs have long been in competition with unmarked adverbs. 9 In the long run, the frequency of adverb marking in -ly has been increasing (cf. Nevalainen 2004: 20). Quantitative evidence for this comes from Nevalainen (1997: 172, 182-183), who investigates the time span from 1350 to 1710 in the Helsinki Corpus. Variable adverbial marking is governed by a considerable number of factors. Previous research offers the following findings. - There is a semantic differentiation between suffixless and suffixcontaining adverbs: while the former tend to be employed for literal, concrete or elementary uses (e.g. physical properties, dimensions, speed, value), the latter show affinities with secondary, abstract or figurative senses. Typical examples include sell cheap/get off cheaply, clean shaven/cleanly dressed, sound asleep/reason soundly, come quick/quickly afterwards, sit high on horse/desire highly, etc. (cf. Jespersen 1965c: 48-51; Donner 1991: 4,10; Nevalainen 1997: 166-167). However, linguists occasionally fail to find the semantic distinction confirmed by naturalistic data: the two adverbial forms seem to be used interchangeably (cf. Donner 1991: 10). - A syntactic constraint refers to the category of the element modified by the adverbs: when modifying adjectives or other adverbs, they frequently appear in the suffixless form, whereas verbal heads show a clear association with marked adverbial modifiers (e.g. full cleer/well vs. fully comprehendyng/delighted; Nevalainen 1997: 166).10 A further syntactic constraint differentiates between examples within the category of adverbs modifying a verbal head. With certain adverbs like slow, quick, cheap, etc. (which are formally identical with adjectives), the syntactic position of the adverb relative to the verb plays a major role: the suffixless form is almost exclusively used in post-verbal, but hardly ever in pre-verbal position (e.g. to drive slow(ly) or to slowly drive, but *to slow drive; cf. Bolinger 1968: 138; Quirk et al. 1985: 405; Ungerer 1988: 35). A likely reason for this tendency can be sought in the incremental processing of utterances. Once a verb is processed, it

162

-

-

-

-

Analysis o/verbal and adverbial structures

paves the way for a following adverb that refers back to it, so that even instances lacking the adverbial marker can immediately be analyzed and appropriately attached. In contrast, if an unmarked adverb precedes its head verb, it may easily be mistaken for an adjective. Even in PDE, there is some functional overlap between suffixed and suffixless adverbs postmodifying a verbal head (e.g. drive slow(ly), buy cheap(ly), etc.). Although in many cases, the use of the unsuffixed variant is regarded as nonstandard, it is still used in informal situations, particularly in American English (e.g. talk daft, pay one's rent regular, play real good, speak to someone sharp, etc.; cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 405406; Ungerer 1988: 33-34; Nevalainen 1997: 146-147). In their grammar, Quirk et al. (1985: 406) remark that the coordination of two adverbs makes the suffixless forms more acceptable (e.g. speak loud and clear, lose fair and square, etc.). Similarly, in compounds with participles, the suffixless adverbial form is frequently employed (e.g. new born barn, dim-lit street), although suffixed forms are equally possible (cf. Nevalainen 1994: 248-249; 1997: 165). Apart from such semantic and syntactic differences, suffixless adverbs have since the eighteenth century, under the sway of prescriptive grammar, been stigmatized as indicative of social inferiority (cf. Sundby, Bj0rge, and Haugland 1991: 200-203; Nevalainen 2004: 20). Suffixless adverbs were, however, tolerated better when they were used as intensifiers before adjectives or adverbs. In fact, suffixless intensifying adverbs have enjoyed a great currency in the history of English (e.g. marvellous graceful, wondrous plain, exceeding dreadful, passing good, mighty strong, precious small, prodigious handsome, etc.; cf. Franz 1986: 224; Nevalainen 1997: 168-169). Suffixless intensifiers, in particular, are still productive today, including examples like devilish cold, burning hot, bitter cold, piercing/biting cold (cf. Fijn van Draat 1967: 98-102; Bolinger 1972: 25), and are adduced by Fijn van Draat as evidence that the avoidance of stress clashes determines the acceptability of the combination. However, rhythmic alternation is violated by other high-frequency combinations of intensifiers and adjectives, such as real good, damn good, dead certain, clean stupid (cf. Ungerer 1988: 36). Thus, the impact of the rhythmic factor is at least questionable in this context. Rhythmic alternation as a factor requiring the presence of the suffix in certain cases is only mentioned by a few authors (e.g. Fijn van Draat 1967: 97; Stroheker 1913: 39; Bihl 1916: 146; Franz 1986: 226), but they never subject their claims to a quantitative study. However, Nevalainen (1997: 165) remarks that that in verse, the presence or ab-

Suffrxed and suffrxless adverbs

163

sence of the adverbial marker may be governed by rhythmic requirements. For prose texts, she finds that the alternation is practically entirely determined by semantic and syntactic factors, so that the variants occur in a complementary distribution in which rhythm has no say (cf. Nevalainen 1997: 175-183). These accumulated insights into the distribution of suffixed and suffixless adverbs suggest that an attempt to isolate any rhythmic influences in a corpus of prose texts has to take account of a large number of competing influences and holds little promise of success. The three following analyses of pairs of suffixed and suffixless adverbs will seek to progressively restrict the contexts studied so as to control for the semantic and syntactic determinants and to focus on the effects of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. As the discussion proceeds, the samples serving as databases will thus become more restricted, but the conclusions that can be drawn from the analyses will in turn become more refined.

5.3.1.

Quick vs. quickly from EModE to PDE

The pair quick and quickly is among the variably marked adverbs which, according to Bolinger (1965b: 149), are semantically largely equivalent and sensitive to rhythmic preferences. For the following analysis, the familiar series of non-dramatic prose corpora covering the sixteenth to twentieth centuries (EEPF, ECF, NCF and BNC wridom I) was searched for all occurrences of quick and quickly (including their spelling variants). Only those examples where the adverbial variants follow their verbal heads were considered, thus taking care of the processing difficulty involved in the pre-verbal use of an adverbial modifier. Interestingly, the extensive nineteenth-century subsection of the corpus does yield five examples of preverbal quick that involve noninitially stressed verbs immediately following the stressed monosyllabic adverb. From the viewpoint of rhythm, these examples are thus impeccable and suggest that rhythm may, after all, play a greater role than has so far been assumed in the licensing of pre-verbal occurrences of adverbs. Two examples are quoted in (4a-b).

(4)

a. Weak from inanition, confusedfrom want ofsleep, harassed with fatigue, and exhausted by perturbation, she felt now so ill, that she solemnly believed her fatal wish quick approaching. (Fanny Burney: Camilla, 1796; NCF) b. ... , the severe task she thought necessary to perform ofgiving him his liberty, with the anguish ofa total inability to judge whether such a step would recall his tenderness, or precipitate

164

Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

his retreat, were suggestions which quick succeeded, and, in a very short time, wholly domineered over every other. (Fanny Burney: Camilla, 1796; NCF) While these examples seem instructive, they do not figure in the following analysis. 11 Except in the few cases mentioned, pre-verbal positions as a rule never select quick, but prefer its explicitly marked competitor quickly, presumably on account of the better processability of the construction. The BNC yielded six post-verbal uses of quick that were likewise excluded since they occurred in unconventional attributive expressions such as getrich-quick scheme and grab-it-quick opportunity. Among the remaining post-verbal uses of quick(ly), the following analysis distinguishes between three types of following contexts. To begin with, independently of the grammatical or syntactic category of the following word, stressed and unstressed syllables following quick(ly) were separated. Since the internal structure of the sentence outside of attributive structures can be of so many diverse kinds, this binary distinction does not take account of the degree of syntactic and prosodic integration holding between the adverb and the following element. Prosodic boundaries have only been taken into consideration insofar as any punctuation mark following quick(ly) was regarded as indicative of a substantial pause and kept separate. It is of course true that punctuation was only regularized in the course of the eighteenth century and that much of the punctuation to be found in earlier works is the doing of later editors. However, some kind of rough measure was needed to come to a maximally objective decision about what to count as a prosodic break. This methodological trick also disregards existing differences between punctuation marks, some of which tend to encode shorter breaks than others. Punctuation marks in a written text therefore present only a very coarse approximation of the complex prosodic reality. All uses of quick(ly) preceding a punctuation mark together form the third category of the count. Examples (5a-e) illustrate the contexts belonging here. (5)

a. My heart took the alarm, and beat quick, my cheeks glowed, my nerves thrilled, and my knees shook with exstasy! (T.G. Smollett: Roderick Random, 1748; ECF) b. "Ah!" said the old gentleman quickly. (Charles Dickens: The Life and Adventures ofNicholas Nickleby, 1839; NCF) c. You tell me about this plant, and I'll kill you quick - bullet in the head, no more pain. (D. Mclntee: White Darkness, 1993; BNC)

Sujjixed and sujjixless adverbs

165

The division into stressed and unstressed syllables deserves some comment. The simple binary division adopted in the analysis of attributive structures is no longer feasible. While in the domain of attributive structures we were dealing with sequences of content words, whose stressbearing syllables are usually endowed with a relatively strong stress, we are now confronted with a large number and variety of function words following quick(ly). The categorization adopted for the following analysis was as follows. For one thing, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation was not applied as mechanically as was done, for instance, by Fijn van Draat (1967). Consider example (6). (6)

As the vessel bent before a light fair wind, we glided quickly over the lagoon under a cloud ofcanvass. (Robert Michael Ballantyne: The Coral Island, 1858; NCF)

Ifwe scanned this example in Fijn van Draat's manner, we would construct the following alternating rhythm: glided quickly over the lagoon. Stress on the definite article is, however, very unlikely. The status of the preposition over is debatable: when occurring between unstressed syllables, the initial syllable may receive a certain amount of stress in order to avoid a sequence of - in this case - five unstressed syllables (cf. glided quickly over the lagoon). In contrast, when occurring after a stressed syllable, over would hardly receive so much stress as to cause a real stress clash (cf. *glided quick over the lagoon). The degree of stress on its initial syllable is thus, to some degree, context-dependent. For the purpose of the corpus analysis, a unique classification of such cases was necessary since the context following quick(ly) had to be established as an independent rather than a dependent variable. It was therefore assumed that a disyllabic preposition introducing a full prepositional phrase never carries so much stress as to give rise to a clash with the preceding adverb even if the latter is monosyllabic. Thus, prepositions heading a full prepositional phrase were generally judged to be stressless. However, when prepositions combine with unstressed personal pronouns and moreover occur in the focus position of a prosodic phrase, they can take on a higher amount of stress just to provide a site for the intonational nucleus of the phrase (cf. the rule of Beat Addition introduced in section 2.1.3 above; see also Jespersen [1909] 1965a: 159; Gimson 1994: 230; Obendorfer 1998: 99). Sentences (7a-b) illustrate this constellation. (7)

a. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears, and she turned quickly from him and walked towards the drawing-room. (Edith CEnone Sommerville: The Real Charlotte, 1894; NCF)

166

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

b. Laura opened it hastily, and cast her eyes quickly over it, as Pen kept his fixed on her, blushing. (William Makepeace Thackeray: The History ofPendennis, 1849; NCF) Though graphically identical, prepositions and adverbial particles were treated in different ways. While prepositions were (apart from the above exceptions) treated as unstressed, particles like over and out in examples (8a-b) were considered stressed.

(8)

a. The evening was quickly over, for Sir Boyvill retired early; ... (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Falkner, 1837; NCF) b. Mr. Wiclifield tapped at a door in a corner ofthe panneled wall, and a girl ofabout my own age came quickly out and kissed him. (Charles Dickens: The Personal History ofDavid Copperfield, 1850; NCF)

Among the three categories established for the count, the one that will be at the centre of the discussion, i.e. occurrences of quick(ly) before stressed syllables, turns out to be the least numerous one: the overwhelming majority of adverbs occur either before punctuation marks or before unstressed prepositions, noninitially stressed adverbial particles like across, away, enough, etc., or other unstressed function words (e.g. and, as, than, that, to). Most ofthe rhythmically critical occurrences are before stressed particles of the types illustrated in (8a-b). This scarcity of potential loci for stress clashes once more bears witness to the rhythmic flexibility prevailing in grammatical structures outside of noun phrases, which makes avoidance strategies aiming at the reduction of stress clashes less pre-eminent. Figure 21 shows the distribution of quick and quickly in rhythmically critical and uncritical contexts. Contrary to expectation, the share of unmarked adverbial uses of quick is highest in the eighteenth century, which is most notorious for its enforcement of standardization. The decrease of the marked variant quickly between the first and second subperiods and the renewed increase between the second and third and third and fourth subperiods is statistically highly significant. 12 The drop in adverb marking in the eighteenth century parallels Nevalainen's (1997: 172) data showing a temporary decrease in token frequency for adverb marking around the second half of the seventeenth century, despite the general trend towards a more consistent marking in the long-term development from ME to the early eighteenth century. Quick seems to have been temporarily conventionalized as an unmarked adverb.

Sufjixed and sufjixless adverbs

30/30=100% 100% 90%

168/173=97%

El----

L 93/96 "<'" =97%

13

""

13

167

119/120=99%

=:J! 1381/1437=96%

15/16=94% 1106/1331 =8~.%.~d1714/1838=93%

80% ..Q -'<

.::=

;:;

70%

~

60%

Il)

50%

"""0

E l::

=92%

40%

Il) ()

....

Il)

0..

30%

22/65=34%

20% 10% 0% EEPF 1518-1700

ECF 1705-1780

NCF 1782-1903

BNC wridom 1 1960-1993

Figure 2 J. The distribution of the post-verbal adverb quickly compared to quick

before stressed syllables, unstressed syllables and punctuation marks in a series of prose corpora (EEPF, ECF, NCF and BNC wridom 1) What is of greater interest for our purposes is the distribution of these unmarked adverbs. Figure 21 clearly indicates that the three rhythmic categories distinguished in the count differentiate successfully between the relative frequencies of marked and unmarked adverbs. Even in the eighteenth century, where quick is used in 42 percent of the cases in total, it hardly permeates into positions where it would lead to a stress clash. What is more, during the entire period investigated, ~uick as an adverb only appears seven times before a stressed syllable. 1 Its frequency in the two rhythmically uncritical contexts is significantly higher in the eighteenth, nineteenth and (for examples preceding punctuation marks) even twentieth centuries. 14 This almost categorical avoidance of stress clashes should suffice to lend credence to the relevance of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation as a factor co-determining the omissibility of the adverbial suffix -ly. Thus, both the presence of a preceding head verb and the avoidance of stress clashes represent almost unexceptionable preconditions to the replacement of quickly by quick. There is no numerically significant deviation from this rule throughout the entire time span studied. Figure 21 also reveals a contrast in the frequency of adverbial marking between instances preceding an unstressed syllable and those preceding a punctuation mark. If the latter can be taken as an indication of a pause, the generalization seems to be warranted that the marked variant quickly is

168

Analysis o/verbal and adverbial structures

maintained to a relatively larger extent before a pause than before an unstressed syllable. 15 This finding could be motivated with reference to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation as a result of stress lapse avoidance. The effect is, however, inseparable from that of yet another factor, which may have a phonological component as well: pre-pausal position, i.e. the position at the end of a prosodic unit, in English is usually correlated with the location of the semantic focus as well as the intonational nucleus of the unit (cf. Couper-Kuhlen 1986: 127; Bolinger 1975: 559,603). This prominent position has to be filled by linguistic material that has sufficient prosodic weight. 16 As Bolinger (1975: 52) remarks, speakers sometimes add syllables for the sole purpose of filling out an intonation. I? Thus, the maintenance of the adverbial marker in pre-pausal position may be related to the need to add phonological substance to the ends of sentences, clauses and phrases by means of an additional syllable. Among the factors influencing the selection of quick and quickly, the coordination of two adverbs is a determinant that can have two sorts of influence, which will be discussed in turn. Both quick and quickly are occasionally found in the company of another adverb. Usually, both conjuncts are either marked, as in (9a-b), or unmarked, as in (1 Oa-b). 18 The entire corpus yields 145 instances of two suffixed adverbs and 32 instances of two suffixless adverbs in combination, but only 11 occurrences where one marked and one unmarked adverb are combined, as in (11 a-b). (9)

a. Opening the door, he spoke a few words quickly but quietly to two females who ran to meet him in the passage. (Charlotte Bronte: Shirley, 1849; NCF) b. Sometimes my pulse beat so quickly and hardly, that I felt the palpitation ofevery artery; ... (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein, 1818; NCF)

(10) a. Mr. Thornton's heart beat quick and strong, andfor the time he utterly forgot the Outwood lane. (Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell: North and South, 1855; NCF) b. ... what storme, what thunder-bolt did euer shoot so quicke and deadly, as then their rage, disdaine, and desire ofbloud changed both their mindes and their looks? (Kingsmill Long: Barclay his Argenis, 1625; EEPF) (11) a. Ofall angles, the acute angle is most in request, and therefore he that presents his offerings acutely and quicke, is accounted the best Mathematician; ... (John Johnson: The Academy ofLove, 1641; EEPF)

Suffixed and suffvdess adverbs

169

b. She kissed him hard and quickly, then spun out ofhis arms, dragging the cover offthe bed to wrap around her. (Jennifer Taylor: Destined to Love, 1992; BNC)

The tendency for two coordinated adverbs to take the same morphological shape is presumably related to processing preferences which are also responsible for the striving for parallelism observed in connection with suffixed and suffixless variants of the comparative worse(r) in section 4.2. Linguists as early as Havers (1931: 69-70; 181) see this preference as conditioned on the one hand by effects of perseveration and anticipation in the processing of a sentence and on the other by a certain aesthetic awareness on the part of the speaker or writer. In a somewhat different vein, Kuno (1987: 7) finds that formally parallel structures will always tend to be interpreted in a parallel fashion although a non-parallel interpretation would equally be possible. 19 Thus, language processing can be shown to favour parallelism of form and meaning. The inclination to encode two parallel meanings in formally parallel linguistic material is unmistakably responsible for the substitution of the marked form hardly for the normally suffixless and semantically different adverb hard in example (9b). The OED 2 (1994: s.v. hardly) quotes this example as the latest occurrence of hardly in the sense of 'vigorously, forcibly, violently', with a time lapse of over a century after the penultimate citation. Example (9b) contrasts with (11 b), which avoids the semantic anomaly, but in exchange tolerates a lack of formal parallelism. A more thorough investigation of the effect of parallel encoding would have to employ a finer differentiation of the corpus data. For the present discussion, only pairs were considered in which quick(ly) was connected to a coordinated adverb by and, but, or or (neither) nor or separated from it by a comma, and in which one or both adverbs were at most accompanied by a short adverb like so, too, as, etc. A question left open since it is beyond the scope of this analysis is whether the preference for parallel encoding decreases with an increasing distance between the two adverbs under consideration. A likely hypothesis would be that adverbs separated by greater distances, as in (12), are less subject to the parallelism constraint. (12) In spite ofall his self-control, Evan breathed quickly and looked eagerly. (George Meredith: Evan Harrington, 1861; NCF)

Furthermore, an in-depth study would have to take into consideration the phonological and morphological shape of the adverbs concerned: some, like deadly in (lOb), do not lend themselves to suffixation and may therefore distort the picture (cf. Bauer 1992: 190).

170

Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

In addition, the present data on coordinated adverbs can be used to test the observation mentioned in Quirk et al. (1985: 406) to the effect that the coordination of two adverbs makes the use of the unmarked forms more acceptable (cf. the introduction in section 5.3). For this purpose, figure 22 compares the percentage of coordinations in which both members are marked to the percentage of marked occurrences in the total. tIl

100% - , - - - - - - - - - - - - -

----3214/3395 =95% 75/83=90%

~;;. 90%

-g

"0

80%

~

70%

,; 60%

~.... 50% 40%

"@

-5

~ 30%

.&c ~


0.

-e-total in coordinated uses

20% 100/0

0%

+------,--c;§-------------=::~----_,_-----_i

EEPF 1518-1700

ECF 1705-1780

NCF 1782-1903

BNC wridom 1 1960-1993

Figure 22. The distribution of the post-verbal adverb quickly compared to quick in

coordinations compared to the overall total in a series of prose corpora (EEPF, ECF, NCF and BNC wridom 1)

Though the number of coordinated structures is extremely low in the first two chronological subsections, the data show that coordinated uses of adverbs have a stronger propensity to remain unmarked than the gross total. It also appears that the frequency of pairs of unmarked adverbs is the larger, the greater the tolerance of unmarked forms in general. Thus, none of the six coordinations in the eighteenth-century data involves a marked form, and in the nineteenth-century data the frequency of 32 percent of coordinations involving unmarked adverbs is still significantly higher than the average of only 17 percent. The contrast does not disappear completely even in the twentieth century, when unmarked adverbs are generally avoided.2° Thus, Quirk et al.' s (1985: 406) observation is clearly confirmed for earlier forms of English as well as for PDE. At this point, it would be desirable to separate the respective contributions of rhythm and coordination to the absence of adverbial marking. Both tendencies overlap to some degree since quick(ly) always precedes an unstressed function word or a pause when occurring in the first position in a coordination, and frequently

Sufjixed and sufjixless adverbs

171

does so when occurring in the second. However, the total of 188 coordinations is inadequate for the fine-grained analysis that would be necessary here and does not produce any (statistically or linguistically) convincing results. In the following study of slow(ly), yielding almost twice as many coordinations, this shortcoming will be compensated for. In many respects, the study of the variable marking of slow will only echo and reinforce the findings outlined so far for its antonym quick(ly). But thanks to the close comparability of the two adverbs, some unexpected but enlightening differences will emerge that would otherwise be lost.

5.3.2.

Slow vs. slowly from EModE to PDE

The following analysis of the variable marking of slow as an adverb employs the same parameters and categories as the analysis of quickY As before, the analysis concentrates on post-verbal uses of slow(ly) (cf. Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 569) and differentiates between three types of following contexts: stressed syllables, unstressed syllables and punctuation marks (indicating a major prosodic boundary). Two examples of each category are quoted in (13) to (15), the first member of each pair representing a non-coordinated use and the second a coordinated one. (13)

a.... and then the figure, turning sLOwly round, discovered to Frederic the jleshless jaws and empty sockets ofa skeleton, wrapt in a hermit's cowl. (Henry Walpole: The Castle of Otranto, 1764; ECF) b. The bars dropped noiselessly and sLOwly down, till the chain tightened at the staple. (William Harrison Ainsworth: Jack Sheppard, 1839; NCF)

(14) a. Aurelian gathered up his Spirits, and walked sLOwly towards his Lodging, never remembring that he had lost Hippolito, ... (William Congreve: Incognita, 1692; EEPF) b. He delivers his lines sLOw and easy, like the hero in a cowboy film. (Russell lames: Underground, 1989; BNC) (15) a. They walked sLOwly, with frequent pauses, but without speaking again. (George Eliot: Adam Bede, 1859; NCF) b. The elephant's belly heaved up and down rhythmically and sLOw, and Ifloated up and down with it, ... (Alison Leonard: Gatecrushing the Dream Party, 1990; BNC)

172

Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

The first count distinguishes only between the three types of rhythmic context following slow(ly). Coordinated and non-coordinated uses are not separated. Figure 23 summarizes the results. 18/18=100% 19/19=100% 577/577=100% 444/444=100% :;:;:;:;;;:;:;:;:;;;;:;:;:;;;:;;:;:;:;;;:;3J~t-cclcc............... ~=1293/1318 100% ,-;;;;,~~~;t----=:::::llijlj:::====cc='~c~;;;c oto2/24=92% 53/54=98% ,,/ =98°/0 90 '-e-1165/1198 /( =97% 1488/1539 " =97% 80% 25/29=86% .0 70% 1212/1259 41/57=72% =96% ';;; 60% "-< o ' Q) 50% ~, b/)

/( 1

6

i

~

0..

40% 30%

l

-e- before stressed sy liable

20%

- e - before unstressed sy liable

10% 0%

before punctuation mark +------,---------,-------,-----

EEPF 1518-1700

ECF 1705-1780

NCF 1782-1903

BNC wridom 1 1960-1993

Figure 23. The distribution of the post-verbal adverb slowly compared to slow

before stressed syllables, unstressed syllables and punctuation marks in a series of prose corpora (EEPF, ECF, NCF and BNC wridom 1) As in the case of quick(ly), the share of adverbial marking falls to a minimum average of 87 percent in the eighteenth century.22 While the data for quick(ly) and slow(ly) thus agree in supporting the temporary trend towards a reduction in the token frequencies of marked adverbs in the late seventeenth century (stated by Nevalainen 1997: 172), the extent to which suffixation is suppressed differs markedly between the two adverbs. In the case of quick(ly), the -ly-suffix is absent significantly more often than in the case of slow(ly).23 An account of this characteristic difference does not have many clues to go by, except, possibly, the semantic contrast between the two. In fact, the suffixless monosyllablic form quick is particularly well adapted to describing rapidly occurring actions or events, while slow can be made to reflect its meaning better through the addition of a second syllable in the shape of the -ly-suffix. The motivation behind the differing behaviour of quick(ly) and slow(ly) would then be explainable as a striving for linguistic iconicity, i.e. a tendency for linguistic forms to in some sense mirror non-linguistic reality (cf. McMahon 1994: 86). Accordingly, a speaker or writer intending to stress the rapidity and brevity of an action or

Sufjixed and sufjixless adverbs

173

event would preferentially resort to a short monosyllable than to a substantially longer suffixed form, while someone intending to stress the slowness or long duration of an action or event would rather select the suffixcontaining disyllable. In the case of quick(ly) , this, by hypothesis, leads to a noticeably higher percentage of unmarked forms than in the case of slow(ly), even where the absence of the -ly-suffix results in infractions of the alternating rhythm as in (16) or to pre-pausal uses of quick as in (17), which are otherwise disfavoured. (16)

Ifyou go back down the lane, turn right, then quick right again, you'll see the Hall. (Emma Richmond: Love o/my Heart, 1993; BNC)

(17)

"Tell me t' chances. Tell me quick! ... " (Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell: Sylvia's Lovers, 1863; NCF)

Despite the apparent appropriateness of a short expression for a rapid action, an opposing functional motivation can be discerned behind the generalization of the suffix in the nineteenth century (besides the normative pressures promoting the regular suffixation of adverbs). In connection with slow(ly), figure 23 shows that stress clashes with the following context are non-existent: the adverbial marker is never omitted when the adverb precedes a stressed syllable, which suggests an even more unexceptionable influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation than in connection with qUick(ly).24 Importantly, however, when the following context of the adverb poses no rhythmic problems, the use of the suffixless variant is licensed. This applies to uses before an unstressed syllable and before a punctuation mark. As figure 23 shows, these two constellations differ in so far as those involving a punctuation mark indicating an articulatory pause dispense with the suffix relatively more often. 25 This finding diverges from the corresponding results obtained in figure 21 above for quick(ly), where cases preceding a pause were shown to involve a higher proportion of adverbial marking than cases preceding an unstressed syllable. This was explained in terms of the need for sufficiently substantial phonological material at the end of an intonation unit to support the intonational nucleus. If the distributional contrast does not hold true for slow, this can be accounted for by the different phonological structures of the two adverbs under consideration. While quick contains only a short vowel, whose brevity is underscored by the voiceless plosives with which the monosyllable begins and ends, slow, though being only monosyllabic as well, begins with a fricative and possesses a long diphthong which is apt to sustain a phrase-final pitch movement (cf. Bolinger 1965a: 135). It appears that it is

174

Analysis o/verbal and adverbial structures

due to this noticeably different phonological duration that quick without a suffix is perceived as inadequate and slow as adequate for the pre-pausal position. Since pre-pausal uses are relatively frequent, in particular in connection with quick(ly), the maintenance of a disyllabic form, even in the face of an iconically motivated preference for the monosyllabic variant, can be accounted for. While these explanations for the differences between quick(ly) and slow(ly) are only given post facto and would require further empirical substantiation (possibly involving experimental methodologies in addition to corpus linguistic approaches), the original target of the study, which was to determine the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, seems to have been reached. However, before the difference in adverbial marking between instances of slow(ly) preceding a stressed syllable and other cases can safely be ascribed to rhythmic alternation alone, any possible synergies have to be taken into consideration. This concerns first and foremost influences exerted by the coordination of adverbs. The data for slow(ly) include a total of 661 coordinations. Of these, as many as 611 consist of slowly and another marked adverb, a case illustrated in example (Bb) above. Only 40 involve slow and another unmarked adverb, as in (l4b), and a mere 10 lack formal parallelism, involving either slowly plus an unmarked adverb or slow plus a marked adverb, for instance sentence (l5b). The scarcity of mixed structures indicates that parallelism of form and meaning is once more the preferred option. Furthermore, pairs of unmarked adverbs seem at first sight to be relatively rare. It has to be borne in mind, however, that these examples have to be considered against the background of their era and that most examples come from the later corpus sections, in which unmarked slow is generally relatively rare. Figure 24 takes care of this by comparing the frequency of marked instances of the adverb in the respective corpus subsections with their frequency in coordinated structures. The parameters of the count are identical to those used in the construction of figure 22 and will not be reiterated here. As in the case of quick(ly), coordinated uses of slow(ly) deviate slightly from the total, the widest divergence being again found in the eighteenth century, which is the period of the greatest variability in adverbial marking. The differences between the two curves however become significant only for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which offer a sufficient number of coordinated examples. 26 It appears to be the case that the coordination of two adverbs facilitates the omission of the adverbial suffix, as stated by Quirk et al. (1985: 406). As mentioned earlier, a serious problem of this analysis and that portrayed in figure 22 is the fact that coordinated adverbs usually occur in positions preceding unstressed syllables or pauses, as they do for instance in examples (l4b) and (l5b). Cases like

SuffIXed and sufjixless adverbs

175

(Bb), where slowly precedes the stressed syllable down, have to be regarded as statistically insignificant. To obtain a more realistic picture of the actual strength of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, it is therefore essential to separate the effects of rhythm and coordination. 100% tIl

ofl1.l

90%

;>

-g 80% "0

J;l al

e

Q 0

... -e '+-< tIl

"a 0

113/130=87%

/,;Y

6/9=67%

50% 40%

i:: l1.l

20%

l1.l

10%

0.

:;r-----_~....... /,,;.f'1t2;3'i'·O:94o/~'''~·3~/334=92%

60%

30%

...u

3225/3301=98%

70%

l1.l

~

2954/3034=97%

-B--total coordinated uses

0% EEPF 1518-1700

ECF 1705-1780

NCF 1782-1903

HNC wridom 1 1960-1993

Figure 24. The distribution of the post-verbal adverb slowly compared to slow in coordinations compared to the overall total in a series of prose corpora (EEPF, ECF, NCF and BNC wridom I)

Figure 25 implements this separation for the late twentieth-century corpus, which offers the largest sample of coordinated structures. On the one hand, the graph distinguishes between the three rhythmically defined contexts following slow(ly) (stressed syllables, unstressed syllables and punctuation marks). On the other, it contains separate columns for the noncoordinated and coordinated examples in each rhythmic category. The diagram shows that both factors have noticeable effects with regard to the frequency of adverbial marking. First, the percentage of (pairs of) marked adverbs (be it for coordinated or non-coordinated uses) declines from left to right. In the case of a following stressed syllable, adverbs are marked without exception. These potential loci for stress clashes thus represent knock-out contexts for unmarked adverbs in PDE. In rhythmically uncritical positions, the data for non-coordinated uses contain between 1 and 3 percent of unmarked adverbs. This marginal difference can be uniquely ascribed to the workings of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation since the factor of coordination does not apply here. Minimal though they

176

Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

are, the contrasts between the three categories turn out to be statistically significant with the exception of the comparison between stressed and unstressed syllables. 27 It is, however, questionable whether they permit linguistically valid conclusions. tIl

100%

oD

....
;>

"0 o:l

"0

90% 80%


~

1;;

S

Q 0 tIl ....

70% 60% 50%

'a0. 40% '-' '-+-< 0


OIl o:l

15
u

....

30% 20% 10%


0.

0% before stressed before unstressed before punctuation syllable syllable mark Ii in coordinated uses • in non-coordinated uses

Figure 25. The distribution ofthe post-verbal adverb slowly compared to slow in coordinated and non-coordinated uses and in different rhythmic contexts in the imaginative prose section of the BNC (wridom 1)

The data for coordinated uses of slow(ly) and another adverb are inconclusive with regard to effects of stress clashes since there are no more than two examples preceding stressed syllables, one of them quoted in (Bb). As expected, both involve the suffix-containing variant of the adverb. The only possible quantitative comparison is that between cases preceding unstressed syllables and preceding punctuation marks, which provides additional evidence in favour of the high acceptability of the unmarked variant slow in phrase-final position?8 The second comparison implied in figure 25 is that between the columns within a pair. Wherever there is a difference between non-coordinated and coordinated uses, the coordinated ones exhibit a lower rate of adverbial marking, the difference running to 5, respectively 8 percentage points. 29 This confirms Quirk et aI.' s (1985: 406) statement to the effect that coordinated pairs of adverbs are relatively often suffixless. So far, Quirk et aI.' s efforts have been merely descriptive; what is still lacking is an explanation for this phenomenon. It may be assumed that the sequence

SuffIXed and suffIXless adverbs

177

of two words of the same grammatical category makes their function easier to recognize so that additional grammatical signals can be dispensed with. A different account, equally speculative, would hold that the fact that rhythmic alternation is virtually always secured in coordinations even in the absence of adverbial suffixes has played a role in stabilizing and preserving suffixless collocations. The data in figure 25 thus contain (partly significant) evidence for three types of influences impinging on the frequency of adverbial marking as late as the twentieth century. The absence of the threat of a rhythmic clash, the coordination with another adverb and the occurrence at the end of a prosodic unit all contribute synergetically to the omission of the adverbial suffix in a certain percentage of cases. 30 If none of the three conditions applies, adverbs are consistently marked in our data. If all three conditions apply, the rate of omission reaches its maximum of 11 percent. The lack of statistical significance for individual contrasts is merely due to the high level of adverbial marking that is maintained throughout the late twentieth century. Having controlled for the syntactic determinants of adverbial marking (listed in the introduction to section 5.3) by restricting the analysis to adverbs modifying verbs and following their heads, and having selected pairs of suffixed and suffixless adverbs without an obvious distinction in meaning, we still need to take account of the acceptability difference between marked and unmarked forms, established in the eighteenth century and perpetuated in the stigma attached to unmarked forms nowadays (examples (5c) and (17) might be instances of this). Without an extensive stylistic analysis of the literary works included in the database, it is impossible to eliminate a potentially distorting effect of different registers employed in the works investigated. There is, however, no reason to believe that this would not impinge in the same way and degree on all the categories employed in the studies of quick(ly) and slow(ly) in this and the previous section. The findings for the adverb quick(ly) and its antonym slow(ly) can be summarized as follows. While adverbial marking in -Iy has never been entirely unexceptional since its introduction in ME, in the data presented here the high regularity it has reached by the EModE period decreases again in the eighteenth century, just to attain a nearly obligatory status by the twentieth century. Throughout this evolution, the same determinants have been shown to be at work. The occurrence before a stressed or an unstressed syllable in connection with the preference for rhythmic alternation is one of the strongest predictors of adverbial marking. Another factor characterized by the same generality is the preference for formal parallel-

178

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

ism between semantically parallel expressions, and an inclination to leave both adverbs in a coordinated structure unmarked. Quick(ly) and slow(ly) differ in (at least) two interesting ways, which are presumably related to their different semantic and phonological characteristics. On the one hand, an iconic tendency has been made responsible for the lower rate of omission of the suffix in connection with an adverb signifying slowness: the longer the duration of an action or event, the more syllables the expression describing it should contain. On the other, suffixless slow, but not quick, seems to be tolerated in the final position of a prosodic phrase: it is possibly due to its greater phonological weight that suffixless slow is appropriate, while the suffix-containing form quickly is preferred in this prominent position.

5.3.3.

Scarce vs. scarcely in PDE

The final analysis of variable adverbial marking to be described is the most restrictive one. It concerns the pair scarce/scarcely. As Stroheker (1913: 50) justly remarks, there seems to be no meaning distinction whatsoever between the members of the pair; even the iconically motivated difference between shorter and longer duration is inapplicable. The use of scarce as an adverb is, however, unanimously judged archaic or literary by linguists like Jespersen (1965c: 50) and Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 569). Thus, newspaper language is not the text type predestined to form the basis of an analysis. Yet, the investigation of an extremely extensive corpus consisting of a total of 40 years of different British national papers dating from the last decade of the twentieth century will provide interesting insights into the niches where the adverbial use of scarce has maintained itself to the present day. To reduce the data for scarcely and in particular scarce to manageable numbers and to focus the analysis appropriately, all occurrences of a list of modal auxiliaries immediately followed by scarce and scarcely were searched. 31 In this way, most hits featured a main verb or another (nonmodal) auxiliary following the adverb. Examples with an insertion (an adverbial or the negator not) separating scarce(ly) from the following verb were discounted. Furthermore, it was found that the 2964 cases of auxiliary or main verb uses of be and have with the exception of 5 instances invariably select the marked form scarcely. While an explanation for the strong affinity of be and have with scarcely is still pending, the two verbs have, for the time being, been excluded from the further analysis. The following study has thus been restricted to include only sequences of a modal auxiliary, scarce or scarcely, and a main verb without any intervening material.

SuffIXed and suffIXless adverbs

179

The main verbs differ according to the rhythmic status of their initial syllables. Three categories were distinguished. First, the verbs can have an unstressed initial syllable like, for instance believe and forbear in examples (18a-b). The use of scarcely in this context creates a sequence of two unstressed syllables, which is usually tolerated by the language. The substitution of scarce however maintains a regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, as is indicated by the stress marks. (18) a. Even now Mrs Hunnam can scarcely believe her daughter was killed as she stepped offa school bus. (The Daily Mail 2000) b. Even the mostfanatical Europhobes could scarce forbear to cheer when Tony Blair addressed the French National Assembly in its own tongue. (The Guardian 1998) Second, in many cases the verbs are stressed on their initial or, if monosyllabic, unique syllable. Two examples are given in (19a-b). While the suffixed fonn scarcely is apt to secure rhythmic alternation in this case, the use of scarce leads to a more or less prominent stress clash. (19) a. On Sunday night Kay could scarcely summon the energy to stay standing. (The Times 1997) b. The light was so bad I could scarce see [or: see] a pin. (The Daily Mail 1994) At this point, a binary distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables following the adverb under consideration turns out to be no longer wholly satisfactory. Thus, a consideration of the following rhythmic context allows us to refine the category of initially stressed or monosyllabic verbs. The issue becomes critical already in examples like (19b), where the monosyllabic verb see - a lexical category usually assigned a primary stress - is followed by its object, only separated from the strongly accented pin by the indefinite article. It could be argued that see should be considered to carry only a reduced amount of stress here since it does not occur at the end of a prosodic phrase but is followed in that position by another syllable which receives the phrase-final (and, in this case, also sentencefinal) accent. In this case, see would be subject to the Beat Deletion rule (cf. section 2.1.3), and both see and the indefinite article a would assume the role of the two weakly stressed syllables in a ternary rhythm. The phenomenon whereby material that is stressed under nonnal circumstances yields up its prosodic prominence on account of subsequent material occurring in an even more prominent position serves to shape sentence prosody in a way so as to implement the requirement for rhythmic alternation. Simi-

180

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

lar effects are noted by Bolinger (l965b: 149-150; 1979: 56) and Zwicky (1969: 429). As mentioned in the introduction to the present chapter, this phenomenon will for present purposes be referred to as prosodic overshadowing. For the present analysis, prosodic overshadowing will exclusively be appealed to in a closely circumscribed type of context to which it applies with a high probability. Reconsider example (l9b). If the disyllabic adverbial variant scarcely had been used here in the place of scarce, the threatening stress clash with see would not have arisen. In that case, the example would scan: scarcely see a pin, and see would most likely retain its stress to avoid a sequence of three stressless syllables. Thus, the stress level of see might vary with the preceding context, which is the dependent variable in the present analysis. For this reason, prosodic overshadowing will only be assumed to take place where the rhythmic properties of the following context are sufficient to take away the stress from the main verb. To decide this, only the first two syllables following scarce(ly) were taken into consideration. Compare examples (20a-e). (20) a. The half-built verandahs could scarce give shade to the wounded, whom the surgeons were still busy dressing. (The Times 1991) b. After her retirement her condition worsened until the former globetrotter could scarcely go out: ... (The Guardian 1995) c. I could scarcely get thro' it. (The Daily Mail 1996) d. They could scarcely fiel comfortable snoring in an armchair with ladies in the room ... (The Times 1992) e. Stephen could scarce care less: ... (The Times 1996) In examples like these, a monosyllabic main verb following scarce(ly) is immediately followed by another strongly stressed syllable with which it stands in a close syntactic and prosodic relationship. This syllable may be the verb's object (20a), the particle in the case of a particle verb (20b), a preposition bearing a strong accent (20c) (for stressed prepositions, cf. the discussion in section 5.3.1), the first syllable of a predicative expression (20d), or of an adverb (20e). By contrast, cases like (21a), where the following preposition is stressless, or like (21 b), where the predicative expression is noninitially stressed, are categorized as non-overshadowed, just like examples such as (21c), where the main verb is followed by a strong prosodic boundary, which prevents the application of prosodic overshadowing.

Sufjixed and sufjixless adverbs

181

(21) a. My halls are decked with so many boughs ofholly that I can scarcely get through the door, the presents are piled high under the tree, ... (The Times 1993) b. There is much to celebrate, but we can scarcely feel complacent. (The Times 1997) c. We regale bored younger members ofour circle with stories of how even children who could scarcely walk knew how to switch on a set in order to listen to Uncle Mac and his children's requests. (The Times 2000) In the metrical grid representation, the different configurations corresponding to the contrasting example pairs (20c) and (2la) as well as (20d) and (21b) can be visualized as in (22a-b) and (23a-b). (22) a.

(23) a.

x x x x x x x x x (x) x x x [scarce(ly) get through it]

b.

x x x x x x x x x (x) x x x x x x [scarce(ly) feel comfortable]

b.

x

x x x x x x x x x (x) x x x x [scarce(ly) get through the door] x x x x x x x x x (x) x x x xx [scarce(ly) feel complacent]

In the (a)-examples, the stress level on the monosyllabic verb is reduced in comparison to the (b)-examples, due to the avoidance of a stress clash with the immediately following strongly stressed syllable. Thus, prosodic overshadowing of the verbs under consideration in the present, restricted sense is itself a function of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, avoiding stress clashes with the following material. In the definition adopted here, prosodic overshadowing does not depend on whether the verbs are preceded by a stressed or an unstressed syllable. In case the suffixless adverbial variant scarce is used, this leads to a relatively less prominent stress clash between scarce and the following verb in the (a)-examples than in the (b)examples, where the verb itself is more prominent. The -ly-suffix can therefore be less easily dispensed with in the (b)-examples.

182

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

The present definition of prosodic overshadowing is of course very technical and restrictive. This is necessitated by the need to establish quantifiable categories delimited by artificially clear boundaries. In actual fact, even infinitives (whether mono- or plurisyllabic) followed by a strongly stressed syllable at a distance of one or more unstressed syllables as in (22b) and (23b) have a lower stress level than they would have, for instance, in phrase-final position. Prosodic overshadowing is undoubtedly a gradable phenomenon, but for present purposes only the strictest version, for which the strongest effects can be predicted, was adopted. Variable suffixation in -ly is at the centre of the present study investigating the distribution of scarce and scarcely in the late twentieth-century British newspaper corpus. The hypothesis to be tested here is that insofar as scarce can still be found as an unmarked adverb in current British English, it will occur preferentially where it does not incur the inconvenience of a stress clash, i.e. where it precedes an unstressed syllable. Prosodically overshadowed contexts can be predicted to take an intermediate position between fully stressed and unstressed syllables if the concept of overshadowing turns out to have any practical relevance. Figure 26 presents the differences between the three categories. 100% 90% ..Q 80%

~ 70% ~~ 60% '+-< o 50%

.&

40%

~

30%

8.

20%

l::

10% 0%

before initially stressed verbs

before prosodically overshadowed verbs

before noninitially stressed verbs

Figure 26. The distribution of the adverb scarcely compared to scarce before main verbs in a British newspaper corpus (The Daily Telegraph 19912000, The Guardian 1990-2000, The Daily Mail 1993-2000, The Times 1990-2000)

The marked variant scarcely clearly dominates the situation in the newspaper texts investigated. This was to be expected since journalistic prose is a

SujJixed and sujJixless adverbs

183

progressive style not particularly prone to archaic forms. It is all the more significant that the remaining 3 percent of adverbial scarce are concentrated in niches defined by the rhythmic criteria set up above. Of the 98 instances of adverbial scarce preceding main verbs in the entire corpus, we find only 9 instances preceding initially stressed verbs (0.6 percent of the cases in this category), while there are a considerable 84 instances (5.6 percent) occurring before noninitially stressed verbs, and the difference is statistically highly significant. 32 The remaining 5 instances are to be found before monosyllabic verbs that are followed and overshadowed by a stronger-stressed syllable (2.5 percent of the cases in this category). From this intermediate kind of behaviour, the assumption can be deduced that prosodically overshadowed syllables are on the borderline between stressed and unstressed ones. The difference to both sides narrowly fails the statistical test, but there is no reason to believe that the inclusion of an even larger amount of data, particularly for the phenomenon of overshadowing, would not reinforce the trend observedY What can be retained as a result is that the preservation of the unmarked form scarce in adverbial uses premodifying main verbs in British English is clearly determined by the degree of stress on the initial (or only) syllable of the verb and is thus sensitive to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. Apart from cases where a syllable can unambiguously be classified as either stressed or unstressed, we have identified a class of cases where some of the usual stress prominence on a syllable can be sapped by the presence of an immediately following stressed syllable that is assigned a stronger accent on account of sentence prosody. The data in figure 26 suggest that the avoidance of stress clashes is the only or at least the most important factor licensing the use of scarce as an adverb. Closer scrutiny of the data however qualifies this simplistic conclusion. According to the data filtered out of the Francis and Kucera (1982) word lists in table 3 of the Appendix, a chance distribution of initially and noninitially stressed verbs would predict only 27.5 percent of the latter type. Figure 26 however reveals that 46.2 percent of the tokens of verbs following scarce and scarcely (1500 out of 3248) are noninitially stressed, which differs very significantly from the expected frequency.34 The reason for this astonishing finding may be the fact that the semantics of certain noninitially stressed verbs like afford, avoid, believe, conceal, contain, deny, disguise, expect, forbear, imagine and remember, which are extremely frequent in the set of examples, happens to lend itself particularly well to a modification by scarce(ly). Whether or not this is correct, the 84 instances of noninitially stressed verbs preceded by the unmarked variant are in no way distributed evenly among this list. While most of the verbs named normally select the marked form scarcely, only forbear exhibits a striking

184

Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

affinity with scarce: 57 instances of scarce are cumulated on forbear as opposed to only 3 instances of scarcely. The remaining 27 occurrences of scarce are dispersed among 13 other verbs. This suggests that part of the manifest contrast in the selection of the adverbial variants between initially and noninitially stressed verbs may be due to a lexical association between the obsolescent suffixless adverb and the verb forbear, which is equally obsolescent in many of its senses (cf. OED 2 1994: s.v.forbear (v.». Even so, if all instances of forbear were excluded from the data in figure 26, the contrast between initially and noninitially stressed verbs would still remain highly significant. 35 Though the exceptionality of the verb forbear can be argued to be a survival from earlier states of the language, there is no direct evidence in the history of scarce and scarcely as to why forbear rather than any other noninitially stressed verb should have remained associated with scarce to such an extent. In former centuries, the unmarked adverbial use of scarce yielded only gradually to the marked form. In the EEPF corpus, covering the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the percentage of the marked form scarcely only runs to 17 percent. The ECF corpus of eighteenth-century prose once again exhibits a decrease in the proportion of adverbial marking to no more than 13 percent and thus provides further evidence for the unexpected fall also observable in the data for quick(ly) and slow(ly) in figures 21 and 23. The nineteenth century sees a significant rise in the percentage of scarcely in the NCF corpus, accounting for 76 percent of the adverbial uses, and the excerpts of late twentieth-century novels contained in the BNC reach 100 percent of scarcely if a few historicizing texts are discounted. The importance of noninitial stress and the avoidance of stress clashes in diachrony is assessed and supported in Schlliter (2002b: 261266) and will not be repeated here. Throughout the almost four centuries from 1518 to 1903,forbear never stands out as a particularly frequent collocate of scarce. Rather, it used to be one out of many noninitially stressed verbs that productively associated with scarce as a modifier. It is only in the twentieth century that the formerly productive rhythmically determined distribution of the adverbial variants has developed into a mixture of rhythmic licensing and lexical restriction. Parenthetically, it should be noted that a search carried out in a parallel newspaper corpus comprising 11 years of American newspapers (Detroit Free Press for 1992 to 1995, Los Angeles Times for 1992 to 1995, Washington Times 1990 to 1992) employing the same search parameters as were applied for the British newspapers yields a single instance of scarce used as an adverb. Significantly, this example occurs before the noninitially stressed verb withhold in the Washington Times for 1990. This indicates that the obligatory introduction of adverbial marking is virtually completed

Marked and unmarked infinitives

185

in American English. Since the diachronic development has tended towards a generalization of the suffix, it is this time British English that lags behind considerably, whereas American English can be argued to have implemented its striving for regularization (cf. Kovecses 2000: 189). In a nutshell, the present analysis has focussed on a very narrowly circumscribed context of adverbial variation, which virtually excludes the possibility of a syntactic or semantic interference. The data for PDE testify to the decisive influence of the avoidance of stress clashes in the selection of the variants scarce and scarcely. They prove sensitive to a prosodic overshadowing of a usually stressed item by an immediately following item bearing a stronger accent, which reduces the degree of stress on the item under consideration and increases its compatibility with a preceding monosyllabic scarce. The discussion has opened up a number of side issues that will be left to future research. For instance, it is unclear why auxiliary and main verb uses of be and have, despite their generally weak stress, shy away almost categorically from the suffixless form scarce. No exhaustive account could be given for why only forbear but none of the other noninitially stressed verbs that frequently selected scarce in earlier centuries has preserved the suffixless variant to such an exceptional extent. Finally, once again the question has been raised of why the eighteenth century, notwithstanding the sway of prescriptive grammar, exhibits a lower token frequency of adverbial marking than the earlier two centuries. This finding is in accordance with Nevalainen's (1997: 172, 182-183), who finds a decrease in adverbial marking between the two subperiods from 1500 to 1570 and 1640 to 1710. It is only in the nineteenth century that the spread of the -ly-suffix as an adverbial marker gathers speed again, thus promoting the overall trend towards a more consistent marking of adverbs.

5.4.

Marked and unmarked infinitives

Like adverbial marking, the marking of infinitives is a longstanding case of morphological variation in English. And similarly, the distribution of infinitives with and without to has never been systematically examined with regard to a potential influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. In the present section, this deficiency will be remedied as far as certain uses of three verbs, make, bid and dare, are concerned. Historically, unmarked infinitives are older. Marked infinitives originated in a nominalized use of the unmarked infinitive introduced by the preposition to (e.g. to donne; cf. Bihl 1916: 223; Ohlander 1941: 58; Warner 1993: 136). With the surge of the infinitive marker in ME, the functional differentiation between main verbs (tending to take marked infinitival complements) and auxiliaries

186

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

(tending to take unmarked infinitives) came into being (cf. Denison 1993: 213; Fischer 1997: 126). As is usual with grammatical changes of this magnitude, the introduction of (for) to as an infinitive marker did not happen without an extensive period of vacillation between marked and unmarked forms. From Bihl's (1916: 224-241) study of the late ME ofChaucer's and Gower's time, we know that begin, beseech, bid, charge, come, counsel, desire, (causative) do, feel, gin, go, grant, help, hope, learn, let, make, pray, seem, suffer, think, vouchsafe, will and many others could be followed by either marked or unmarked infinitives. On the way to EModE, some of the variability subsided, but Stroheker (1913: 81-89) and Franz (1986: 536-539) still find variably marked infinitives dependent on many of the verbs named above, including make, bid and dare, in the works of Marlowe, Kyd and Shakespeare. Eventually, the distribution of (for) to and zero infinitive markers became largely standardized and congealed into stable patterns. However, even for PDE, Jespersen ([1940] 1965b: 288, 290) and Fijn van Draat (1967: 73-96) note that marked and unmarked infinitives alternate after the verbs bid, cause, dare, have, help, know, make, etc. Three of these verbs will be investigated in the following subsections, focusing on a potential rhythmic bias in their diachronic evolution. Once again, rhythmic effects cannot be studied in isolation from semantic, syntactic and processing-related factors that may have a say in the use or omission of the infinitival marker. The impact of such factors presumably spans more than a limited period of time: there is evidence that ME infinitival variation was subject to the same influences as the more limited remains of variability in our days (cf. Fanego 1994: 191; Fischer 1996: 253). The ample literature on the subject has revealed the following parameters underlying the choice. First of all, the grammatical function of the infinitive clause (whether subject, predicative, direct or indirect object or other) plays a major role, going back to the function of the infinitive in OE (cf. Mustanoja 1960: 522-544; Fanego 1994: 191; Fischer 1997: 117-126). Effects of this kind will play no role in the three following analyses since the grammatical functions of the infinitive clauses investigated do not vary. - Secondly, it has often been observed that a complex object expression intervening between the superordinate (matrix) verb and the dependent infinitive and the separation of the infinitive and the superordinate verb by intervening adverbial material require a more explicit link between the superordinate verb and the infinitive. This explicit link function can be realized by the infinitive marker to (cf. Ohlander 1941: 60-65; Mustanoja 1960: 522; Jespersen 1965b: 290; Quirk and Svartvik 1970: 410;

Marked and unmarked infinitives

-

-

-

-

-

187

Warner 1993: 138; Fanego 1994: 193-198; Rohdenburg and Schltiter 2000: 448-449; cf. also Stroheker 1913: 89). The syntax of the sentence involving an infinitival complement has a major influence on the use or omission of the infinitive marker: if an element from within the infinitive clause is fronted, in particular if the object of the matrix verb becomes the subject in a passivized structure, the infinitive is much more likely to be marked than in a canonical sentence structure. Passivized and other non-canonical structures thus successfully resisted the historically prevailing trend towards the loss of the infinitival marker. The indispensability of explicit infinitival marking has received a functional account in the need to clarify the grammatical status of the infinitive (cf. Stroheker 1913: 81; Ohlander 1941: 65; Mustanoja 1960: 526; Fanego 1994: 199-202; Fischer 1995: 15; Rohdenburg and Schltiter 2000: 446-447). If two infinitives dependent on the same superordinate verb occur in coordination, the second infinitives are usually unmarked. However, in coordinations involving a change of object, they tend to be marked (cf. Ohlander 1941: 59; Quirk and Svartvik 1970: 410; Denison 1993: 214; Rohdenburg and Schltiter 2000: 450-452; cf. also Stroheker 1913: 89). If two matrix verbs with dependent infinitives occur in a parallel structure, the two are likely to influence each other in such a way as to create a formally parallel structure. This includes the use or omission of the infinitive marker and may induce a choice that is untypical of one of the matrix verbs when occurring in isolation (cf. Fanego 1994: 201). Several semantic factors have been found to exert an influence on the marking of infinitives. Deriving from an old locative preposition, the marker to has preserved shades of its original meaning and is therefore employed as a semantic marker of futurity, indirect perception, indirect causation, low transitivity, negation or irrealis. In other words, the closeness of the relationship between matrix verb and infinitive is iconically expressed: the more indirect it is, the more likely the infinitive marker is to separate the two (cf. Ohlander 1941: 58; Fanego 1994: 191; Fischer 1995: 8-14, 19-23; 1996: 253, 257-258; 1997: 111). These semantic effects can be reduced to a more general principle proposed by Haiman (1983: 782). His so-called Distance Principle applies to a multiplicity of variation phenomena and stipulates that "The linguistic distance between expressions corresponds to the conceptual distance between them." Finally, a number of linguists have suggested that rhythm is responsible for the distribution of to as an infinitive marker (e.g. Fijn van Draat 1967: 73-77; Bihl 1916: 223-225; Ohlander 1941: 66; Visser 1973: 2303). The importance different authors attach to this factor however

188

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

varies considerably. Since the acquisition of the new infinitival marker function of to happened simultaneously with the loss of unstressed final syllables in ME, some have discerned a causal relationship between the muting of final syllables that had formerly fulfilled a rhythmic buffer function and the introduction of the infinitive marker, which took over that function. Two cases in point would be OE him iihte dwellan, which developed into ME him oght(e) to dwelle, and OE gewunod drincan, which became ME wont to drinke (cf. Bihl 1916: 223; cf. also Franz 1910: 158; 1986: 537; cf. also Stroheker 1913: 1). A further point of attack for rhythmic preferences arose in the ME period, when the prepositionfor came to reinforce the infinitive marker, so that by the thirteenth century, to and for to alternated in all functions. It has been argued that the two alternative infinitive markers (to andfor to) and zero could for a while be selected according to rhythmic preferences (cf. Stroheker 1913: 88; Bihl 1916: 225, Mustanoja 1960: 522), although varying needs for explicitness also had a say in this respect (cf. Fanego 1994: 202). Further optimistic estimates of the importance of rhythm come from Stroheker (1913: 81) and Franz (1986: 537), who make the avoidance of stress clashes account for the maintenance of infinitival marking in the passive, while it was given up in the active. The following examples illustrate the typical stress constellations in active and passive sentences. (24) a. They made him come. b. He was made to come. (Stroheker 1913: 81) As sentence (24a) illustrates, in the active, the matrix verb and the dependent verb are usually separated by a pronominal or other object, whereas sentence (24b) shows that the matrix and dependent verbs, both carrying a lexical stress, would occur in immediate vicinity if it was not for the intercalation of the infinitive marker. While these early authors attach great importance to rhythmic influences in prose as well as in verse (cf. Ohlander 1941: 66), the more recent authors take a more sceptical stance. Fischer (1995: 1; 1996: 265 note 1; 1997: 109) decidedly denies the explanatory potential of rhythm outside of versified language. Thus, Fanego's (1994: 191) dismissive remark to the effect that the role of rhythm is "obvious enough" cannot be taken for granted. What is completely lacking in the literature is an attempt to isolate the influence of rhythm from that of other factors, such as the semantic and syntactic determinants just introduced, and to develop an independent measure of the importance of stress clash avoidance. 36 The following four analyses are designed to rectify this shortcoming by studying appropriate example

Marked and unmarked infinitives

189

sets of two directive verbs (active and passive make and passive bid) and the marginal modal dare.

5.4.1.

Infinitives dependent on active make in EModE and LModE

The first study in this group investigates the variable marking of infinitives dependent on the verb make in the active. The focus of the corpus analyses will be on the EModE and LModE periods, since the earlier variability had settled into a fixed pattern by the nineteenth century. In the active, the infinitive marker, already rare in ME, was declining (cf. Rissanen 1999: 287). Stroheker (1913: 81) explains this with reference to the fact that active make was often followed by an unstressed personal pronoun, as in example (24a) above, and could therefore dispense with an additional stress clash buffer. Constructions involving active make followed by a full noun phrase object can, however, be expected to exhibit a certain degree of variability that might be susceptible to rhythmic effects. The following study will test the hypothesis, adopted from Fijn van Draat (1967: 80-86), Franz (1910: 157) and Bolinger (1965b: 151), to the effect that the infinitival marker was temporarily used independently of grammatical and semantic needs as a stress clash buffer separating two stressed syllables. To compile a representative sample of uses of active make followed by non-pronominal objects, a search was carried out in the EEPF and ECF corpora and in the corresponding subsections of the EPD corpus that retrieved all forms of the verb make followed by the definite article the. Among other hits, this yielded a considerable number of different types of noun phrases functioning as objects of make and followed by an infinitive complement. Pronominal objects were intentionally excluded from the study. In the case of coordinated infinitives, only the first was taken into consideration so as to exclude distorting effects of coordination or change of object. Compared to passive uses of make, which will be studied in the following section 5.4.2, the stress constellations in the active voice can be multifarious. The analysis employs a ternary parameter for the context following the (optional) infinitive marker, and a binary parameter for the context preceding it. This is a gross simplification and far from doing justice to the complexity of the actual state of affairs; however, for present purposes it provides a sufficient aPfroximation to the rhythmic constellations obtaining in different contexts. 7 As for the context following the potential locus of the infinitive marker, a distinction was drawn between initially stressed and noninitially stressed verbs. An example of the former type is provided by ring in example (25), and one of the latter type by believe in example (26).

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Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

(25)

... ,. one night coming home three quarters drunk, she acted the part ofZantippe, and made the House to ring with her scolding. (Richard Head and Francis Kirkman: The English Rogue, Part 2, 1668; EEPF)

(26)

This they affirmed to be the true cause both ofthe saltness, and the ebbing andflowing motion ofthe Sea, and not the jogging ofthe Earth, or the secret influence ofthe Moon, as some others had made the World believe. (Margaret Cavendish: The Description ofa New World, 1666; EEPF)

Stress clashes due to the omission of the infinitive marker can only arise in the former case, when the following verb has the main stress on its initial (or only) syllable. An intermediate case is represented by monosyllabic verbs that are directly followed by a rhythmically even more prominent syllable. They were grouped in a third category which appeals to the concept of prosodic overshadowing introduced in connection with the alternation scarce/scarcely. It was assumed that these verbs give up some of their prosodic prominence due to the avoidance of a stress clash with the following syllable (cf. Bolinger 1965b: 149-150; 1979: 56; Zwicky 1969: 429). This in turn reduces the gravity of a potential clash with a preceding stressed syllable. Example (27) illustrates this constellation. (27)

This blunt proposition given without any manner ofreason or Circumstance, made the Prince start back a step or two, and ask him his meaning ofwhat he said. (Aphra Behn: Love Letters between a Noble-Man and his Sister, Part Ill, 1687; EEPF)

The three categories thus distinguished enable us to assess the influence of rhythm on the synchronic variability and the diachronic evolution of infinitival marking in a preliminary way. Figure 27 compares the frequency of infinitive marking in the EModE and LModE subcorpora. Notice, however, that it considers only the context following the omissible infinitive marker and therefore tells only half of the story. The figure clearly illustrates the decline of infinitival marking during the period considered. While in the EModE corpus (1518 to 1700), the marker is still used in 27 percent of the cases on average, its frequency drops to 3 percent in the LModE corpus (1701 to 1780). The nineteenth century databases were not included in this study due to the lack of variability. Given the scarcity of infinitive marking in the eighteenth century, it is not astonishing that the rhythmic criteria lead to the greatest discrepancies between the three groups in the earlier corpus section. As expected,

Marked and unmarked infinitives

191

the incidence of the infinitive marker to is lowest before non initially stressed infinitives. For the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the divergence of this category from both initially stressed and prosodically overshadowed infinitives is most significant. 38 100% - , - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - , - e - initially stressed infmitives 90% -e-prosodically overshadowed infinitives

80%

'>M'>~_ noninitially

70%

stressed infinitives

60% 50% 40%

170/543=31 % 46/156=29%

20%

I 20/117=17%' 10% ~ 0%

-e-9/283=3% 2/112=2% -e-l/77=1%

J-~-._--------.-,~------=--EEPF + EPD 1518-1700

ECF+ EPD 1701-1780

Figure 27. The distribution of the marker to before (initial or non-coordinated) infInitives dependent on active make and following full defmite object noun phrases in a series of prose corpora (EEPF, ECF, EPD)

In the eighteenth century, infinitival marking has practically died out in all rhythmic contexts and does not exceed three percent even before initially stressed infinitives. Accordingly, there are no statistically significant discrepancies between any of the three rhythmic categories. Among the 9 examples still involving marked initially stressed infinitives, 3 are instances of the proverb money makes the mare to go, where the infinitive marker was originally conditioned by rhythm, but in the eighteenth century its use can safely be ascribed to the conservatism characteristic of set phrases. In 5 of the remaining 6 instances, the use of to avoids the creation of a stress clash. All the other cases where an initially stressed infinitive follows a finally stressed object noun phrase have to tolerate stress clashes in the eighteenth century since the infinitive marker has become largely unavailable. The fact that noninitially stressed infinitives that exclude the possibility of a stress clash are occasionally marked as late as the eighteenth century does not disprove a rhythmic influence, but underlines the importance of other factors impinging on infinitival marking. Consider the

192

Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

following three examples, which are the only ones in which noninitially stressed or overshadowed infinitives are still preceded by to. (28)

But Una, like Neptune, (as described in bb Virg. lib. I Virgil) with her awful voice made the waves of their passions to subside (or at least forced them to conceal their rage,) ... (Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier: The Cry, 1754; ECF)

(29)

This is sad construction, when Homer, Euripides, ./Eschylus, make the word Isos to import no more than like. (Thomas Amory: John Buncle, 1756; ECF)

(30)

... , and indeed, nothing but such Brutality could have made the Consideration ofhis shameful Death (so this weak Woman called Hanging) which was now inevitable to be born even without Madness. (Henry Fielding: Jonathan Wild, 1743; ECF)

The use of the marked infinitive to subside in example (28) may be regarded as an anticipation of the structure in the following parenthesis dependent on the matrix verb force, which obligatorily takes the marked infinitive. A deviation from this structure would have produced a lack of parallelism, which would run counter to the intended parallelism in meaning. In example (29) (and also in (28) and (30), by the way), the impingement of the matrix subject on the object is a very abstract one characterized by a low degree of transitivity, as compared to the more prototypical instances of make followed by object-infinitive constructions quoted in (25) to (27). Under these circumstances, the use of the infinitive marker has been argued in the survey in section 5.4 to be reinforced by the tendency known as the Distance Principle. In example (30), the use of to is arguably triggered by the complex object expression, containing a prepositional phrase to which a parenthetic remark and a relative clause are appended. In this case, to does not function as a stress clash buffer (which would be more or less superfluous preceding the prosodically overshadowed infinitive be). Rather, it is an exponent of a syntactic processing strategy that takes into account the grammatical complexity of a structure and compensates for it by providing additional structural signals, in this case making the dependence of be on make more explicit. Rohdenburg (1996: 151) gives the following definition of the socalled Complexity Principle: "In the case of more or less explicit grammatical options the more explicit one(s) will tend to be favored in cognitively more complex environments." However, as example (31), containing a similarly complex object expression, suggests, the Complexity Principle

Marked and unmarked infinitives

193

had no absolute sway over the marking of infinitives even in the EModE era; if there were no other factors to be considered, the infinitive would certainly be marked. (31)

This was that which made the people (who were neither safely to be admitted unto, nor conveniently to be excludedfrom the framing oftheir Common-wealth) verily believe when it came forth, that it was no other than that, whereofthey themselves had been the makers. (lames Harrington: The Common-Wealth of Oceana, 1656; EEPF)

The fact that the infinitive believe is, however, not entirely bare, but introduced by the adverb verily seems significant in this context: it can be argued to pave the way for the infinitive complementing the preceding matrix verb after a lengthy object expression. Its absence would make the structure harder to process since the infinitive would appear very abruptly. This preparatory function of the adverb cannot easily be explained as a structural signal making the dependence on the matrix verb explicit. Rather, it could preliminarily be described as a precursor to the infinitive indicating the beginning of a new phrase without an explicit reference to the preceding grammatical context. Seen in this light, the infinitive marker to as in example (30) can be ascribed a second function, which happens to tally well with the requirement for an explicit link between the matrix and the dependent verb: it, too, may serve to fill in the onset of a new phrase after a longish object and a relatively wide prosodic break. While these remarks are still hypothetical and not substantiated by quantitative data, Schltiter (in preparation a) contains a more systematic look at this phenomenon labelled upbeat. Effects of the Complexity Principle on infinitival marking after make are amply dealt with and demonstrated in Rohdenburg and Schliiter (2000: 446-452). In the present study they are partially neutralized due to the restriction to full noun phrases as objects, but the length and complexity of these objects and the presence of insertions are neglected so as to avoid a further complication of the analysis. Similarly, syntactic effects such as parallelism and semantic tendencies like the Distance Principle are disregarded. It is assumed that these cancel themselves out in a sufficiently large dataset. As far as the results portrayed in figure 27 go, the expectation is confirmed that the rhythmic status of the first syllable of the dependent infinitive correlates with the probability of occurrence of the infinitive marker. So far, however, the data only warrant a binary division between noninitially stressed infinitives and all others. The indiscriminability of initially

194

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

stressed and prosodically overshadowed infinitives may be due to the fact that the contexts preceding the (marked or unmarked) infinitives are not homogeneous. This hunch will be pursued in the following closer analysis of the EModE data, in which infinitival marking dependent on active make is still frequent enough to establish a fine-grained distributional pattern. In order to get a better grip on the buffer function of the infinitive marker, an additional distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables in the preceding context was introduced, cutting across the three categories of following contexts employed in figure 27. Each of the examples in (25) to (27) involves a stressed syllable preceding the (marked or unmarked) infinitive. In example (25), featuring an initially stressed infinitive, the omission of to would therefore lead to a stress clash. In the other two examples, to can be omitted without this undesirable consequence. This is more true of example (26), involving a noninitially stressed infinitive, than of example (27), involving a prosodically overshadowed one. Thus, the rhythmic status of the preceding context is only at issue if the dependent infinitive is initially stressed. If the syllable preceding the (marked or unmarked) infinitive is stressless, as in example (32), the omission of the infinitive marker is as unproblematic from a rhythmic point of view as in the case of noninitially stressed or prosodically overshadowed infinitives. (32)

Thus she spoke with afierceness, that made the Lover tremble with fear oflosing her; ... (Aphra Behn: Love Letters between a NobleMan and his Sister, Part Ill, 1687; EEPF)

The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century data presented in figure 27 were thus subjected to further scrutiny. Within each of the three categories of following contexts, an additional distinction was introduced between stressed and unstressed syllables preceding the dependent infinitive and, if applicable, the marker to. Such a binary classification of course fails to do justice to the complexities that emerge in naturalistic language use, but it can be expected that the rough distinction will permit some cautious conclusions. An effect of this distinction was only predicted in the first category, where the infinitive was initially stressed. The data for dramatic and non-dramatic prose were kept apart since the respective tendencies to mark an infinitive dependent on active make differ widely: for non-dramatic prose, the average of infinitival marking runs to 32 percent, while for dramatic prose, the proportion falls to only 14 percent. Figures 28 and 29 display the results of the analyses for non-dramatic and dramatic prose respectively.

Marked and unmarked infinitives

195

100% Vl

90%

• following a stressed sy llable

80%

ITIl following an unstressed sy llable

."

>

:-8 I::

!.;:<

.5 "0

70%

."

60%

~

50%

~

S

'+-< 0

."

30%

...u

20%

."

0-

00

~ N N

40%

~

d."

~

00 M 11

10% 0% initially stressed infinitives

prosodically overshadowed infmitives

noninitially stressed infmitives

Figure 28. The distribution of the marker to before (initial or non-coordinated) infmitives dependent on active make and following full defmite object noun phrases in the EEPF corpus of non-dramatic prose (1518-1700) 100% 90%

• following a stre:~e~~-;-I;~~~:-----I

.::: et::

80%

11 following an unstressed sy llable

!.;:<

70%

Vl

."

I::

.5 "0

."

60%

~

50%

~

40%

N

~

S

'+-< 0

."

....~ I::

M

30%

."

... u

."

0-

I

11

0 0\

--N

20% 10% 0% initially stressed infinitives

prosodically overshadowed infinitives

noninitially stressed infinitives

Figure 29. The distribution of the marker to before (initial or non-coordinated) infmitives dependent on active make and following full definite object noun phrases in the EPD corpus of dramatic prose (1540-1700)

196

Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

The margin between dramatic and non-dramatic prose texts remains stable in every single subcategory represented in figures 28 and 29. Thus, the dramatic prose corpus anticipates a state of affairs that was reached considerably later by non-dramatic prose. 39 As in the case of the alternation between a quite and quite a(n), delineated in figure 14 of section 4.5 above, the so-called 'written-to-be-spoken' genre of dramatic prose turns out to be the more progressive variety as it gives up the infinitive marker earlier than non-dramatic prose, representing a more literate genre. These findings seem to warrant the conclusion that the loss of infinitival marking in EModE is spearheaded by the spoken language of the time, which is to a certain degree reflected in contemporary dramatic prose. What is more relevant in the present context is, however, the rhythmic conditioning of variable infinitive marking. As predicted, the rhythmic status of the syllable preceding the infinitive plays a major role when the infinitive is initially stressed. In both types of prose, statistically robust differences can be demonstrated only within this category.40 The difference in infinitive marking between preceding stressed and unstressed syllables runs to 11 percent in both counts. It is thus obvious that in addition to the following context, the preceding context co-determines the use or omission of the infinitive marker. In dramatic as in non-dramatic prose, the incidence of marked infinitives is highest when both the syllables preceding and following the locus of the marker are stressed. In these potential stress clash contexts, the percentages of marked infinitives are highest, running to 42 and 23 percent respectively, and thus clearly exceeding the average totals of 32 and 14 percent for the respective subcorpora. This finding indicates that a considerable number of tokens of the infinitive marker still in use in the EModE period are not motivated by grammatical or semantic considerations, or inserted as structural signals facilitating language processing. Rather, they are simply needed as rhythmic buffers, separating two strongly stressed syllables. For prosodically overshadowed and noninitially stressed infinitives, the preceding context plays no quantifiable role; the statistical test either yields extremely high error probabilities or is inapplicable. 41 This was to be expected, since whenever the first syllable of the infinitive is weakly stressed or unstressed, no stress clash could possibly arise, even if the preceding syllable was stressed. An inspection of the distribution of infinitive markers following stressed syllables (i.e. the black columns) in figures 28 and 29 yields some further insights. In these closely circumscribed cases, we can predict the strength of the stress clashes that arise if to is omitted. The clashes are extremely strong if the infinitive is fully stressed on its initial syllable. They are intermediate in strength if some of the rhythmic prominence of a monosyllabic infinitive is sapped by an immediately fol-

Marked and unmarked infinitives

197

lowing more prominent syllable. These constellations are schematically described in (22) and (23) in the section on scarce(ly). Stress clashes do not occur if the infinitive has its lexical stress on a later syllable. This gradation of rhythmic contacts is mirrored by the fall in infinitive marking following stressed syllables (the black columns) from left to right in the above diagrams: the marker is most needed where it serves to avoid stress clashes, and it is most dispensable where another unstressed syllable is available for this function. Once again, the so-called prosodic overshadowing turns out to have a considerable explanatory potential for the fine distributional differences found in both dramatic and non-dramatic prose. 42 The light grey columns in figures 28 and 29, Le. the cases following unstressed syllables, appear to follow a similar pattern. The situation is, however, more blurred on account of the fact that here it is only the influence of the following context that can be measured. Obviously, initially stressed and prosodically overshadowed infinitives are more likely to be accompanied by an infinitive marker than noninitially stressed infinitives. This, however, cannot be taken as evidence of stress clash avoidance. 43 In sum, the foregoing discussion has traced the loss of infinitive marking dependent on active make through almost three centuries. While the EModE subcorpus exhibited a sizeable proportion of marked infinitives, in the LModE subcorpus, there are only scant remains. These could partially be accounted for by unsystematic references to a striving for syntactic parallelism, a semantic factor (the Distance Principle), a processing-related factor (the Complexity Principle), and the survival of archaic features in fixed expressions such as proverbs. A more systematic investigation has probed into the role of the preceding and following rhythmic contexts in EModE. The results indicate that a combined consideration of both is best suited to isolate the effects of the preference for rhythmic alternation in a closely circumscribed class of critical cases. All in all, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is only one out of many influences co-determining the presence or absence of the infinitive marker, but its impact is quantitatively measurable and must not be neglected in a full account of EModE infinitival marking.

5.4.2.

Infinitives dependent on passive make from EModE to nineteenthcentury English

As has been shown in the introduction, passive constructions involving directive (or manipulative) verbs (in Dixon's 1991: 194 classification, verbs of MAKING) like make and bid are rhythmically precarious: since the object of the superordinate verb, which is in the active placed between

198

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

the verb and the dependent infinitive, is fronted to become the grammatical subject of the sentence, the two verbs usually occur in immediate succession. Passives have often been claimed to have preserved the infinitive marker as an intervening buffer element (cf. Rissanen 1999: 287-288), while actives could dispense with this additional syllable more easily, as has been shown in the preceding section. However, the statistics for English verbs based on Francis and Kucera (1982) and presented in the introduction to Chapter 4 indicate that only about 60 out of 100 types and about 70 out of 100 randomly selected tokens in (written) PDE will be initially stressed. For earlier forms of English, no comparable statistics are available, but for centuries, verbs have shown a propensity towards non initial stress due to the presence of unstressed prefixes, widespread in OE (cf. Kelly and Bock 1988: 398), and the influx of end-stressed French verbs since ME times. This suggests that rhythmic tendencies may not have been the only factor advancing the categorical introduction of infinitival marking in the passive. Presumably, rhythmic motivations were reinforced by the workings of the Complexity Principle (cf. Rohdenburg 1996: 151). As has been demonstrated in psycholinguistic research, passive constructions generally involve a greater processing load than their active counterparts. 44 Thus, rhythmic preferences and syntactic complexity appear to have worked synergetically in the establishment of the marked infinitive in passive uses. As a consequence, the complementation patterns of the verb make and other directive verbs diverged as early as the ME period, in which Mustanoja (1960: 526, 529) discovers a predominance of unmarked infinitives in the active and of marked infinitives in the passive. While Mustanoja (1960: 533) finds considerable variation involving make in ME, Stroheker (1913: 85) states that as early as EModE, the unmarked infinitive is the rule after active make, but to may be used for the sake of rhythm. According to Dixon (1991: 194), the split between the active and the passive is completed in PDE, where to is no longer used after active make, but generally included after the passive. The distinction between initially and noninitially stressed verbs can be exploited to isolate a potential rhythmic component of the variation between marked and unmarked infinitives and of diachronic shifts in their distribution. The following analysis concentrates on passive uses of make, which promise to hold a great potential for stress clashes since the monosyllabic and stressed form made is in most cases immediately followed by the dependent infinitive. As before, only non-coordinated infinitives or, in the case of coordinated infinitives, the initial conjuncts will be considered. By distinguishing between different rhythmic types of dependent verbs, critical and uncritical contexts can be differentiated. Rhythmically critical

Marked and unmarked infinitives

199

are those contexts in which an initially stressed (or monosyllabic) verb that retains its full rhythmic prominence immediately follows made. In this case, the absence of to leads to a stress clash, as in (33a), but the presence of the marker can safeguard the alternating rhythm, as in (33b). (33) a. ... , since they were most certain, their purses should be made pay for the contention, as the Kings Forces without the walls, would keep them from all provisions necessary for their subsistance; ... (Sir Percy Herbert: The Princess Cloria, 1661; EEPF) b. Upon that the Fire was made to broil his Flesh, he was stript naked, and tyed to the Tree; ... (Anon.: Vertue Rewarded, 1693; EEPF) In contrast, rhythm is not at stake where the dependent infinitive has its primary stress on a later syllable. In this case, the omission of the infinitive marker to leads to an alternating rhythm as in example (34a). Nevertheless, its presence can be favoured by extra-rhythmic constraints, such as the increased need for explicitness typical of the comparatively complex passive constructions, as in example (34b). (34) a. Besides the Priests who were made believe, they should still continue their jurisdiction over the peoples actions, were also induced to a complyance to that purpose, ... (Sir Percy Herbert: The Princess Cloria, 1661; EEPF) b. Captain Damnation was made to retreat, and to intrench himself further offofMansoul; ... (John Bunyan: The Holy War, 1682; EEPF) Certain examples involving monosyllabic verbs, like (35a-b), pose a problem of classification. For these verbs a third category was introduced if they were immediately followed by a syllable carrying an even stronger stress. As in the above studies of scarce/scarcely and make in the active, these verbs were assumed to be prosodically overshadowed by the following material and consequently destressed, so that the stress clash with the preceding verb made is mitigated. The stress marks included in examples (3 5a-b) indicate this. (35) a. Be made sit downe againe. (Barten Holyday: Technogamia, 1618; EPD) b. Wyl not the Crab stock be made to bring!oorth pleasaunt frute and the stonie ground be made fertill: ... (Austen Saker: Narbonus, 1580; EEPF)

200

Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

The following corpus analysis will thus verify the hypothesis proposed by Fijn van Draat (1967: 80-86), Franz (1910: 157) and Bolinger (1965b: 151) according to which the infinitive marker can be put to use as a stress clash buffer and is therefore dispensable, even in the passive, where rhythmic alternation is secured in a different way. Furthermore, the analysis will seek to determine whether stress clash avoidance had an accelerating effect on the generalization of the infinitive marker in the passive. For this purpose, a large diachronic corpus was used, including both dramatic and non-dramatic prose, and covering the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. 45 The database was searched for all forms of the auxiliary be followed by made. 46 In this way, a by no means complete, but representative set of passive uses was assembled. Figure 30 shows the results for the three chronological subsections. --e- 450/450 66/66=100% 56/58=97% 100% 1--r;~:;:;;;;;;;;;;;;=......---l;;t-----=:::::?·3---=100% Cl>

90%

.f: "a

80%

Il)

~

70%

""Cl

60%

.S Il)

~

a a '+-< 0

50%

~

8110=80%

77/77 =100% 204/204 =100%

18/31=58%

40%

Il)

30% ~ t:: Il)

C,) ....

20%

0..

10%

--e- initially stressed infinitives

~prosodically

Il)

--(po.

overshadowed infinitives

noninitially stressed infinitives

--J

I

0% EEPF + EPD 1518-1700

ECF+EPD 1701-1780

NCF+EPD 1781-1903

Figure 30. The distribution of the marker to before (initial or non-coordinated) infmitives dependent on passive make in a series of prose corpora (EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD)

The diagram shows three initially clearly distinct lines converging to the maximum of 100 percent of marked infinitives in the nineteenth century. In the earlier centuries, unmarked infinitives are still current in 17, respectively 10 percent of the total number of cases. Unmarked infinitives are, however, unevenly distributed among the rhythmically different contexts. As predicted, there are only very few occurrences in connection with initially stressed non-overshadowed infinitives. Sentence (33a) above is

Marked and unmarked infinitives

201

one of the two examples in this category. It entails an objectionable rhythmic constellation which is avoided in 97 percent of the cases through the intercalation of the unstressed infinitive marker as a buffer element. The infinitive marker is, however, significantly less frequent before noninitially stressed infinitives: its incidence is limited to 58 percent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and to 78 percent in the eighteenth century.47 This is not to deny the possibility that the spread of the infinitive marker in the passive was furthered by the need to make the passive structure more explicit. However, the results manifest a major influence of rhythm on the speed of the grammatical change. Irrespective of the syntactic complexity of the construction, noninitially stressed infinitives often do without the rhythmically superfluous syllable, while initially stressed ones promote its insertion. The resultant time lag between the most progressive and the most conservative contexts amounts to about two centuries. In the course of the eighteenth century, the use of marked infinitives after passive make becomes fixed and is from then on impermeable to influences of rhythm. The prosodically overshadowed infinitives distinguished in figure 30 have so far been left out of consideration. Their behaviour is roughly intermediate between the other two groups, but the differences fail to reach statistical significance due to an insufficient number of examples, which makes the chi-square test inapplicable. Although the reduced rate of infinitival marking in comparison to non-overshadowed initially stressed infinitives is only accounted for by two unmarked examples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and by a single unmarked example in the eighteenth century, these data can be interpreted to indicate that the concept of prosodic overshadowing has some degree of psychological reality. In conjunction with the data for scarce(ly) displayed in figure 26 and for active make in figures 27 to 29, they suggest that preceding a more prominent syllable, the stress level of a normally strongly stressed lexical verb is lowered. Besides reducing the stress clash with the following context of the verb, this has the effect of making a potential clash with the preceding context, in this case the form made, less salient and thus less objectionable. The effect of processing complexity manifests itself in the corpus data in another, more specific way, already noticed by Fijn van Draat (1967: 80-86). The superordinate verb made may occasionally be separated from its dependent infinitive by an intervening adverbial expression. The 9 examples retrieved by the search were excluded from figure 30, since the influence of rhythm is overridden by the need to make the grammatical link between the superordinate and subordinate verbs explicit. In fact, not a single one of these examples involves an unmarked infinitive, irrespective of the length of the intervening material and of the location of the stress on

202

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

the infinitive. Sentences (36a-b) give an impression of the range of examples. (36) a. ... ; he finding he was sought, and not consenting to bee made by force to yield, to other then his owne made choice, he stole away; ... (Lady Mary Wroth: The Countesse ofMontgomeries Urania, 1621; EEPF) b. Tracts, so numerous that it would be impossible to give their measure or their value by any other calculation than that oftheir weight, were made by the ingenuity ofthe fair and pious contributors to assume a very tempting aspect, ... (Frances Milton Trollope: The Vicar ofWrexhill, 1837; NCF) This effect can clearly be ascribed to the Complexity Principle. Note, however, that the number of examples is insufficient and that the threshold for the use of the marked infinitive is extremely low as early as the EModE period. The complexity effects that have been isolated by Rohdenburg and Schlliter (2000: 446-449) in active uses of make, where the threshold is very much higher, argue much more strongly in favour of the Complexity Principle. In sum, the separation of initially stressed and noninitially stressed infinitives has allowed us to extract a rhythmic component of the variation between marked and unmarked infinitives dependent on the directive verb make in the passive. Before the complementation pattern of passive make was fixed, the avoidance of stress clashes differentiated between initially and noninitially stressed infinitives, giving rise to an almost categorical presence of the infinitive marker before initially stressed infinitives, while noninitially stressed ones occurred without the marker well into the eighteenth century. Prosodic overshadowing of stressed verbs by immediately following more strongly stressed material has been shown to lower the probability of infinitival marking, while the separation of the infinitive from the matrix verb triggers the marker without fail (as far as our data are concerned). These results vigorously endorse the influence - often dismissed as insubstantial in the literature - of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation on infinitival marking even in prose language. On the diachronic level, both the cognitive complexity of the passive and the danger of stress clashes between passive made and the immediately following infinitive have worked synergetically to establish the marked infinitive by and by as the only viable option. The active, being neither cognitively demanding nor particularly problematic in terms of rhythm, meanwhile dispensed with the infinitive marker. Thus, the fixation of the different infinitival complementation patterns of active and passive make was completed by the nineteenth

Marked and unmarked infinitives

203

century. Note that this grammatical split goes along with a violation of the preference for system congruity and for the uniform encoding of meanings: these factors militate against the maintenance of grammatical variants selected on the basis of contextual factors such as rhythm and complexity. The following analysis of infinitival complements of passive bid will provide a further means of isolating the contributions of stress clash avoidance and cognitive complexity to some extent.

5.4.3.

Infinitives dependent on passive bid in nineteenth-century English

The directive (or manipulative) verb bid is in many ways comparable to the verb make. Like make, bid could variably be complemented by marked or unmarked infinitives (cf. Visser 1973: 2303), but as early as ME, Mustanoja (1960: 526, 529) notes a preponderance of the marked infinitive in passive uses and of the unmarked infinitive in active uses, and Stroheker (1913: 81) finds this situation perpetuated in EModE. Thus, an attempt was made to delineate the synchronic and diachronic influence of rhythmic alternation on the distribution of the infinitive marker in the complementation of passive uses of bid. 48 The analysis however incurred a number of difficulties. For one thing, directive bid is much less frequent than make, so that even the addition of the dramatic prose corpus EPD to the three nondramatic corpora EEPF, ECF and NCF did not yield any statistically satisfying results for the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Secondly, while the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century data juxtaposed 14 unmarked infinitives with 17 marked ones, the entire eighteenth-century section of the corpus yielded only a single instance of passive bid followed by an unmarked infinitive as opposed to 32 instances of marked infinitives. As a consequence, no distributional profile could be worked out. Astonishingly, the nineteenth-century subsection again yielded 12 instances of unmarked infinitives, contrasting with 73 marked ones. To judge from these data (which are by no means plentiful), the share of infinitive marking in the passive has declined between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This finding is in stark contrast with the data for passive make, which established the infinitive marker obligatorily in the nineteenth century. From the point of view of rhythm, this decline in the use of the potential buffer element to is, however, counterbalanced by the third characteristic difference between make and bid. While make has a unique past participle made, the participial form of bid varies between monosyllabic bid and disyllabic bidden. The second unstressed syllable of the latter can function as a stress clash buffer before initially stressed infinitives, just like the optional -en suffix of the participles of drink, break and strike in attributive

204

Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

uses, investigated in sections 4.4.1, 4.4.2, and 4.4.3 above. Like the infinitive marker to, the use of the participial suffix seems to have undergone a changeable history if the data culled from the corpora are to be trusted. While in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sections bidden occurred 6 times and bid 25 times, the eighteenth-century data reveal a single occurrence of bidden as opposed to 32 occurrences of bid. This trend towards the regularization of bid seems to be reversed again in the nineteenth century, where we find as many as 54 instances of bidden alternating with 3 I instances of bid. 49 As a consequence, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the one hand and the nineteenth century on the other paint a very intricate picture in which two possible stress clash buffers compete with each other. The eighteenth-century situation is meanwhile of no interest for the present work since stress clashes are excluded by the almost categorical use of the infinitive marker. The EEPF data for the infinitival complementation of passive bid are given in Rohdenburg and Schltiter (2000: 485). The present study will focus on the nineteenth-century data retrieved from the NCF corpus and the corresponding publication years 1781 to 1903 in the EPD corpus. As in the previous studies, a basic distinction was made between initially stressed, noninitially stressed and monosyllabic prosodically overshadowed infinitives dependent on bid(den). Leaving the diachronic situation out of consideration, figure 3 I differentiates between four possible constellations involving the optional morphemes. First, there are cases like (37a) in which neither the infinitive marker nor the participial suffix are present. Second, the suffixed variant of the participle may be used without the infinitive marker, as in example (3 7b). Third, the suffixed participle may combine with the infinitive marker (37c). And fourth, the monosyllabic participle can be followed by the marked infinitive (37d). (37) a. On the morrow early, he was bidprepare to attend the House of Lords. (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Falkner, 1837; NCF) b. He was bidden come to fulfil his promise instantly. (George Meredith: One of Our Conquerors, 1891; NCF) c. The page brought in the box, and was bidden to wait without, which he did; ... (William Makepeace Thackeray: The Memoirs ofBarry Lyndon, 1856; NCF) d. I was bid to sit down - drink a glass ofwine; and I was helped with cattle, and with grain to sow my land. (Conrad Ludger: The Peevish Man, 1799; EPD) Figure 31 depicts all instances involving marked infinitives in light colours (light grey or hatched white-and-grey) and instances involving unmarked infinitives in dark colours (black or hatched black-and-grey). All instances

Marked and unmarked infinitives

205

involving the monosyllabic form bid are represented as solid areas, whereas those involving disyllabic bidden are represented as hatched areas. The data in figure 31 confirm the expectation that before initially stressed, non-overshadowed infinitives the total absence of any morpheme apt to function as a buffer will be avoided. Among the 47 instances in this category, 6 involve bidden, 13 involve the infinitive marker, and 28 involve both, but there is no case in which a stress clash between the monosyllabic participle bid and an unmarked infinitive arises. Omission of the infinitive marker does exist even in the case of initially stressed infinitives, but in this case, the threatening stress clash is avoided through the use of the disyllabic participle, as in example (3 7b). In the rhythmically less critical contexts, a few instances can be found that do without either of the two possible buffer elements. In the 10 combinations with prosodically overshadowed infinitives that were found, there is 1 instance of this kind, and in the 15 combinations with noninitially stressed infinitives, there are a considerable 3 instances, one of them quoted in (37a). Although these results are far from statistically significant,50 they demonstrate the rigorous avoidance of stress clashes through the use of at least one of two available stress clash buffers. That the dropping of both is possible under suitable circumstances is indicated by the two categories of cases where none is required for the sake of an alternating rhythm. 100% 90% 80% 70%

i

8/15=53%

60 %

.bid+ 0

l:J 50%

~

0..

40%

121 bidden + 0

30%

[3 bidden

+ to

IliIbid + to

20% 10% 0% initially stressed infinitives

prosodically overshadowed infinitives

noninitiaJly stressed infinitives

Figure 31. The distribution of the marker to and mono- and disyllabic participial variants before (initial or non-coordinated) infmitives dependent on passive bid in two nineteenth-century corpora (NCF and works from the EPD corpus dated 1781-1903)

206

Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

A bold conclusion from these admittedly sparse data would hold that passive bid, in contrast to make, was able to maintain unmarked infinitival complements exactly because its participle was equipped with an alternative way of preventing stress clashes with the following infinitives. Thus, the complexity inherent in passive constructions does not suffice to impose the infinitive marker as an obligatory structural signal ensuring a greater explicitness of the construction, whereas rhythmic clashes are never tolerated at all. This fact reinforces the stance of those favouring a rhythmic account of the grammatical split between unmarked infinitives in the passive and marked infinitives in the active (cf. Stroheker 1913: 81; Franz 1986: 537). Finally, it should be noted that the variability in the participial form of bid and in the marking of dependent infinitives has still not subsided in PDE: a search of the entire BNC yields 9 instances of passive bid with a dependent infinitive, in which the participial variant bidden outnumbers bid by 8 examples to 1, and one of the instances of bidden is followed by an unmarked infinitive. Hence, as in the nineteenth-century, stress clashes are ruled out in the late twentieth century corpus.

5.4.4.

Infinitives dependent on the marginal modal dare from EModE to PDE

The final study of infinitival marking to be described here deals with infinitives dependent on the "marginal modal" dare, to adopt Quirk et al. 's (1985: 137; cf. also Nagle 1989: 93) classification. 51 On the one hand, this verb differs from make and bid insofar as it originates as a modal auxiliary. On the other, it is in line with them since it has developed certain characteristics of a main verb, and among other things it now variably takes marked infinitives. The choice between marked and unmarked infinitives following dare has provided the subject for numerous studies, most of which have, however, confined themselves to describing the emergence of main verb characteristics or tested the relevance of the de-auxiliarization of dare for grammaticalization theory (for further discussion, see Traugott 2001; Schliiter, in preparation d, and the references therein). One of the rare attempts at an explanation for the use or omission of the infinitive marker is the avoidance of stress clashes (cf. Fijn van Draat 1967: 86-96; Stroheker 1913: 83; Bolinger 1965b: 151; Visser 1969: 1434, 1435). This claim, which has never been put to an empirical test, will be examined in the following analysis. A full-scale analysis of the grammar and usage of dare has to take into account the long and complex history of the verb and the differential behaviour of individual verb forms. It also has to consider semantic orienta-

Marked and unmarked infinitives

207

tions (such as epistemic implications and assertivity) that have been argued to influence the choice of a more auxiliary-like or main-verb-like syntax (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 138; Duffley 1992: 11-13; 1994: 220-239; Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 110). A more far-reaching attempt to do justice to a variety of constraints on the presence or absence of the infinitive marker to after dare is provided in Schliiter (in preparation d), of which the present study is an excerpt. For present purposes, only the inflected third-person singular form dares will be selected, which has a long record of variable infinitival marking. Like other recognizable main verb forms, the earliest occurrences of third-person singular forms with the -s-inflection or its predecessor -th appear in the sixteenth century (cf. Visser 1969: 1436; Warner 1993: 202; Beths 1999: 1094). Since that time, the membership of dare in the category of auxiliaries or main verbs has been indeterminate, and variation has been part and parcel of the language all through LModE and PDE (cf. Denison 1998: 169; Barber 1993: 275-276; Krug 2000: 200-202). Whereas auxiliary forms of dare predictably tend to take unmarked infinitival complements, most main verb forms of dare (such as daring, dared and the infinitive) are typically followed by marked infinitives. Dares and dareth have from the outset been exceptional in this respect: they have always shown a particular and as yet unexplained affinity with the bare infinitive (cf. also Beths 1999: 1095 and Taeymans 2004). The combination of a main verb form of dare as represented by the inflected form dares/dareth with an unmarked dependent infinitive is in the literature referred to as a blend. 52 However, as is demonstrated in Schliiter (in preparation d), the share of infinitival marking in connection with the inflected third person singular form has been on the rise since its first appearance, i.e. the form is developing an increasingly main-verb-like character. Examples (38a-b) illustrate variable infinitive marking after dares. (38) a.... He is a coward, and dares survive his honour; let him live. " (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: The Fortunes ofPerkin Warbeck, 1830; NCF) b. The man who dares to lOve her ought at any rate to be something in the world. (Anthony Trollope: The Duke's Children, 1880; NCF)

As can be seen, the use or omission of the infinitive marker is not without an effect on the rhythmic structure of the combination of dares and the following infinitive. While noninitially stressed infinitives are unproblematic when immediately following the stressed monosyllable dares, initially stressed infinitives like love would in this case lead to a stress clash. We

208

Analysis o/verbal and adverbial structures

may thus expect to find support for the hypothesis put forward above, according to which the use of the infinitive marker is in part conditioned by the need for a stress clash buffer. For this purpose, a series of prose corpora comprising dramatic and non-dramatic prose, dating from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, and the entire BNC, covering the late twentieth century, were searched for all occurrences of dares. 53 In the majority of cases, these were followed by the dependent infinitive without any intervening material. Examples with such insertions were excluded from the analysis. All instances involving the potential auxiliary verbs be, have and do as dependent infinitives were likewise excluded because their rhythmic status is often difficult to determine. Since prosodically overshadowed infinitives were relatively rare in the data, they were treated as a subtype of noninitially stressed infinitives. Thus, figure 32 distinguishes only between two types of rhythmic context. 100% rJl

-,-------------------------,

-e- before initially stressed infmitive

90%

-;)-- before noninitially stressed infinitive


'b 'a t+::

80%

"0

60%

.5
~

~/l2=75i

70%

a a

50%

0

40% .

'+-<

31/39=79% I

/.


0Jl t':l

E
0.

30% 20% 10% 0% EEPF+ EPD 1518-1700

ECF+EPD 1701-1780

NCF +EPD 1781-1903

BNC 1960-1993

Figure 32. The distribution of the marker to before (initial or non-coordinated) infmitives immediately following the verb form dares in a series of

prose corpora (EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD, BNC) The results not only reveal that infinitival marking is more frequent with initially stressed infinitives in every single chronological stage viewed in this figure, but also that the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has been a driving force in the establishment of marked infinitives in the context investigated. The differences between initially and noninitially stressed dependent infinitives are particularly noticeable in the phase where the transition is most rapidly under way, Le. the eighteenth and nineteenth

A-prejixation of-ing-forms

209

centuries. 54 It is thus partly due to the rhythmic context whether occurrences of dares display a fully main-verb-like syntax or whether they continue to favour the older auxiliary-like syntax. What is true of dares can be expected to hold for the remaining verb forms of dare as well as for other verbs sitting on the fence between auxiliary and main verb status (e.g. need, help), though evidence for rhythmic effects is still at a premium here. The conclusion that can be drawn from the data sampled in the above analysis is that under appropriate conditions, the choice between main verb and auxiliary syntax of the marginal modal dare can be decided by rhythmic preferences, above and beyond all semantic differences that may persist between the two constructions. The main finding of the four analyses of variable infinitival marking that jointly make up section 5.4 can be summarized as follows. The distribution of marked and unmarked dependent infinitives is not uniquely determined by the grammatical category (auxiliary or main verb) of the superordinate verb, as one might be inclined to think. While semantic explanations, which are frequently resorted to in the secondary literature, are difficult to quantify in a corpus, the frequently neglected influence of the preference for rhythmic alternation has been argued to contribute to such diverse effects as the split between active and passive uses of make, the alternation of the infinitive marker with a disyllabic participle in passive uses of bid, and the acceleration of the transition of dare from modal auxiliary to main verb.

5.5.

A-prefixation of -ing-forms

The final two studies in the present section on verbal and adverbial structures focus on the diachronic evolution of a phenomenon that will, in accordance with linguistic convention, provisionally be referred to as aprefixing. The sources of the phenomenon lie in the OE period. The socalled a-prefix goes back to an OE locative preposition which was most probably on, although at and of are other likely candidates. By ME times, the preposition had become semantically bleached and phonologically reduced to a (cf. Fijn van Draat 1912b: 508; Stroheker 1913: 25; Mustanoja 1960: 577; Visser 1973: 1894; Wolfram 1980: 121; Nagucka 1984: 363; Denison 1993: 387). OE had two types of verbal nouns, one in -ung/-ing and one in -ojJ/-eth, both of which could be preceded by the preposition on. In ME, the -ojJ/-eth-variant was ousted as a productive derivational suffix by the -ing-variant (cf. Mustanoja 1960: 577). The resultant structure a-V ing reached its maximal currency in the EModE period, but had to compete with the equally spreading prefixless -ing-form (cf. Denison 1993:

210

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

388). The two were equivalent in the function of expressing actions in progress and exerted a mutual influence on each other that resulted by and large in an interchangeability of the types he is a-hunting and he is hunting, the prefixed -ing-form retaining a slightly more nominal character than the prefixless -ing-form (cf. Nehls 1988: 184-185; cf. also Nagucka 1984: 368). According to Nehls (1988: 185), in the eighteenth century, a-prefixed -ing-forms lost ground to prefixless forms and became increasingly confined to nonstandard and dialectal usage. Yet, they survived in some idiomatic niches well into the twentieth-century standard language and continue to thrive in many English dialects on both sides of the Atlantic (cf. Franz 1986: 559; Visser 1973: 1996; Trudgill 1978: 15; Wolfram 1976; 1980). The syntactic uses of a-prefixed -ing-forms are multifarious. They occur in progressives, in reduced relative clauses, after verbs of perception, verbs of movement and rest, verbs of starting and continuing, and in adverbial constructions. A-prefixing is thus restricted to parts of the verb phrase; it is not applicable to the entire range of gerundial -ing-forms (cf. Wolfram 1980: 110-117; cf. furthermore Franz 1986: 559; Visser 1973: 18881918). Within the permissible contexts, prefixed -ing-forms alternate with prefixless -ing-forms, and their distribution in PDE nonstandard speech has been shown to be co-determined by an interplay of syntactic and phonological factors (cf. Wolfram 1976: 52). As semantic factors, aspectual considerations such as habituality or remoteness and narrative techniques such as emotional intensification have been adduced in the literature (see the references in Wolfram 1976: 52-55). However, their explanatory value is questioned by Wolfram (1976: 52; 1980: 141), who finds no evidence of any semantic factors influencing the distribution of a-prefixing. As for the syntactic constraints, Trudgill (1978: 16-17) discerns two tendencies, which are variable in nature: First, -ing-forms in simple verb phrases (e.g. I'm a-gain ') are more likely to take the prefix than -ing-forms in more complex (multi-verb) verb phrases (e.g. He kept a-doin ' on it). Second, (at least for urban speakers in Norfolk) verbs without a following direct object (e.g. I'm a-camin ') are more likely to take the prefix than verbs with a following direct object (e.g. I was just a-doin ' on it).55 These syntactic tendencies intersect with phonological constraints, two of which are practically exceptionless. As a consequence, in certain cases where a-prefixing would be grammatically licensed, it is blocked because it violates one or both of these. Wolfram (1976: 50-52; 1980: 124-126; cf. also Trudgill 1978: 16) detects the following set of phonological constraints:

A-prefixation of-ing-forms

211

- First, a-prefixing is categorically excluded if the -ing-form to which the prefix would be attached begins with a vowel (e.g. *a-eatin '). This constraint is explained as a strategy of hiatus avoidance. - Second, a-prefixing is restricted to -ing-forms with a stressed initial syllable. Noninitial stress is a knock-out context for the prefix, which is itself devoid of stress (e.g. *a-retirin '). This constraint is motivated by the avoidance of contiguous unstressed syllables codified in the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. Third, a variable constraint leads to a reduced rate of a-prefixing if the word preceding the -ing-form ends in a vowel (e.g. quietly a hollerin '). This constraint resembles the first in that it serves to avoid the formation of hiatuses, but unlike the first it is not obligatory. This difference in status is not accounted for by Wolfram (1976; 1980), but it arguably has to do with the fact that hiatuses across word boundaries are less noticeable than within a word. Moreover, word-initial stressed vowels are more obtrusive than word-final unstressed ones, so that a hiatus will be more objectionable in the first case than in the latter. Though Wolfram mentions no more than these three phonological constraints, a fourth one is clearly missing to complete the set. This concerns the hypothesis, to be tested in the following study, that the rhythmic nature of the preceding context plays a role as a determinant of the use of the aprefix. If it is true that -ing-forms taking the a-prefix are necessarily initially stressed, the omission of the prefix would lead to a succession of two stressed syllables if the preceding syllable happened to be likewise stressed. On the other hand, the omission would be facilitated if the preceding syllable was unstressed. This rhythmic component of a-prefixing has been pointed out by Fijn van Draat (1912b: 508-509), but has never been subjected to an empirical analysis. Like the third phonological constraint, this potential influence would cross a word boundary and can therefore not be expected to be categorical, but its effect should emerge in an appropriate quantitative investigation. The following two analyses concentrate on a verb of beginning (set) and a verb of motion (go) respectively, followed by variably prefixed -ingforms. As the discussion proceeds, the notion of a-prefixing will have to be enlarged to include elements other than the a-prefix itself, and the categorical constraints against a-prefixing introduced above will be revised accordingly.

212

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

5.5.1.

A-prefixation of -ing-forms following set from EModE to PDE

The verb set has transitive and intransitive uses followed by -ing-forms that are compatible with a-prefixing (e.g. set s.o. (a-)doing s.th., set (a-)doing s. th.). Depending on the presence or absence of stress on the syllable preceding the -ing-form, the omission of the prefix can lead to the creation of stress clashes. To constitute a representative set of examples, all forms of the verb followed by an -ing-form at a maximal distance of 8 words to the right were retrieved from the by now familiar corpus of dramatic and nondramatic prose covering the sixteenth to late twentieth centuries. Figure 33 provides a first insight into the frequency of a-prefixing in the construction. It distinguishes between non-dramatic prose, represented by the novels and short stories assembled in the EEPF, ECF and NCF corpora and in the fictional prose section of the BNC on the one hand, and dramatic prose, represented by the corresponding sections of the EPD corpus on the other. The fact that the latter collection does not cover the late twentieth century explains the absence of a dramatic counterpart to the NCF corpus. -e-102/109

100% Cl

-?

90%

~Cl

70%

~

60%

S!

50%

% 80% ~ ~

~

'-+-< 0

Q)

~ Q) ()

.... Q)

0..

76/88=86%

A
50/61=82%

=93%"

~2/8'·'·\<.

80/137=58%

40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

-e-non-dramatic prose

20/132=15% 113/540=21 %

I

,··dramatic prose ---·-----r-------~--

EEPF + EPD 1518-1700

ECF+EPD 1701-1780

--------~---

-I

NCF + EPD BNC wridom 1 1781-1903 1960-1993

Figure 33. The distribution of the prefix a- and the prepositions a '/an/(up)an/in/ (in)ta preceding -ing-fonns compared to bare -ing-fonns dependent on the verb set in a series of prose corpora according to genre (EEPF, ECF, NCF and BNC wridom 1 contrasted with EPD)

With the exception of a slight increase between EModE and LModE, the share of prefixed -ing-forms following set declines continually from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. This is the result that was to be ex-

A-prejixQtion of-ing-forms

213

pected on the basis of the secondary literature summarized in the introduction. However, as far as constructions dependent on the verb set are concerned, the fall in a-prefixing and its relegation to nonstandard usage do not occur in the eighteenth century, as has been claimed for a-prefixed -ing-forms in general by Nehls (1988: 185). On the contrary, the use of the prefix becomes almost mandatory in this period. The development described by Nehls does not set in until the nineteenth century, which is the only subperiod in which written and written-to-be-spoken usage differs significantly: the written variety turns out to be far more progressive, suggesting that the move away from a-prefixing was promoted by the written standard. 56 If the written-to-be-spoken language of nineteenth-century dramatic prose can be taken as a reliable approximation of the spoken usage of the time, then a-prefixing was still widespread in spoken English, and we know that it lives on to the present day in many spoken varieties. As the inscription of figure 33 indicates, the data do not exclusively refer to -ing-forms prefixed by a-, as in (39a), or zero, as in (39b). They include a set of prepositions (0', (up)on, in, (in)to) that are semantically largely equivalent to the a-prefix, which itself originated as a preposition and is frequently spelled as an individual word rather than attached to the -ing-form (cf. also Visser 1973: 1894). It will be argued that these prepositions can moreover fulfil the same rhythmic function as the a-prefix, which accounts for their inclusion in the present study. Sentences (39c-g) exemplify some of these cases. The disyllabic complex prepositions upon and into were not treated as a special category although they may have nonzero stress when occurring in rhythmically uncritical positions, as in examples (39d) and (e). When occurring between two stressed syllables, they tend to be completely destressed, thus creating a ternary rhythm. The relatively numerous examples involving the preposition about were, however, excluded since the prepositional verb set about + -ing-form has the meaning 'begin working at, take in hand, begin upon' (QED 2 1994: s.v. set (v. I» and is therefore not interchangeable with the others. (39) a. She has a tongue; set it once a-going, and she'll tell more than she knows. (Thomas Hull: The Perplexities, 1767; EPD) b. And when trim 'd by our Hands, they will set our Hearts quaking. (Gabriel Odingsells: The Capricious Lovers; 1725) c. Finding he could not prevail, he set to exciting the mob at the door to acts ofviolence; ... (James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions ofa Justified Sinner, 1824; NCF) d. No, I've seen too much; you'll make me deafnext, I suppose, sirrah, and then set the World upon abusing me that way, Villain. (Mary Pix: The Deceiver Deceived, 1697; EPD)

214

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

e. ... " for Love [What can be the love ofa rake?1 is but second to that, as I have often told thee, tho' it has set thee into raving at me -,' ... (Samuel Richardson: Clarissa, 1748; ECF) f. ... a man ofsome substance that might keep friends and servants, and set the PlOugh on going: ... (James Harrington: The Common-Wealth ofOceana, 1656; EEPF) g. ... ,. and so equal a match were they for each other, as to become the occasion ofno small contest in the old gentleman's mind, -; which ofthe two should be set 0 'going first. (Lawrence Sterne: Tristram Shandy, 1760; ECF)

This mixed bag of examples will need to be systematized in the following analysis. What it does show, however, is that there are no major semantic distinctions between the a-prefix, the zero variant and the different prepositions. The differences that can be discerned between the prepositions and a- rather lie in their chronological distribution in the four subperiods studied. Figure 34 contrasts the respective shares of the prefix a-, the preposition to, and the remaining, numerically less important, prepositions in the set of -ing-forms that are preceded by one of these items. The data for the dramatic and non-dramatic corpus sections are combined and the study is extended to the entire BNC as genre distinctions are no longer at issue in this figure. 100% 90%

112/126=89%

154/182=85%

36/42=86%

80% 70%

~ 60% ~

E 50% Q)

Cl

ti 40% 0-

~a-

--e--to ""others

30% 20% 10%

7/126=6% 7/126=6%

0%

EEPF+EPD 1518-1700

5/42=12% 9/182=5% ECF+ EPD NCF+ EPD 1701-1780 1781-1903

l/42=2%

BNC 1960-1993

Figure 34. The relative frequencies of the prefixes and prepositions introducing initially and noninitially stressed -ing-fonns dependent on the verb set in a series of corpora (EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD and BNC)

A-prefixation of-ing-forms

215

From the EModE period to the nineteenth century, the a-prefix clearly dominates the scene, losing only a few percentage points to the miscellaneous other prepositions. Note that even in the nineteenth century, when aprefixed -ing-forms are under massive pressure from zero-marked -ingforms, the prefix a- still holds its ground against the competing prepositions. This situation is reversed in the late twentieth century. What was no more than an insignificant undercurrent in the preceding centuries now becomes the rule: the preposition to, which never exceeded the 6 percent mark, suddenly spreads to 86 percent of those -ing-forms that still take a prefix or preposition. 57 Although a caveat has to be put in because the contrast is artificially enhanced by the absence of data for the early and mid twentieth century, the changeover from the prefix a- to the preposition to is very clear-cut. Arguably, the preposition to is the twentieth-century successor of the a-prefix of earlier centuries and takes over its functions, and the highlighted construction in example (40b) is the modern equivalent of the highlighted construction in example (40a). (40) a. Sometimes the faint sounds ofthe soldiers' songs would reach me -; the rude chorus ofa regiment timing their step to some warrior's chaunt -; and set my heart a heating to be with them once more. (Charles Lever: Tom Burke, 1844; NCF) b. But oh, he had set her heart to racing the instant she'dfirst seen him. (Sandra Marton: Roman Spring, 1993; BNC) The functional overlap between a- and to is, however, incomplete: more than half of the 36 instances of to occur in examples where the -ing-form would otherwise immediately follow the verb set, i.e. where no intervening object expression is present (11 times in intransitive uses and 8 times in passivized constructions). As will be shown below, these syntactic types are as a rule among the rhythmically precarious cases, which may be the reason for their remarkable drive to adopt the preposition to. The displacement of a- by to can be explained as the result of a successful search for an alternative at a time when a-prefixing was acquiring a social stigma. Despite the still considerable number of occurrences of the a-prefix in the penultimate subperiod of our corpus, a certain association with dialect speakers is noticeable in numerous examples as early as the nineteenth century, e.g. sentence (41). (41) There's summut in th' weather, I reckon, as set folk a-wandering. (Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell: North and South, 1855; NCF)

216

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

It may be worth noting in this context that the substitution of to in this function is only found in the written part of the BNC; the spoken part yields no more than 3 occurrences of set with a dependent -ing-form, all without a prefix or preposition. Thus, the a-prefix and the preposition to not only have a limited functional overlap, but also belong to different registers. The preceding discussion may suffice to explain why a distributional study of the a-prefix also has to take into consideration various prepositional equivalents. The discussion can now focus on the main point of the present study, which is the potential rhythmic function of the a-prefix and its equivalents. At the outset, the dataset accumulated through the corpus search had to be further restricted. With regard to the a-prefix, no counterexamples were found to the categorical restrictions blocking the prefixation of noninitially stressed or vowel-initial -ing-forms, except for sentence (42), which involves an -ing-form beginning with a vowel. The use of the form an preceding it may be considered as a blend between the a-prefix and the preposition on, or as a consonant-final variant of the a-prefix formed on the analogy of the homonymous indefinite article a. (42)

What a recreation it is to be in love, it sets the heart an aching so delightfully, there's no taking a wink ofsleep for the pleasure ofthe pain. (George Colman (the younger): The Mountaineers, 1793; EPD)

Noninitially stressed verbs, which also occur as complements of the verb set, do occasionally take one of the equivalent prepositions, as in examples (39c) and (d) above. 58 Whether preceded by a preposition or not, this type of -ing-form automatically excludes the possibility of a stress clash. For this reason, all instances of noninitially stressed -ing-forms will from now on be left out of consideration. In the case of initially stressed -ing-forms, the possibility of a prosodic overshadowing in the technical sense in which it was employed in sections 5.3.3 and 5.4 is not available here since the dependent -ing-forms are minimally disyllabic, with an unstressed final syllable. The -ing-forms can of course be overshadowed by more distant strongly stressed material and example (39g) would be a likely candidate, but the effect of this kind of overshadowing at a distance is presumably relatively weak and was not taken into consideration here. Having restricted the analysis to a set of rhythmically critical -ingforms, and having established the functional equivalence of the a-prefix and a set of prepositions, all that remains to be done is a comparison of the contexts preceding the -ing-forms and, if applicable, the prefix or preposition. By hypothesis, a context that is stressed itself should trigger a higher

A-prefIXation of-ing-forms

217

proportion of prefixes or prepositions functioning as stress clash buffers. This type of constellation has already been amply illustrated in examples (39a), (b), (f), (g) and (40) to (42). On the other hand, buffer elements are dispensable if the preceding context is unstressed. This is frequently the case with personal pronouns as in example (3ge) above. Ignoring for the time being the grammatical class membership of the preceding elements, figure 35 differentiates between stressed and unstressed syllables preceding -ing-forms as complements of set. The percentage of intervening prefixes and prepositions is the dependent variable, which is traced through the four chronological subperiods from EModE to PDE. 59 100%

S ?

90%

~<:>

70%

76/79=96%

% 80% I:l: 60% ~ ~ ~

50%

....~

40%


30%

15
20%

0-

10%

0

~

U ....
0%

-e- foIlowing a stressed sy Ilable -eo- foIlowing an unstressed sy Ilable

EEPF+EPD 1518-1700

ECF+EPD 1701-1780

NCF+EPD 1781-1903

HNC 1960-1993

Figure 35. The distribution of buffer elements before initially stressed -ing-forms dependent on set according to the rhythmic nature of the preceding context in a series of prose corpora (EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD and BNC)

Both curves depicted in the diagram mirror the data in figure 33: aprefixing is fully established in the eighteenth century and subsequently declines again in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The separation into cases following a stressed syllable and cases following an unstressed syllable turns out to account for a minor to moderate divergence. It is smallest in the eighteenth century, since the use ofthe a-prefix is almost ubiquitous in this period. It is largest at the beginning and end of the time span under consideration: in the first subperiod, its use was neither obligatory nor stigmatized so that its selection or omission could freely adapt to rhythmic requirements, and in the last subperiod, the by now

218

Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

avoided a-prefix could be replaced by the preposition to, which had long been around in the same function, but to which no comparable stigma attached. In all subperiods except the eighteenth century, the statistical test yields highly significant results for the difference between stressed and unstressed contexts. 60 Let us consider these contexts in more detail. The majority of instances of set and dependent -ing-forms in the corpus is represented by transitive uses. Thus, in most cases set and the -ing-form are separated by an object expression. The object is frequently pronominal, referring back to a given antecedent. In the default case, for instance example (43a), the pronoun is a simple personal pronoun, typically unstressed and suitable as a stress clash buffer. In some cases, set is, however, used reflexively, and the use of an oxytonic (end-stressed) reflexive pronoun as in (43b) leads to an undesirable stress clash if the a-prefix or preposition is omitted. (43) a. I never should have set it rolling. (Sydney Grundy: The Snowball, 1879; EPD) b. Ratagan set himselfto starting a fire whilst the rest rubbed down the horses and searchedfor firewood. (Paul Keamey: The Way to Babylon, 1992; BNC) A second group is composed of other noun phrases occurring in object position. No distinction is made between different grammatical classes and degrees of complexity of these object expressions, but for the purpose of this analysis they are subdivided according to the stress level of their final syllable into non-oxytonic expressions like Basset in example (44a) and oxytonic expressions (including monosyllables) like Bells in example (44b). (44) a. This Spring will set our Basset going, and that's a Wheel will turn Twenty others. (Sir John Vanbrugh: The Confederacy, 1705; EPD) b. Sirrah, go you, and set the Bells a going in both Churches: ... (Thomas Shadwell: Bury-Fair, 1689; EPD) Thirdly, in addition to objects, set and the -ing-form may be separated by intervening adverbial expressions. These are usually relatively short in the corpus examples, but they introduce an extra syntactic category leading to an increased processing load. Examples with adverbial insertions were again subdivided according to the stress on the last syllable preceding the -ing-form: stressless as in (45a), or stressed as in (45b).

A-prefIXation of-ing-forms

219

(45) a. ...,' and then the Rusling ofSilk Petticoats, the Din and the Chatter ofthe pretty little party-colour 'd Parrots, that hop andflutter from one side to t'other, puts every Sense upon its proper Office, and sets the Wheels ofNature finely moving. (Thomas Otway: The Atheist, 1683; EPD) b. ...,' for set a Woman's Cltick but once a going, and the Devil himselfcan't stop it, till the Alarm, like that ofa Clock, runs down of it self. (Henry Fielding: The Welsh Opera, 1731; EPD) A fourth type of constellation occurs when neither an object nor an adverbial expression separate set and the -ing-form. This is the case in passivizations as in (46a), if the object is pre- or postposed by a syntactic rule as in (46b), or in intransitive uses of set as in (46c). Since both set and the following -ing-form have a tendency to be stressed, virtually all of these examples are potential loci for stress clashes. This is even more true since none of the examples in this category involves the forms setteth or setting, which would exclude stress clashes due to their disyllabic nature. 61 (46) a. 0, when jealousie is once set a going, it runs on high speed. (Richard Brome: The City Wit, 1630; EPD) b. ... the poor Fellow immediately departed to the Pump to wash his Face, and to stop that bloody Torrent which Susan hadplentifully set aflowingfrom his Nostrils. (Henry Fielding: Tom Jones, 1749; ECF) c. Oh the Devil, ifthis old Woman's Clack sets a going, there will be no end ... (Susanne Centlivre: Mar-plot, 1710; EPD) The stressed and unstressed contexts within these different syntactic types can now be compared. Since it would take up too much space to do this separately for each subperiod, the following diagram collapses all the data from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. This of course wipes out the diachronic differences, but offers the advantage of accumulating a sufficient number of examples in each syntactic and rhythmic category, which is not always guaranteed for individual subperiods. As to diachronic changes, suffice it to say that (non-reflexive) pronoun objects and full noun phrase objects bear the brunt of the decline of a-prefixing observable between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reflexive pronouns and intransitive uses of set retain a relatively high percentage of a-prefixing throughout and form the stronghold of the construction up to the present day. Abstracting away from the diachronic dimension, figure 36 thus represents an extremely abstract state of affairs which never existed as such, but

220

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

it isolates the relative contributions of the syntactic and rhythmic factors investigated. 100%

~------------------------~

l!l!J following an unstressed syllable

o 90%

?'-

• following a stressed syllable 80%

~ i; 70% o

§: ~ ;::

60%·

:!2 50%

~ '+-<

o ~

~ ~

0.

40% 30% 20% 10% 0% after after full NP after objects passive uses pre-/post- intransitive pronominal objects + adverbial position of uses objects insertions the object

Figure 36. The distribution of buffer elements before initially stressed -ing-forms dependent on set according to the syntactic and rhythmic nature of the preceding context in a set of prose corpora (EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD

andBNC) Each of the three categories within which stressed and unstressed preceding contexts can be distinguished betrays a clear contrast between rhythmically critical and uncritical contexts. The differences run to between 16 percent for full noun phrase objects and 53 percent for pronominal objects. 62 (This stark contrast is presumably due to the opposition of two not wholly comparable categories, reflexive pronouns and simple personal pronouns.) When the syntactic categories are kept apart, rhythmically conditioned disparities thus come out much more distinctly than in the undifferentiated view provided by figure 35. Oxytonic contexts regularly trigger a higher proportion of buffer elements than comparable nonoxytonic contexts. What is more, this situation is never reversed in any of the individual subperiods that were merged in the construction of figure 36. These results provide solid evidence in favour of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation as a determinant of the variable presence of the a-prefix and its prepositional equivalents. In addition to affording a clearer picture of the importance of stress clash avoidance, figure 36 distinguishes six syntactic constellations that

A-prefixation of-ing-forms

221

can be related to different degrees of processing complexity. The results outlined in Rohdenburg (1995: 375-378; 1996: 155-168) and Rohdenburg and Schliiter (2000: 446-460) lead us to expect that the shorter and the more predictable an intervening object expression is from the context, the lower the processing load it involves. Furthermore, discontinuities caused by inserted material, passivization and other types of movement present additional processing difficulties. Rohdenburg's Complexity Principle (quoted in section 5.4.1) predicts that syntactic complexity can be compensated for through the use of explicit structural signals. With regard to the aprefix and equivalent prepositions, this effect can, however, not be shown. While it is true that the simpler personal pronouns take a lower proportion of prefixes and prepositions (39 percent) than the more complex reflexive pronouns (92 percent), they do not differ significantly from full noun phrases, which average 38 percent (oxytonic and non-oxytonic expressions taken together). While insertions raise the share of prefixes and prepositions to an average of 65 percent, passivized and other non-canonical sentence structures reach only 56 and 24 percent respectively. Both of these are presumably highly complex, but are clearly distanced by the third construction type in which set is immediately followed by its dependent -ingforms: intransitive uses of set, though structurally the simplest of all, run to as much as 87 percent of prefixes or prepositions, thus confirming Trudgill's (1978: 16-17) generalization that intransitive verbs take a higher proportion of dependent a-prefixed -ing-forms than transitive verbs. As a result, the Complexity Principle has no real explanatory potential for the variation profile depicted in figure 36. This suggests that neither the aprefix nor the set of prepositions are suitable as signals making grammatical relationships more explicit in the case of structural complexity. Unlike the infinitive marker, they cannot establish a link to the superordinate verb, but seem to have a more local syntactic or semantic function. An account of the use or omission of the a-prefix hence has to look elsewhere. The Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is one of the more worthwhile candidates, whose influence has been demonstrated on the diachronic level as well as on a more general level. The rhythmic preference has also been shown to be blind to the precise nature of an optional element that can be put to use as a stress clash buffer: archaic prefixes are drawn upon as well as simple or complex prepositions. Prepositional buffer elements transgress the phonological constraints that apply to the a-prefix and therefore become more versatile buffer elements. The present study is, however, far from answering all questions about a-prefixing. For one thing, a satisfactory explanation for the syntactic profile of the distribution displayed in figure 36 is still pending. For another, the semantic aspects of aprefixing need to be clarified. Finally, a-prefixing may be determined by

222

Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

factors that have not yet received the due attention. A hint as to a hitherto neglected factor is given in Schliiter (2002b: 273-274). In the seventeenthand eighteenth-century data, a conspicuous alternation was found between the phrases set someone's wounds fresh a bleeding and set someone's wounds bleeding afresh, each occurring twice in the dataset. In the first version, the -ing-form bleeding carries an a-prefix (in accordance with the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation), but in the second version, it is prefixless. The omission of the prefix can be ascribed to the presence of an etymologically related a-prefix in the adverb afresh. A repetition of the prefix would have led to an objectionable phonological identity. Such avoidance effects are described by the Horror /Equi Principle (cf. Rohdenburg 2003: 236-242), introduced in more detail in the outook in section 7.2.

5.5.2. A-prefixation of -ing-forms following go from EModE to PDE The second study of a-prefixing and the final study in the present chapter on verbal and adverbial constructions deals with -ing-forms dependent on a verb of motion, namely go. Visser (1973: 1910) states that the idiom go aV ing was extremely frequent in ME and EModE. As in the case of other constructions making use of the a-prefix, its usage in PDE is, however, declining in favour of the prefixless construction (cf. also OED 2 1994: s.v. go).

The present study investigates the decline of the a-prefix in the complementation of the verb go from EModE to PDE and aims to quantify a potential rhythmic component of the transition from go a-V ing to go V ing in the sense of 'go out to pursue a certain activity or occupation'. The database marshalled for this study is identical to the one employed for the preceding study of set, with the exception of the twentieth-century corpus, for which the imaginative prose section of the BNC on its own proved to provide sufficient data. A virtually complete set of examples was constructed by searching the database for all forms of the verb go followed at a short distance (maximally 3 words) by a form ending in the -ing-suffix. A large number of examples had to be discarded because their semantics deviated from the target construction. For instance, (47a-b) were discounted since the -ing-forms describe the manner in which the subject moves. In contrast, (48a-b) were included since the -ing-forms refer to the occupation for which the subject is heading. Only the second type of -ingforms is compatible with a-prefixation.

A-prefixation of-ing-forms

223

(47) a. He went running offafter the boy down the tunnel, dodging people and cannoning into others. (Barbara Vine: King Solomon's Carpet, 1992; BNC) b. Soon after New Year a police frogman went diving in the Darnley Canal, just below the Rec. He came up with an old bicycle, halfa pram and Henry's other leg. (Ann Pilling: Henry's Leg, 1987; BNC)

(48) a. Last Sunday I went running, expecting Hank home in the evening. (Gillian Cross: On the Edge, 1989; BNC) b. Have you been to the office yet? she asked, attempting cool civility. No. I decided to go diving instead. (Rosalie Ash: Calypso's Island, 1993; BNC) Other examples of type (48) comprise high-frequency collocations with begging, fishing, hunting, wooing, but also compounds like husbandhunting, swan-hopping and wool-gathering and more idiosyncratic examples like botanizing, kidnapping and patriotizing. In contrast to the other analyses presented in this book, the following one does not distinguish between rhythmically critical and uncritical contexts. This is due to the fact that the construction go a-V ing is intransitive, so that no intervening object expressions were to be reckoned with. As a result, the rhythmic constellations were largely invariable. The present study capitalizes on this fact by systematically restricting the focus to rhythmically critical contexts. In this way, the effects of the presence or absence of buffer elements and of the choice between different types of buffers can be foregrounded, thus yielding novel insights into interactions of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation with factors such as frequency and standardization. The restriction to rhythmically critical contexts was achieved by the following considerations. Firstly, examples involving disyllabic forms of go (in particular the -ing-form) were discounted. Secondly, cases with intervening adverbial expressions (including adverbial particles in constructions of the type go about Ving, go away Ving, go on Ving 'continue Ving', after which the use of the a-prefix is very rare) were discarded. These two measures resulted in a uniform context preceding the -ing-form: in all remaining cases, the -ing-form immediately follows a monosyllabic form of go, from which it is optionally separated by the a-prefix or a different buffer element. A third restriction refers to noninitially stressed -ing-forms, which are as a rule incompatible with the a-prefix. Even so, the search retrieved 5 instances, which are accounted for by the presence of a secondary stress on their initial syllable (4 x a masquerading,63 1 x a

224

Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

superseding). Since these few exceptions constitute no fruitful ground for a quantitative analysis, they do not figure in the following data. Fourthly, as in the preceding study, prosodic overshadowing in the strict sense is not applicable to the -ing-forms under discussion since the unstressed syllable constituted by the -ing-suffix is enough to exclude the immediate adjacency of more strongly stressed material. More difficult is the decision as to what should count as a buffer element. Besides the a-prefix, a number of prepositions were found accompanying the dependent -ing-forms (cf. also Visser 1973: 1910). The database yields a total of 27 occurrences of the prepositions to, on, in and into that were judged to have by and large the same (bleached) meaning as the aprefix and to be equally suitable as stress clash buffers. Compared to the 427 occurrences of the a-prefix, these prepositions however play only a negligible role and do not deserve the same amount of attention as to in connection with -ing-forms dependent on the verb set. Two examples are given in (49a-b). (49) a. Not long after, shee retyred into the Garden, wherein (by chance) there were no company, the King then being gone on hunting. (Kingsmill Long: Barclay his Argenis, 1625; EEPF) b. This good humour ofthe parson inspired the company with so much glee, that the farmers soon forgot their losses, and all hands went to dancing in the yard. (Tobias George Smollett: Roderick Random, 1748; ECF) More interestingly, as many as 123 examples in the set feature the adverbial particle out, 14 of which also combine it with the a-prefix. Consider the following examples, illustrating the four possibilities of the total absence ofa buffer in (50a), the use of the a-prefix in (SOb), the use of the particle out in (50c), and the combination of both in (SOd). (50) a. You wouldn't have a man go fishing in patent leather boots and an embroidered shirt - he'dfrighten the fish! (Alfred Sydney Wigan: Titfor Tat, 1855; EPD) b. I used to go afishing when I was a youug [sic] chap; ... (T.A. Palmer: Among the Relics, 1869; EPD) c. Go outfishing - in the duck-pond - or go and see the cows milked, or the pigs fed; ... (John Maddison Morton: Takenfrom the French, 1886; EPD) d. So you can go out a fishing together - that's settled. (Thomas William Robertson: My Wife's Diary, 1854; EPD)

A-preflXation of-ing-forms

225

For the purposes of the present study, it was assumed that the four construction types illustrated in (SOa-d) are semantically largely equivalent. The directional particle out is applicable in many, if not most of the uses of the go a-V ing-construction, which typically refers to occupations pursued outdoors. When it occurs as the only element separating go and the -ingform, as in (SOc), it is arguably destressed so as to avert a threatening stress clash. When it is accompanied by the a-prefix, as in (SOd), rhythmic alternation is independently secured by the stressless prefix. Thus, whether out or the prefix or both are used, no major infraction of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation occurs. As long as both go and the -ing-form retain their stresses, however, a clash arises if none of the potential buffer elements is used. As in the case of passive bid and its complements, two optional elements are available which play distinct grammatical roles, but can assume the same prosodic function. Figure 37 distinguishes between the two buffer elements and their combination. Together with the remaining bufferless cases (not represented in the diagram), these add up to 100 percent. 100% ~

~--------------------~--~-~,

103/114=90%

........out 0 Ving -e-out G- V ing ' G - V ing 1 Prep V ing

90%

0..

.0 80%

~

70%

~

60%

~

50%

;:l

.0

~

"\., \~

~ 40%

"

\"

o

~

Zl

30%

0%

~-'

\\,.J 51/596=25% (y.,..,..,~

@ 20% ---1-2/217=1% -e-5/114=4% ~ 10% -=........ 0/114=0% 0..

~~\::.

82/596=1~

........27/544 =5%

+--=e~O:/2~1;.;7===OO=Vo::;:==::;~~~~~~~...,._.:::~:::~~~:::~~ EEPF+ EPD 1518-1700

ECF+EPD 1701-1780

NCF+ EPD 1781-1903

BNCwridom 1 1960-1993

Figure 37. The different types of buffer elements intervening between go and dependent initially stressed -ing-forms in a series of prose corpora (EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD and BNC)

As a first observation, it is found that the curve for initially stressed -ingforms mirrors that for -ing-forms dependent on set delineated in figure 33 almost perfectly, but for the higher level of buffers after set maintained in the twentieth century thanks to the substitution of to for the a-prefix. Fol-

226

Analysis o/verbal and adverbial structures

lowing a slight increase leading to the almost categorical use of buffers in the eighteenth century, their frequency falls considerably in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More interestingly, as all examples on which figure 37 is based involve a monosyllabic form of go followed by an initially stressed -ing-form, they all represent potential loci for stress clashes. Hence, the loss of buffer elements depicted in the diagram translates into an introduction of stress clashes in the structure go (a-)Ving. Throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the a-prefix was virtually omnipresent in the context under consideration and helped to avoid stress clashes, though this was not its original function (cf. the introduction in 5.5). The apparent rise in a-prefixing between the EModE and LModE periods is statistically insignificant,64 but like the previous study of set, it provides a counterexample to Nehls' (1988: 185) more general finding to the effect that a-prefixing declined in the eighteenth century. Quite to the contrary, this period is the one with the highest frequency of the prefix, amounting to 95 percent (108 out of 114 examples) altogether. In parallel with the case of set, it is only the nineteenth century that sees a sharp decline in the use of the prefix down to only 27 percent (158 out of 596 examples) of the constructions under consideration. 65 The evolution depicted in figure 37 provides indirect evidence for the importance of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. Consider the rapid changeover that took place between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Crucially, the incidence of the particle out, which occurred only 5 times in combination with the a-prefix in the eighteenth century, rose significantly to a total of 89 occurrences (15 percent), only 7 of which continued to be associated with the disappearing prefix. 66 This suggests that the particle temporarily took over a buffer function at a time when the a-prefix came under pressure because it was increasingly judged to be part of the spoken nonstandard language. This supposition is reinforced by the fact that the particle out was hardly ever used in connection with noninitially stressed -ing-forms. Among the total of 49 noninitially stressed -ing-forms that were discarded from the dataset, only a single nineteenth-century example involved the particle. That the intercalation of out was only a transitory solution is indicated by the fact that in the twentieth century, all types of elements suitable as rhythmic buffers were eventually given up. The frequency of out declined to a residue of 5 percent in the latest subperiod, and the a-prefix vanished completely with the exception of a single survival in a nursery rhyme, which has been excluded from the count since it represents metricallanguage. 67 One may wonder how PDE puts up with a rhythmically precarious construction that has for centuries shown signs of stress clash avoidance, but is

A-prefIXation of-ing-forms

227

now largely deprived of suitable buffer elements. A look at the frequency of the construction provides a clue to the answer. Figure 38 indicates the frequency of the construction consisting of monosyllabic go immediately followed by a dependent initially stressed -ing-form with or without buffer elements. The curve exhibits a minimum in the eighteenth century and a maximum in the late twentieth century. This suggests two conclusions. Firstly, the apparent rise of a-prefixing between EModE and LModE discernible in figure 37 is offset by a decrease in the frequency of the construction as a whole. 68 In other words, at the time when the a-prefix was quasi-obligatory, the entire structure began to fall into disuse. One factor in this decline may have been the fact that prescriptivists began to frown on the a-prefix. Since avoiding the prefix would have forced speakers to put up with stress clashes in a formerly rhythmic construction, but since they had no alternatives at hand, they refrained from the entire construction. Thus, the aversion to stress clashes may have been responsible for the reduced incidence of the go (a-)Ving-structure in the eighteenth century. 35 CIl

"0

....

28.8 (544)

30

0

~ ~

25

~

]

.... (l) 0..

20 15

CIl ~

(l)

..>::

....0

Oil ....

B

10

7.1 (114)

5 0 EEPF + EPD 1518-1700

ECF + EPD 1701-1780

NCF + EPD 1781-1903

HNC wridom 1 1960-1993

Figure 38. The frequency ofthe go (out) (a-)Ving construction involving initially stressed -ing-forms in a series of prose corpora (EEPF, ECF, NCF, EPD and BNC wridom 1)

Secondly, the reversal of the trend in the nineteenth century may in turn have been facilitated by speakers beginning to enlist the particle out as a buffer element and replacement for a-. For a certain limited interval, an alternative had been found to which no stigma attached, but which helped avert the threatening adjacency of two stressed syllables. But as early as the nineteenth century, the danger of stress clashes ceased to be an insur-

228

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

mountable obstacle: in many cases clashes were tolerated although as much as 60 percent of the cases employed none of the two buffer elements nor their combination. In the twentieth century, this evolution redoubled its speed. Both types of buffer elements practically disappeared from the scene, while the frequency of the go V ing construction soared to a level never before attained. At the same time, the construction, which had been dominated by almost formulaic expressions like go a begginglfishinglhuntinglwooing in earlier centuries, suddenly became extremely productive and semantically flexible. The examples from the BNC quoted in (51a-e) may serve to give an impression of its wide range of application. (51) a. Mahoney was one ofyour boys, and nobody in his right mind would go gunning for him, unless there was a big pay-off (P. Chester: Murder Forestalled, 1990; BNC) b. We can go roller-skating again and Olde Tyme Dancing. (Bette Howell: Dandelion Days, 1991; BNC) c. He'd said to Mrs Abigail that her husband went homo-ing about the place. (William Trevor: The Children ofDynmouth, 1987; BNC) The rise in frequency of the construction, noticeable since the nineteenth and most striking in the twentieth century, contributes an avenue for explaining the tolerance of bufferless realizations: the more frequent a construction, the more predictable or given it is, and the less prosodic prominence it attracts. As a result, the stress on its constituents can be reduced, and this is arguably the case here. As the stress marks in examples (51 a-e) indicate, the form of the verb go gives up some of its stress and thus adapts to the stress on the following -ing-form. This destressing in anticipation of a subsequent stronger syllable is another case of prosodic overshadowing. This phenomenon has been argued to be restricted to prosodically closely integrated units (cf. section 5.3.3). By hypothesis, the increase in frequency of the go V ing construction goes hand in hand with a tighter prosodic coherence and a destressing of the verb go. As a result, go nowadays has not much more semantic and prosodic weight in combination with a dependent -ing-form than an ordinary auxiliary. These circumstances have helped the English language to cope with the threat of a major dysrythmy resulting from the suppression of the a-prefix. Although no direct quantitative comparison of rhythmically problematic and unproblematic contexts of the use of the a-prefix and its prepositional equivalents has been possible, the present study has been argued to have ramifications for an assessment of the scope of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. Thus, it has been shown that the principle seizes upon any

Summary

229

kind of linguistic material that can be put to use as a stress clash buffer, irrespective of its grammatical function. It has been argued that the aprefix, the prepositions and the particle out are all largely synonymous in the present data despite their original meaning differences. A task for further research would be to determine to what extent the rhythmic motivation can overrule semantic distinctions. The frequency data have lent themselves to an optimistic estimate according to which the emergence of infractions of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation can lead to an overall decline of the critical construction. The same data have also suggested a qualification of the impact of stress clash avoidance when the frequency of the construction causes its constituents to become functionalized and to give up their prosodic independence and prominence.

5.6.

Summary

In the present chapter, the focus has been shifted from attributive structures, treated in Chapter 4, to a variety of grammatical structures involving adverbs and verbal constructions. The grammatical and rhythmic relations between the items involved are thus of a different, and generally looser, kind than those between attributes and their nominal heads, but they share with the latter their sensitivity to stress clashes. The individual structures investigated include the negation of sentence adverbs, variably marked adverbs (quick/quickly, slow/slowly and scarce/scarcely) in certain postand pre-verbal positions, variably marked infinitives dependent on two manipulative verbs (make and bid) and a marginal modal (dare) and variable a-prefixing of -ing-forms dependent on a verb of beginning (set) and a verb of motion (go). Once again, these heterogeneous structures are all held together by the fact that they show effects of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, and this property also links them with the attributive structures studied in the previous chapter. This synopsis of the phenomena studied in the present chapter allows us to systematize our findings under three different perspectives, which will be adopted in turn. First, interactions with additional factors beyond those that were already implicated in attributive structures have been uncovered and will be briefly surveyed. Second, conclusions can be drawn as to the limitations of the influence exerted by the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation outside of attributive structures. And third, the grammatical domains in which the influence of the principle is noticeable can be typified. None of the analyses presented in this book has remained restricted to a monocausal account. The following list contains the most important factors

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Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

that have been shown to interact with the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. - First and foremost, the semantics of a construction has to stay intact. Therefore, additional syllables inserted as buffers are only tolerated if they do not add anything substantial to the meaning. Optional grammatical markers such as the adverbial suffix, the infinitive marker to and the largely bleached a-prefix are showcase examples of this. The latter has been argued to be partially replaced by the preposition to or the particle out, which do not alter the meaning but can likewise serve as buffer elements. In the case of negated sentence adverbs, the adverbs inserted on account of the need to separate the negator not from initially stressed adverbs were in some cases (e.g. entirely, altogether, all that, at all, particularly) more substantial in length, but their semantic contribution to the propositional meaning was judged to be negligible. Semantic factors do, however, exert subtle influences on the distribution of optional grammatical markers, which may be in conflict with rhythmic preferences. One of these semantic tendencies is known as iconicity. In the case of the adverbs quick(ly} and slow(ly}, the striving to adapt the form of an expression to its meaning was made responsible for the fact that quick(ly} revealed a comparatively stronger tendency to shed off its adverbial suffix than slow(ly}, which usually occurs in the long form. Another iconic effect referred to in the discussion of infinitival complements of active forms of make was the intercalation of the infinitive marker in cases where the impingement of the matrix subject on the object is relatively indirect. In cases like these, the conceptual distance between two constituents is iconically expressed by the linguistic distance between them (Distance Principle). In the case of infinitives following dare, a similar semantic effect was invoked by Duffley (1992; 1994) but, as is often the case with semantic factors, proved hard to quantify. The variation between grammatical alternatives is also subject to certain processing constraints, which ensure ease of en- and decoding. One of these constraints leads to the almost complete absence of unmarked adverbs in positions preceding their verbal heads, where they would not be easily recognizable as adverbs. This preference has been shown to work in synergy with the preference for an alternating rhythm. Other factors relating to the recognizability of the grammatical function of a word are the tendency to omit the adverbial suffix in coordinated adverbs (which is also reinforced by the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation) and, on a more general level, the tendency for semantically parallel items to take a formally parallel shape. The converse tendency holds true for forms that do not represent a semantic parallel: in this case for-

Summary

231

mal resemblances tend to be avoided due to the Horror ./Eequi Principle, which combines a processing constraint with a phonological dispreference. Minor effects of horror cequi were detected for repeated aprefixes. The Complexity Principle assists processing in that it adapts the degree of grammatical explicitness given to a construction to the processing difficulty involved in it. Thus, the presence of optional grammatical markers after long object expressions, after insertions and in passive constructions with directive verbs (make and bid) was explained in terms of the increased processing load involved in such constructions, while the predictions were not confirmed in the case of aprefixing after different uses of the verb set (possibly because the aprefix is not suitable as an explicit structural signal). The temporary replacement of the a-prefix by to and out and its disappearance in PDE as well as the widespread loss of markerless adverbs are moreover a question of register and style. Linguistic material like the a-prefix, which was largely void of a semantic function, tended to be eliminated and indistinct adjectival or adverbial forms that encoded two different functions in a single form tended to be formally distinguished by the obligatory introduction of the adverbial suffix. Trends like these were spearheaded by the written standard language, which attached a social stigma to the disfavoured forms. As in the case of attributive structures, standardization promoted the ideal of biunique encoding and the elimination of variants. - Furthermore, as in the case of attributive structures, grammatical variation in non-attributive structures has been shown to have a certain tendency to settle into stable patterns. In this way, variation profiles originally motivated by rhythmic or other factors have congealed into grammatical rules that can no longer respond adaptively to other influences. Such fixation has taken control over infinitival complements of directive verbs: active constructions have since the eighteenth century been confined to unmarked infinitives, whereas passive constructions have since the nineteenth century mostly taken marked infinitives. Certain archaic collocations perpetuating formerly current grammatical forms have survived in the form of specific lexical associations or proverbs. Phrases like (to) scarce forbear and money makes the mare to go preserve an archaic syntax and bear witness to the rhythmically guided choice of the adverbial suffix and the infinitive marker in earlier forms of the English language. In connection with the construction go (a-)Ving, it has been argued that the frequency of a construction interacts with rhythmic alternation in two ways. On the one hand, a construction can partially fall into disuse if the loss of buffer elements leads to objectionable dysrhythmies; on

232

Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

the other, high frequency can help reduce the prominence of a rhythmic obstacle so that stress clashes become objectively (phonetically) or subjectively (in the mind of the language user) less salient. - The avoidance of hiatuses has been shown to have an extremely strong effect on the distribution of the a-prefix. With practically no exceptions, whenever an -ing-form begins with a vowel, the a-prefix cannot be used, even though semantic and rhythmic effects may favour its addition. Hiatuses can, however, be circumvented through the use of the form an in analogy with the indefinite article, or through substitution with a preposition (to, (up)on, in(to) , etc.). The studies of scarce(ly), of infinitives dependent on make in the active and passive, and on bid in the passive testify to the necessity to occasionally look beyond the rhythmic level at which no more than a binary distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables can be drawn. Rather than being a simple question of yes or no, stress clashes can involve different degrees of gravity and be more or less strongly avoided. Specifically, the presence of a strongly stressed syllable immediately following a word that normally also carries a full lexical stress, can withdraw some or most of the prosodic prominence from the latter. For this phenomenon, the pictorial term prosodic overshadowing has been employed. Prosodic overshadowing can itself be considered as a result of the workings of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, reducing stresses to minimize clashes with subsequent material. - Another determinant that falls in the domain of prosody is the location of the semantic focus at the end of larger syntactic units in English and the concomitant requirement for a phrase-final prosodic prominence. It has been argued in the case of the suffixless adverbs quick and slow that the greater phonological weight inherent in slow makes it more apt to occur in phrase-final position than its antonym. With regard to variable infinitive marking after active make, it has been hinted that the beginning of a new syntactic and prosodic unit seems to require a so-called upbeat, which can be implemented by the infinitive marker or by other linguistic material. Since this effect does not concern the preference for rhythmic alternation proper, but only limits its effects to certain domains, this track is not pursued in the present book. Consider, however, the more far-reaching treatment in Schliiter (in preparation a). In sum, the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is limited by numerous factors which may, depending on the individual case, reinforce or counteract its workings. It is also inherently limited because the domain of rhythmic alternation is restricted to prosodically close-knit units. The attributive structures studied in Chapter 4 presented instances par excel-

Summary

233

lence, but the rhythmic structures of the diverse adverbial and verbal structures treated in this chapter are comparatively complex. This is undoubtedly the reason why effects of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation have not always been as easily discernible in this chapter as in the preceding one. Without going into too much detail, some of the intricacies of prosodic structure and their consequences for rhythmic alternation can be approached from a theoretical angle. Several linguists have noted that rhythmic processes like stress shift are restricted to prosodic entities which are often equated with the prosodic phrase (cf. Liberman and Prince 1977: 320; Selkirk 1984: 319; Nespor and Vogel 1986: 177-178; 1989: 77-78; Gussenhoven 1991: 17; Getty 2002: 136). Stress shifts may be regarded as a manifestation of the sensitivity to stress clashes within prosodic phrases. Adjacent stresses that are separated by a phrase boundary do not provoke avoidance strategies to the same extent. Thus, Bolinger (198 I: 19) defines the phrase, which is delimited by pauses or prosodic surrogates of pauses such as the lengthening of the terminal syllable, as the domain of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. Within prosodic phrases, by contrast, the lengthening of a clashing syllable is uncommon and awkward (cf. Liberman and Prince 1977: 320). In the literature, we find some attempts to systematize the location of prosodic phrase boundaries. Selkirk (1984: 314-320) and Levelt (1989: 304-305,380-381) name a number of factors co-determining the wideness of a juncture (or, conversely, the degree of "metrical togetherness", to borrow Levelt's term). Among them are the end of an intonational phrase, the end of a major sentence constituent (subject phrase, predicate phrase), the end of a multi-word phrase (noun phrase, verb phrase, adverbial phrase, prepositional phrase), the end of the (lexical) head of a noun phrase, verb phrase or adverbial phrase, and, finally, the end of any content word. Depending on how many of these criteria apply to a word boundary, Selkirk and LeveIt insert a number of silent grid marks, where other authors prefer to use square brackets. The number of silent beats corresponds (albeit not linearly) to the total duration of terminal syllable lengthening plus the ensuing pause. An example sentence taken from Selkirk (1984: 319-320) is quoted in (52). (52)

x x

x x x x x x x x xxxxxx xx x x x x x x xxxxx Mary finished her Russian novel. x

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Analysis a/verbal and adverbial structures

Within the three-word noun phrase her Russian novel, we find at most one silent beat separating the individual words. This result accords well with the empirical finding that noun phrases are particularly sensitive to stress clashes. The other constituents of sentence (52) are separated by two or more silent grid positions, which corresponds to the observation that most of the non-attributive structures investigated in the present chapter do not exhibit the same degree of sensitivity to stress clashes. The examples subsumed under the categories of stressed and unstressed syllables used in the preceding analyses of this rubric (with the exception of negated sentence adverbs and scarce(ly) followed by main verbs) do not belong to closely integrated multi-word phrases, but constitute a mixed bag with different boundary widths, many of which would involve two or more silent beats in Selkirk's and Levelt's systems. Crucially, the presence of two intervening silent grid positions significantly reduces the offensiveness of stress clashes and hence lowers the chance with which avoidance strategies are implemented (cf. Levelt 1989: 381; for similar results concerning boundary widths in poetry, cf. Tarlinskaya 1984: 8). Against the background of such theoretical insights, it would seem desirable to adopt a more fine-grained classification of prosodic boundary widths and to correlate this with the avoidance of stress clashes. However, the situation is more complex than Selkirk's and Levelt's rules suggest. The ends of syntactic units are not related in any simple and unambiguous way to prosodic phrase boundaries, but the latter are also dependent on factors such as speaking rate, contrastive or other stress and many more and can also be inserted at the discretion of the speaker (cf. Bolinger 1981: 19). To complicate things even further, the width of a prosodic boundary is not only correlated with the type and number of syntactic boundaries, but also with the phonological length of the syntactic constituents. Roughly speaking, the longer a constituent is, the wider the boundaries delimiting it. For this reason, the stress on the verbs in the (a)-examples of (53) and (54) can shift on account of the adverbs belonging to the same prosodic phrase, but it is less likely to shift in the (b)-examples, in which the extended adverbs form prosodic phrases of their own and are therefore set off from the verbs by a more important juncture. The examples are borrowed from Nespor and Vogel (1986: 178). (53) a. John perseveres gladly. b. John perseveres gladly and diligently. (54) a. Given the chance, rabbits reproduce quickly. b. Given the chance, rabbits reproduce very quickly.

Summary

235

It is virtually impossible to analyze large naturalistic datasets while employing as detailed a categorization scheme as would be necessary to capture all of these distinctions. Therefore, the corpus analyses presented in this chapter were limited to four clearly distinguishable categories: stressed and unstressed following syllables were always distinguished, where appropriate, prosodically overshadowed strong syllables were kept separate, and care was taken to maintain a separate category for examples with a wide prosodic juncture indicated by a punctuation mark. Beyond this rough classification, we will have to content ourselves with the somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion that the consistency with which rhythmic alternation is obeyed in grammatical structures outside of noun phrases is noticeably inferior to that within closely integrated attributive structures. Moreover, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has to compete with a considerable number of determinants impinging on relevant grammatical variation phenomena. Nevertheless, and this is the most important conclusion that can be drawn from the present chapter, the preference for alternating strong and weak beats gives rise to statistically noticeable effects in virtually all of the case studies outlined above. A last interesting point that deserves consideration in this summary is the extent of the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation on grammatical variation and change outside of attributive structures. In the majority of cases investigated here, the principle correlates the absence of various (free or bound) morphemes with rhythmically uncritical contexts and the presence of these morphemes with rhythmically critical contexts that would otherwise provoke a stress clash. For the grammar of the language, this phonologically motivated variability has far-reaching consequences. For one thing, the formal distinction between the two grammatical categories of adjectives and adverbs is annihilated in the pairs quick/quickly, slow/slowly and scarce/scarcely if the adverbial suffix is dropped for rhythmic reasons. For another, the marking of infinitives dependent on (active and passive) make, (passive) bid, and dare as well as the choice between the mono- and disyllabic participial variants of bid have been shown to depend on the rhythmic status of the preceding and following elements. The fact that the presence or absence of the infinitive marker was temporarily underdetermined by the grammar and the fact that active and passive constructions have become fixed with different complementation patterns are problematic for any conventional grammatical theory. It is impossible to set up a unified rule for the distribution of marked and unmarked infinitival complements without making reference to functional factors such as rhythm and complexity, and yet the presence or absence of the marker has a grammatical significance insofar as it usually differentiates between the classes of main verbs and auxiliaries. As for the optional

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Analysis ofverbal and adverbial structures

a-prefix treated in two studies, its grammatical function had become obliterated by the time at which the present study sets in. Although it no longer functioned as a preposition, the loss of stylistic acceptability that it underwent in the nineteenth century presumably had consequences for the grammar. The -ing-forms that had formerly been introduced by the a-prefix now partly took on a preposition that was semantically as dispensable as the prefix had been. The construction go (a-)Ving even threatened to fall out of use at the same time as the a-prefix came under pressure. In the case of initially stressed sentence adverbs, finally, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is evidently in a position to obviate the syntactic rule preposing the negator not to otherwise permissible sentence adverbs or to enforce the intercalation of some kind of buffer element. Thus, its influence extends well into the syntactic composition of a sentence and amounts to an obligation rather than a mere preference. As in the chapter on attributive structures, the conclusion suggests itself that the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has greater power over grammatical choices and grammatical evolution than can easily be reconciled with modular theories of grammar. Its influence reaches deep into morphological and syntactic alternations and is clearly beyond that of an interpretive component. A model of grammar that places grammatical, semantic, phonological and other constraints on an equal footing and allows for multiple interactions between them would be descriptively more adequate and could integrate the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation as a factor with a high explanatory potential for all of the phenomena investigated here.

Chapter 6 Theoretical implications

The corpus-based findings that have so far been at the centre of the discussion will in this chapter be related to the state of the art in linguistic theory. While it seems natural that empirical and theoretical linguistics should stand in a relationship of intense exchange and cross-fertilization, the tasks of drawing theoretical conclusions from actual language data or of testing theoretically derived hypotheses against linguistic reality have in many cases been left to the other side and therefore not been addressed. The empirical results, which can now be pieced together, are particularly rewarding as far as linguistic theory is concerned since they yield theoretically relevant insights into the relationship between two or more parts of a grammar, which have preliminarily been referred to as 'modules' or 'components': the preference for rhythmic alternation clearly belongs to the module concerned with the phonological realization of language, whereas it has been shown to exert an influence on the grammatical form of a sentence, including its morphological and syntactic make-up. The empirical studies thus provide evidence for the relationship holding between different representations of linguistic behaviour. They will now be considered in the light of two selected linguistic models, and the suitability of these conceptions to integrate the findings will be evaluated.

6.1.

Introduction

The minimal consensus which all current linguistic theories share is that the system of a language (also referred to as its grammar in a wider sense) fulfils the basic task of pairing ideas with speech waves (cf. e.g. Garrett 1975: 133-137; 2000; Levelt 1989; Lamb 1999: 63; lackendoff 2002: 126). In language production, ideas are somehow split up into words and morphemes, which are aligned according to the syntactic and morphological rules and pronounced according to the phonology of the particular language. In perception, sound waves are parsed into morphemes and words, which are interpreted semantically to extract the ideas coded in them. All comprehensive models of language thus have to make assumptions on the relationships holding between semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonological representations.

238

Theoretical implications

The theories that will come under scrutiny in the present chapter are not randomly chosen. Among the numerous attempts to formalize a grammar, two were selected that allow for an interaction of phonological constraints such as the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation with grammatical (morphological as well as syntactic) constraints. The first is the relatively recent model known as Optimality Theory (section 6.2). The theory, which has received much acclaim since its first formulation in 1993, can be considered as a distantly related offspring of generative linguistics. In the second place, a completely different approach will be taken that draws its inspiration from knowledge about neurophysiological processes in cognition. Spreading activation models, which rely on interactive networks in which information is stored and processed, were made use of most notably in the 1980s by authors like Rumelhart and McClelland (cf. the bibliography) and have since that time been put to use in some psycholinguistic research. However, they have not received the attention that they will be shown to deserve thanks to their compatibility with and their explanatory potential for empirical findings such as those outlined in Chapters 4 and 5. Thus, in section 6.3 of this chapter, it will be shown how corpus linguistic findings and spreading activation models can be made to converge and crossfertilize each other.

6.2.

Optimality Theory

The focus of linguistic theory-building after the Chomskyan revolution has been characterized by several shifts that have culminated in the 1990s in a fundamental revision changing the old modular and derivational conception of a grammar almost beyond recognition. This revised model is known as Optimality Theory (aT) and was first formulated in two widely circulated manuscripts by Prince and Smolensky (1993) and McCarthy and Prince (1993). aT responds to a trend existing since the 1970s, but redoubling its force since the 1990s, to shift the emphasis from syntactic rules located deep under the surface to overt well-formedness constraints (for an inventory of directions in constraint-based grammar, see Jackendoff 2000: 24). Thus, well-formedness conditions, which formerly were no more than peripheral annotations to a theory of grammar in the role of output filters, now become the central objects of linguistic study (cf. Prince and Smolensky 1993: 1). A second important modification concerns the recognition that the number of absolute universals shared by all natural languages is smaller than traditional generative linguistics would make us believe. Linguistic research has shown that it makes more sense to treat certain cross-

Optimality Theory

239

linguistically preferred states as violable constraints, so-called "soft universals" (cf. Guy 1997b: 334). The fact that the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation can be integrated as a soft universal and as such figures at the centre of the theory makes OT a rewarding framework within which an attempt can be made to integrate the corpus-linguistic findings from Chapters 4 and 5. The following sections proceed from a characterization of the basic assumptions of the theory as far as they are relevant to the present book (section 6.2.1) to a critique of some of its aspects on the basis of our empirical findings (section 6.2.2). The pivotal point of the problems raised in this enterprise is the failure of standard OT to accommodate language variation and change. Thus, the concluding section 6.2.3 treats some extensions of the theory that have been proposed to accommodate language variation and change and applies them to the empirical data accumulated in Chapters 4 and 5.

6.2.1.

Universal, violable and ranked constraints

In stark contrast to syntactocentric models such as generative linguistics, OT is radically output-oriented and largely disregards the grammar-internal ways of generating this output. Constraints bearing on the output and their interactions are paramount to the model. Furthermore, OT eliminates the concept of serialism. Instead, it assumes that the evaluation of all constraints (semantic, syntactic, morphological, phonological, etc.) happens in parallel; there is no order of precedence for constraints of different types (cf. Kager 1999: xi; McCarthy 2002: 24). Prince and Smolensky (1993: 2) assume that the grammar of a language consists of two main devices, a generator (GEN) and an evaluator (EVAL). The generator receives an input consisting of lexemes, including phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic information (cf. Archangeli and Langendoen 1997: 213; Kager 1999: 19) and on this basis generates a theoretically unlimited set of candidate outputs. The precise nature of the generator is still very much a matter of debate (cf. McCarthy 2002: 8). In contrast, the internal structure of the evaluator provides the central object of research in OT. The evaluator is the place of a set of constraints, the above-mentioned "soft universals", which are assumed to be equivalent to Universal Grammar. A basic tenet of OT is that each natural language contains the complete set of these constraints, which are therefore linguistic universals (cf. also Kager 1999: 11; McCarthy 2002: 11-12). The constraints are not mutually consistent, i.e. they can be in conflict with one another and are therefore frequently violated. Thus, a constraint may not have an observable effect on the actual output issuing from a grammar on

240

Theoretical implications

account of one or more constraints that have a stronger influence than the former. Nevertheless, it is assumed to be universally present (cf. Kager 1999: 3). The incompatibility between constraints necessitates a conflict-solving operation determining the relative importance attached to each of the constraints in the evaluator. To implement this, OT makes use of a "strict dominance hierarchy" of constraints that adheres to the basic rule "Each constraint has an absolute priority over all the constraints lower in the hierarchy" (Prince and Smolensky 1993: 2; cf. also Tesar and Smolensky 2000: 25). This means that a violation of a higher-ranked constraint cannot be compensated for by the satisfaction of any number of lower-ranked constraints (cf. Kager 1999: 22-25). Among the candidate outputs produced by the generator, the evaluator thus selects the output that best satisfies (or least violates) the ranked set of constraints as the actual output. This candidate is not perfect in all respects, but it is the optimal solution to conflicts between constraints. While the grammars of different languages contain the same set of universal constraints, the main difference between them lies in their constraint ranking, which results in language-specific outputs (cf. Prince and Smolensky 1993: 3). OT was first developed as a model for accommodating findings on the morphology-phonology connection. Therefore, phonological preferences like the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation have early on been stated as constraints on the well-formedness of potential outputs and can serve to illustrate the workings of the model in the present context. For this purpose, the preference for rhythmic alternation has to be split up into two components, a prohibition against stress clashes (1) and a prohibition against stress lapses (2). Both can be conceived of as versions of the socalled Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), which militates against the adjacency of identical units of any kind (3).' (1)

NO-CLASH: Adjacent stressed syllables are prohibited. (cf. Raffelsiefen 1996: 195; Kager 1999: 165; Plag 1999: 156; Anttila 2002: 227; Getty 2002: 100)

(2)

NO-LAPSE: Stress lapses are prohibited. (cf. Raffelsiefen 1996: 198; Plag 1999: 156; Anttila 2002: 227; Getty 2002: 100)

(3)

OCP: Adjacent identical elements are prohibited. (cf. McCarthy 1986: 208; Kiparsky 1988: 379)

The finding, mentioned in the survey of the secondary literature on rhythmic alternation in section 2.1 (cf. Schane 1979: 565; Nespor and Vo-

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gel 1989: 87; Kager 1995: 372), according to which stress clashes are generally more strongly avoided than stress lapses suggests that NO-CLASH should be ranked above No-LAPSE. The differential ranking of the two componential constraints subsumed under the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation elegantly integrates this empirical fact. In the extension of such a model, the NO-CLASH and No-LAPSE constraints can interact with other, semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonological constraints. A higher rank of NO-CLASH with respect to a number of these could for instance give rise to the phenomena observed in the above corpus analyses. Constraints like NO-CLASH and NO-LAPSE are well-formedness constraints, defining phonological requirements of pronounceability and perceptibility. In OT, there is a second basic type known as faithfulness constraints. These require that the forms of lexemes or morphemes in the output be identical to their forms in the input (cf. Kager 1999: 16; Plag 1999: 150; McMahon 2000: 16; McCarthy 2002: 13-17; Slade 2003: 338; cf. also Haspelmath 1999: 251 ).2 Put differently, faithfulness constraints promote the invariability of forms across different (e.g. phonological) contexts. They can thus be considered as versions of the 'one meaning - one form' principle. Many of the processes at the morphosyntax-phonology interface can be described in terms of conflicts between faithfulness and well-formedness constraints, the former militating for a context-independent constancy of lexemes and morphemes and the latter for a context-dependent adaptation to the needs of language production and perception (cf. Raffelsiefen 1996: 209). It is obvious that it is virtually impossible for a candidate output to constantly satisfy all constraints of both sets, well-formedness and faithfulness, at the same time. To give just two examples, faithfulness would require the comparative of bad(ly) to be invariably realized in the same form, for instance worse. However, the well-formedness constraints subsumed under the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation favour a variable realization, which can be either worse or worser, depending on the context. Similarly, the input a + not + happy + man would most faithfully be realized as *a not happy man, which runs counter to the NO-CLASH constraint. Therefore, according to the interpretation advanced in section 4.7, a dummy adverb, e.g. very or too, can be inserted that is not present in the input but serves to avoid the stress clash. These examples illustrate that winning candidates in OT are as a rule not perfect in all respects; they usually incur violations of one constraint or the other. Which of the different non-optimal candidates is selected as the output depends on the relative ranking of the constraints involved. In the examples given, the NO-CLASH constraint happened to rank higher than the relevant faithfulness constraints (with regard to worse(r), this ranking was later reversed in favour of faithfulness).

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Theoretical implications

The present discussion does not propose to enter into the details of the formulation of aT constraints and the construction of constraint rankings since, as will be shown in the following two sections, some central postulates of aT will turn out to be inconsistent with the empirical data. However, these data can be interpreted to bear witness to a situation in which the constraint against stress clashes ranks higher than certain faithfulness constraints promoting, for instance, the invariability of the comparative worse or the ubiquitous use of the monosyllabic participles lit and drunk. It also seems to rank very high when it rules out the attributive occurrence of certain unpremodified a-adjectives like alive, ashamed, awake and aware. Furthermore, it appears to dominate (at least part ofthe time) the semantic constraints assigning to the degree modifier quite a pre- or post-determiner position and influencing the ordering of mono- and disyllabic colour adjectives. The findings on negated attributive adjectives and sentence adverbs suggest that in these cases, the NO-CLASH constraint occupies an extremely high rank coming close to a veto power over the constructions. The form of adverbs like quick and slow exhibits a large degree of rhythmically determined variability violating the faithfulness to adverbial marking, and moreover the grammatical markers of infinitives and -ing-forms dependent on verbs of beginning or verbs of motion are distributed more in accord with rhythmic than with grammatical criteria. Most of the corpus analyses have in addition borne witness to the influence of a multiplicity of additional factors which were semantic, syntactic, morphological, processingrelated, stylistic, sociological or other in nature. In an aT-style model, these could be represented as conflicting constraints and their respective degrees of influence could be translated into relative rankings. Straightforward though this transfer may seem, the model makes some essential premises which will turn out to be incompatible with our empirical data, as will be pointed out in the following sections. The fundamental mechanisms of aT are thus fairly simple and promising as a theoretical framework for accommodating rhythmic influences on grammar. The details of the theory are, however, in need of discussion. For one thing, aT assumes that all constraints that are postulated as part of the constraint set are cross-linguistically valid generalizations (cf. Plag 1999: 150; McMahon 2000: 10) and part of Universal Grammar. This stipulation has at least two important implications. Firstly, the number of constraints that can be postulated has to be rigorously limited and has to observe strict qualitative criteria: by hypothesis, every constraint that a linguist may consider necessary in the analysis of a specific phenomenon in an individual language would have to be assigned a cross-linguistically universal status. In an extreme case, this might lead to an implausibly high number of universal constraints and consequently to overly complex and opaque gram-

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mars. Secondly, the stipulation of cross-linguistic relevance naturally triggers a debate about a possible functional motivation of these constraints. In its original version, OT presupposes that all constraints are part of Universal Grammar and thus of our species-specific genetic endowment. However, numerous linguists argue that the constraints are amenable to functional motivations in terms of articulatory, perceptual or cognitive processes, making the requirement of innateness superfluous (Functional Optimality Theory; cf. Boersma 1998: 5; Haspelmath 1999a: 204; McMahon 2000: 81; Bresnan and Aissen 2002: 85, 89; Gess 2003: 68-69). McCarthy (2002: 220) points out that OT is particularly well suited to accommodating a functional basis for formal grammar. The reason for this is that, unlike derivational models such as the traditional generative paradigm, OT is output-oriented: all of its constraints refer to the candidates that suggest themselves as potential outputs. These are endowed with their complete set of specifications, including their phonological shapes, and are thus sensitive to the conditions imposed by the function of the human articulatory apparatus. As a consequence, the theory is particularly suited to expressing phonological preferences in grammar (cf. Myers 1997: 144). Smith (1997: 271) adopts the most radical functionalist stance with regard to the constraints that can be postulated in an OT framework. The author argues that all acceptable constraints must be functionally grounded; otherwise they would be dysfunctional, disqualified as universals and thus illegitimate. A considerable number of linguists have recognized a functional motivation inherent in well-formedness constraints like NO-CLASH, NO-LAPSE, or more generally, the group of obligatory contour constraints. Archangeli and Pulleyblank (1994), Myers (1997: 137-138), Boersma (1998: 1,415), Haspelmath (1999a: 186), Plag (1998: 209) and Tang (2000: 50) ascribe to the OCP a twofold function: on the one hand, it promotes perceptual distinguishability and minimizes confusion, and on the other, it avoids repetitions, which present an articulatory obstacle, and thus minimizes articulatory effort. As has been argued in the outline of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation in section 2.1.1, independent research has shown that the tendency to separate stressed syllables and to keep sequences of unstressed syllables to a minimum is firmly grounded in functional characteristics of the human sensory, cognitive and motor systems and also extends to non-linguistic domains of performance. Note that the claim that OT constraints be functionally motivated does not imply that constraints may not be in conflict with each other (cf. Bresnan and Aissen 2002: 86). Faithfulness or the uniformity of morphemes and lexemes is needed to ensure the recognizability of forms, and the rhythmic adaptability of these forms brings about advantages with regard to pronunciation and percep-

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tion. Nevertheless, the two tendencies impose contradictory demands on the actual outputs of the grammar. It is likewise impossible to correlate the degree of motivation of a constraint with its rank in the hierarchy (cf. Bresnan and Aissen 2002: 86). As we have seen, the strength of the influence exerted by rhythmic alternation on different variation phenomena has changed in the course of the evolution of the English language. Even so, there is no reason to believe that the rhythmic character of the language as a whole has altered, since the changes have been asymmetric across diverse constructions or forms. This indicates that a constraint may rise or fall in the hierarchy independently of its functional motivation. If this was not the case, all grammars of different languages and of different diachronic stages of one and the same language would be expected to use exactly the same ways of resolving constraint conflicts, or in other words, to possess the same constraint rankings and grammars. Functional aT relates extra-linguistic conditions of language use to the form of the grammar itself. This gives rise to the question of how such external factors have come to play a role in the relatively abstract and formal system designated as the evaluator in an aT grammar. Haspelmath (l999a) provides an in-depth discussion of this problem. The author (l999a: 190) conceptualizes a quasi-evolutionary scenario which explains language change as language optimization on the basis of linguistic variation. In this model, the "user-optimality" of a linguistic structure, i.e. the ease with which it can be implemented in real-life communication, influences its frequency of use. Particularly high frequencies can be conducive to obligatory use while particularly low frequencies can be conducive to the loss of a structure. These preferences or dispreferences thus become part of the grammar through a diachronic adaptive process which accounts for the apparent teleology of linguistic change. In this way, aT constraints need not be innate as constituents of Universal Grammar; rather they arise from general functional constraints on language use which are, however, not language-specific (cf. Boersma 1998: 5; Haspelmath 1999a: 204; McMahon 2000: 81). Functional aT thus transcends the refusal of traditional generative linguistics to assign a role to performance factors in the core of linguistic competence and reaches a higher level of explanatory adequacy. A related issue, taking us further afield, is the question of whether and how statistical tendencies, which are typical of actual linguistic performance but below the level of categorical rules, can be accommodated in an aT type of grammar. The proposals envisaging such extensions of the theory are, however, not part of the mainstream of aT, and their discussion will be relegated to section 6.2.3. Another issue worthy of consideration is the scope of aT, which is as yet unclear. Linguists disagree with regard to the question if all the tradi-

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tional components of language should be resolved into constraints and evaluated in parallel or whether a certain amount of serialism should be preserved. Radical parallelism is the version originally proposed by Prince and Smolensky (1993: 5) and the purest form of OT. Under this assumption, all possible candidates are produced by the generator in one step and evaluated in parallel. There is thus no internal serial structure of the grammar. A single constraint hierarchy ranks all constraints, whether semantic, syntactic, morphological, phonological or phonetic. This conception inevitably predicts an interaction between well-formedness conditions across the traditional modular divisions and enables a higher-ranking phonological constraint, for instance, to overrule a lower-ranking semantic, syntactic or morphological constraint (cf. Archangeli 1997: 30; Kager 1999: 25; Kager and Zonneveld 1999: 16). In this respect, the conception of course corresponds well with the conclusion drawn from the empirical analyses in Chapters 4 and 5 to the effect that the preference for rhythmic alternation can neutralize other tendencies and exert an influence on morphological and syntactic variants. Some linguists have, however, advocated more conservative OT models preserving a certain degree of serialism. Prince and Smolensky (1993: 4) themselves propose a version of OT that they address as "harmonic serialism". This model is based on a generator-evaluator loop, i.e. the generator first produces a set of candidates, among which the evaluator selects the optimal candidate, which is in turn fed back into the generator to receive further variations, which are again submitted to the evaluator, and so on until no further optimization is possible. While this version, like the genuine non-serial model, permits a complete interpenetration of constraints of different kinds, Cohan et al. (2002: 50-51) outline a conceivable version of OT preserving the modular structure and the sequential arrangement of modules typical of generative linguistics. In this scenario, in the first step, syntax produces a set of output candidates and ranks them in the order of syntactic optimality. In the second step, phonology operates on the syntactic output and assigns multiple ranked outputs, taking into consideration the syntactic rankings, but being unaware of syntactic processes. These models are again somewhat more progressive in relation to others which do not completely exchange rule-based accounts against constraint-based ones. Pesetsky (1997) and Selkirk (2001) maintain that core syntax, containing rules of constituency and movement, exhibits no optimality-type interactions, whereas those aspects of language closer to the surface (phonology in Pesetsky's conception and phonology plus morphosyntax in Selkirk's conception) are formalized as constraints selecting the optimal output interactively and ultimately able to make the syntactic representation crash. Arguing against the view that a constraint-based model is inappro-

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Theoretical implications

priate to conceptualize core syntactic principles, Spears (1997) shows that virtually all principles of current syntactic theory are accompanied by certain provisos concerning conditions under which they fail to apply. Such principles could be restated as violable constraints and the entire grammar could be modelled in an OT fashion. What all of these variations on the theme of OT have in common is the fact that they attribute to phonology more than an interpretive role: it has its own creative power, its own well-formedness conditions and, if its constraints rank high enough, a veto over dispreferred morphosyntactic representations. So far, the model seems to accord well with the empirical findings presented in Chapters 4 and 5, but section 6.2.2 will raise some critical issues that argue against an unqualified adoption of the theory.

6.2.2.

A critique of Optimality Theory

In the course of its relatively short history, OT has incurred a not insubstantial amount of criticism bearing on several of its fundamental tenets as well as its practical implementation. This concerns the number and nature of its constraints, its psychological plausibility, its determinism, and the implications of the hierarchy of strict dominance. As has already been mentioned, the number of universal constraints that can be postulated in OT analyses has to be controlled. Concerning phonological well-formedness constraints, Kager (1999: 11), for one, demands that they be phonologically grounded in some property of articulation or perception. He stresses that linguists must not arbitrarily stipulate language-specific constraints or constraints that are not apt to be generalized for other reasons. Such specific constraints cannot be reconciled with the core of the theory and are therefore illegitimate (cf. Smith 1997: 271). Despite these obvious requirements that the theory imposes on its constraints, the tendency in current research in OT has been to constantly invent new constraints and to decompose old ones into myriad sub-constraints. This has led to the loss of generalizations and to an excessive growth of constraint sets, which thus become too complex to be part of the human genetic endowment and too numerous to be successfully hierarchized in language acquisition. As a result, OT risks becoming so flexible as to be content-free (cf. Guy 1997a: 138-139; McMahon 2000: 10; 2003: 140). Recognizing this problem, Sherrard (1997: 78) and Gess (2003: 86) propose variants of OT involving universal meta-constraints, for which language-specific instantiations are defined in language acquisition (cf. also Gess 2003: 86). This is intended to set a limit to the number of innate constraints and to keep the model learnable.

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But not only the leamability and innateness of the constraint set are at issue here. What is more, it is impossible to postulate a simultaneous generation of an infinite number of utterance candidates and a simultaneous evaluation of this candidate set by an unlimited number of constraints if the model is intended to have psychological reality (cf. Boersma 1998: 466; McMahon 2000: 30). McCarthy (2002: 10) denies that aT lays claim to being isomorphic with actual processes in the speaker or hearer. Therefore, aT incurs important criticism from linguists who expect that a theory of language should match the workings of language processing as closely as possible (cf. McMahon 2000: 30; cf. furthermore Guy 1991: 20). While some linguists working in the aT framework thus content themselves with a model having nothing to do with the mechanisms involved in language use, it can hardly be contested that more realistic theories of language should be valued more highly since only this type of theory possesses an explanatory potential for natural language. A further important problem with aT resides in the fact that it is a deterministic theory (and in that respect resembles generative grammar). As a consequence of the strict dominance hierarchy, a unique outcome is predicted for every situation: if all constraints are strictly ranked and every higher-ranked constraint overrules even the conjoined effects of all lower ones, the grammar unambiguously converges on a single output. Ties for optimality are only thinkable in exceptional cases in which two candidates happen to incur exactly the same violations, and this is a highly improbable situation (cf. McMahon 2000: 105-106; Anttila 2002: 215). Hence, the standard conception of aT is unable to integrate statistical data on grammatical variation of the kind we encountered in virtually all of the above empirical analyses (cf. Guy 1997b: 334, 336; Smith 1997: 298; Anttila 2002: 217). It is needless to reiterate the finding that worser is never used on a regular basis in attributive uses, that not every single attributive occurrence of the variable past participles is realized by drunken, broken, stricken, knitted or lighted, that the selection of a quite or quite a mirrors variable contributions of rhythmic and semantic factors, that the sequencing of mono- and disyllabic attributive adjectives exhibits only a moderate degree of rhythmic determination, and that the grammatical marking of adverbs, infinitives and -ing-forms dependent on set and go bears witness to an interplay of many different factors whose influences do not seem to be associated with invariable weights. Facts like these force us to postulate a quantitative grammar taking account of the fact that a particular instantiation of a linguistic structure cannot always be predicted deterministically. For this purpose, the grammar needs to include an element of variability, which is incompatible with standard aT. Several attempts to accommodate

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Theoretical implications

language variation and its natural corollary, language change in modified versions of aT, will be outlined in the following section 6.2.3. Linguists working with aT have encountered serious problems revolving around the absolute statements deriving from the maxim of the strict dominance hierarchy. A constraint is either violated or not, and a candidate is either selected as the output or rejected. What is more, no matter how many lower-ranking constraints a candidate violates, it can never be rejected in favour of another candidate violating none but a single higherranking constraint. However, the empirical data presented above rather suggest that the evaluation of a candidate treats all the violation marks assigned to it additively. As a consequence, a candidate output may well be selected although it violates a high-ranking constraint if it shows the best overall compliance with the constraint hierarchy. Examples of this additive kind of quantification can be gleaned from sections 4.3, 4.5 and 4.6. In each case, we suspect that rhythmic effects can be in conflict with semantic orientations (as well as with additional factors), but the attributive use of aadjectives, the pre-determiner use of quite and the short-before-long order of attributive colour adjectives peak only when the rhythmically advantageous version is also preferable on semantic grounds. Similarly, in section 5.5.1 it has been shown that the presence of insertions between set and a dependent -ing-form and the threat of stress clashes jointly increase the probability of use of the a-prefix. In cases like these, the probability with which one variant is used is highest when all factors favour it, and it is lowest when all factors disfavour it. Mixed factor constellations regularly lead to intermediate selection probabilities. These findings force us to stipulate a quantitative element in an aT grammar that handles interactions between constraints and accounts for the systematic character of variation (cf. Guy 1997a: 140; 1997b: 339; Benor and Levy, to appear). Guy (1997b) develops such a model, in which the violation marks assigned to a potential output are replaced by values that correlate with the rank of the constraint that is violated. The selection of a candidate output is a function of the sum of all violation values. McCarthy (2002: 59-61) refers to this type of model as Harmony Theory, and Slade (2003: 362) uses a comparable device named constraint conjunction. On the basis of the empirical data gathered in Chapters 4 and 5, it can concluded, in accordance with Guy (1997b: 340) and Benor and Levy (to appear), that such an additive quantitative model has a greater descriptive adequacy than a model relying on strict dominance. Although Guy's (1997b) model has the advantage of taking into account the effect of many constraints of different ranks, it does not go all the way towards accommodating our data insofar as it is still deterministic, whereas our data display systematic variability. Authors like MUller (1998: 19; for

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Gennan) and Minkova (2000b: 528; for English) take issue with detenninistic conceptions and advocate a replacement of the absolute notions of grammaticality and ungrammaticality of candidate outputs by a gradient notion of acceptability. The two authors propose versions of aT in which the additive constraint violations incurred by candidates result in different degrees of markedness. The least marked candidate is the most acceptable one, but it alternates with others that are more marked albeit not ungrammatical. Again, these proposals necessitate a substantial modification of the original model of aT, but the resultant conception comes closer to linguistic reality. This explains why lit is and struck was occasionally used in single unmodified attributive function, why quick was occasionally used as an adverb to an initially stressed verb, why the division of labour between unmarked infinitives dependent on active make and marked infinitives after passive make has for a long time not been categorical and why the many other phenomena considered in Chapters 4 and 5 all manifest certain preferences rather than rules. Furthennore, aT has massive problems accommodating lexeme- or morpheme-specific behaviour. If the grammar of a language consists of a single constraint hierarchy, all the candidate outputs derived from its inputs are predicted to be treated the same by the evaluator. However, if we only stay within one and the same class of variation phenomena, e.g. the monoand disyllabic participles, the adverbial suffix, the infinitive marker or the a-prefix, we are faced with as many different situations as there are pairs of variants considered. This result is perhaps most conspicuous in the comparison of the different chronological steps in the development of the pairs drunk/drunken, broke/broken, struck/stricken, knit/knitted and lit/lighted. Though the grammatical category of the participles is identical and they all testify to the influence of stress clash avoidance, their respective distributions and developments are as disparate as they can possibly be. Thus, it does not look as if they were indeed all subjected to the same constraint hierarchy. Kraska-Szlenk (1999) adopts a way out of this dilemma that has recourse to morpheme-specific faithfulness constraints, which can occupy different ranks with regard to others in the constraint hierarchy of a language. It is, however, obvious that this solution implicates a proliferation of constraints which can hardly be reconciled with the standard aT notions of the innateness and universality of constraints. Three similarly problematic analyses are presented by Raffelsiefen (1996) and Plag (1998; 1999). The authors resort to different constraint hierarchies for different (groups of) morphemes in order to accommodate their insights concerning morphophonological conditions on word-fonnation (cf. Raffelsiefen 1996: 207; Plag 1998: 214; 1999: 217). In a similar way, an attempt to grasp all the grammatical phenomena described in the empirical chapters of the present

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Theoretical implications

work in a single, comprehensive constraint hierarchy is arguably not only a challenging but an unsolvable task. A formalization in many constraint hierarchies (probably as many as there are phenomena under consideration) might be feasible, but is not desirable since it runs counter to the fundamental assumptions of OT and discredits the entire theory. Guy (1997b: 345) remarks that a system applying a different constraint ordering (i.e. a different grammar) to every feature would be no system at all; it would be unable to explain the generation and decoding of utterances and, not insignificantly, would be impossible to learn. The issue of the learnability of an OT grammar has been treated in considerable detail by Tesar and Smolensky (2000). Their argument relies heavily on the presence of a single constraint hierarchy for each language, which is moreover characterized by strict dominance relationships (cf. Tesar and Smolensky 2000: 25). Evidently, a grammar containing multiple hierarchies is an inconceivable scenario in an OT paying due attention to learnability. Once again, Guy (1997b: 341) holds that an additive quantification of constraint weights would increase the learnability because the grammar would transparently display the relative contributions of each relevant constraint in each instance of language use. The effects of additive constraints are stable and cannot be completely suspended by the effects of other constraints that happen to have a higher rank (cf. Guy 1997b: 340342). Learnability considerations also set a strict limit to the number of constraints that can be postulated as part of a grammar. Since all but the most high-ranking constraints are opaque in most observable instances of language use, it would be statistically impossible in a lifetime to deduce the relative ordering of all the constraints that have been put forward in recent research (cf. Guy 1997b: 341). The numerous inadequacies of OT that emerge when trying to apply the theory to empirical and quantitative data mainly revolve around its central tenet of the strict dominance hierarchy. This formalism turns out to overregulate many aspects of language use. A much less formal paradigm such as Natural Linguistics (cf. Stampe 1979; DressIer et al. 1987 and Wurzel 1987; see the outline of the state of the art in section 1.1), which played a minor role in the linguistics of the 1980s, already recognizes the fact that the grammar of a language represents a trade-off between conflicting tendencies, each having its own functional motivation grounded in the conditions of language use. Mayerthaler (1987: 51-52), for instance, notes that different naturalness principles can be hierarchically ordered and that naturalness on a higher level can override naturalness on a lower level. This conception does without the strict ranking principles stipulated by OT. Therefore, Haspelmath (1999b: 259) and McMahon (2000: 184) express

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their doubts that OT constitutes a substantial improvement with regard to the considerably less formalized framework of Natural Linguistics. Another point of criticism that has not yet been mentioned concerns the fact that, in addition to grammatically controlled variation, languages are also subject to extra-grammatical factors such as style, register and addressee (which are under the conscious control of the speaker) as well as gender, age and socio-economic class (by which the speaker may differ from other members of the same language community; cf. Kager 1999: 323). Being strictly deterministic, standard OT is unable to provide any space for the influence of such extra-systemic factors (cf. Kager 1999: 404; McMahon 2000: 114-115). All of these variants would necessitate differing constraint rankings within an individual speaker or within a single language community. Examples of different sub-systems within the English language, each of which displays different baseline frequencies of the grammatical structures studied, are to be found in the contrast between written and (written-to-be-)spoken registers with regard to the frequency of the disyllabic participles broken and stricken, of the pre-determiner use of quite, of marked infinitives dependent on active make and of the a-prefix preceding -ing-forms dependent on set. A further ternary contrast in the pre-determiner use of quite was detected between spoken British English, fictional prose and newspapers (for similar contrasts between different registers of American English, see Schliiter, to appear). This kind of variation is not provided for in OT, which only allows for innate, universal and situation-independent constraints. Finally, in its purest form, OT is a strictly synchronic theory (cf. McMahon 2000: 58). However, all of the empirical studies that have included a diachronic perspective have shown that a synchronic language system is undeniably a product of its history. In other words, even though a form like worser may be rhythmically more advantageous and better integrated in the system of comparatives than a form like worse, the grammar will not suddenly switch over to this variant, simply because the earlier generation of speakers had the form worse and not worser (cf. McMahon 2000: 81). A grammar that possesses explanatory adequacy has to take into account such diachronic contingencies. Above and beyond all the problems enumerated in this critique, the two main problems with OT consist in its treatment of synchronic variation and diachronic change. Both phenomena are, however, inherent features of any natural language and therefore need to be included in a theory of language (cf. Anttila 1997: 36). To achieve status and credibility, the theory has to address these issues convincingly (cf. Sherrard 1997: 84-85). In fact, there have been several relevant proposals, some of which will be sketched and evaluated in the following section.

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6.2.3.

Theoretical implications

OT approaches to language variation and change

As has been pointed out above, many of the problems encountered in bringing OT in accord with our empirical data are connected with the difficulties standard OT has in accommodating linguistic variation. Since grammatical as well as extra-systemic variation is not properly part of the original formulation of OT, but is the precondition and basis for language change, the theory also excludes considerations bearing on language change. Since standard OT makes no claims whatsoever regarding the modelling of language change, the subject has so far been set aside. Nevertheless, with its reliance on universally valid constraints and its explanation of differences between grammars as differences in constraint rankings, the theory has turned out to be a source of inspiration for a considerable number of offshoots: these variants of standard OT capitalize on its basic assumptions and apply them to conceptualize language variation and change (cf. Hinskens, van Hout, and Wetzels 1997: 8). Looking first at language variation, three fundamentally different possibilities have been proposed to adapt the original concept of the strict dominance hierarchy so as to incorporate variability.3 The first possibility, already mentioned in the preceding section, relies exclusively on ties for optimality. Accordingly, whenever two or more outputs alternate, they are hypothesized to incur exactly the same constraint violations. This approach is defended by Hammond (2000) in an attempt to prove that ties for optimality are logically possible and that there can be multiple winners in a totally ranked constraint hierarchy. As McMahon (2000: 105-106) and Anttila (2002: 217) critically remark, such exact ties are, however, extremely unlikely, all the more so if one takes into account the large number of constraints that current analyses consider necessary to define an OT grammar. The second possibility is based on the assumption that within an individual speaker or a language community, two or more different, but invariant grammars may be in competition. The selection of one or the other grammar may then depend on such extra-linguistic variables as stylistic levels or simply chance (cf. e.g. van Ostendorp 1997; Anttila 2002: 219). The third possibility, which has so far been the most fruitful one, relies on a single grammar with variable constraint orderings. Again, the respective ordering may be determined by extra-systemic factors such as dialect, style or any other speaker characteristics, or it may be free, reflecting indeterminacies in the grammar itself(cf. Guy 1997a: 135; 1997b: 337; Anttila and Cho 1998: 36). An example of each type comes from Boersma (1998). On the one hand, he claims that the amount of assimilation that a speaker indulges in is dependent on the speaking style he or she adopts at a particular moment. This is expressed in the relative ranking of well-

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formedness constraints, favouring assimilatory simplifications, with regard to faithfulness constraints, militating against any such modifications of the input (cf. Boersma 1998: 222; cf. also Gess 2003: 72; Slade 2003: 352381). On the other, Boersma (1998: 330-331) makes appeal to a "noisy" component in the evaluator, maintaining that constraints are not ranked in an ordinal hierarchy, but on a gradient scale on which each constraint can float up and down along the lines of a Gaussian distribution. As a result of this continuous ranking, a particular constraint can occupy a variety of positions at a particular moment, including the possibility of a momentary change of ranks with its neighbours. Further variations on standard OT predicting the relative frequencies of competing outputs in a probabilistic way are proposed by Nagy and Reynolds (1995: 152, 156), Anttila and Cho (1998: 49; cf. also Anttila 1997: 63; 2002: 231-32), Getty (2002: 272-273, 326-329) and Slade (2003: 375-376). For the present study, the evaluation of these proposals will have to remain confined to the theoretical level. In principle, their merits are undeniable. A variable grammar able to integrate extra-systemic and systeminherent factors promises greater descriptive adequacy than a deterministic one. Nevertheless, many of the critical remarks raised in section 6.2.2 apply to these versions of OT as well and get in the way of a straightforward application to quantitative empirical data such as those in Chapters 4 and 5. Firstly, as has already been shown, variation phenomena (which usually testify to the simultaneous influence of several factors) suggest that the evaluation of constraint violations should be additive rather than based on strict dominance. Therefore, variable OT grammars should be equipped with an additive element. Secondly, in actual language use, individual lexernes and morphemes exhibit a differential behaviour in relation to the same (sets of) constraints. This would have to be accommodated in distinct constraint hierarchies for each lexeme or morpheme, a possibility that is unanimously rejected in standard OT as well as its revised versions. Considering the complexity of constraint hierarchies endowed with floating orderings, such a conception is extremely unrealistic. Thirdly, the issue of the learnability of a variable constraint ranking has not yet been settled in a satisfactory way. If we provisionally adopt Kager's (1999: 323) and Tesar and Smolensky's (2000: 50) reasoning, learning a constraint hierarchy that fails to be totally ranked would present an insurmountable problem in language acquisition. Fourthly, whichever version of variable OT is adopted, it is unable to account for variation involving redundant expressions of a grammatical category or for the hybridization of two grammatical structures (cf. Tabor 1994: 171). For instance, in the case of the double comparative worser, two candidate outputs appear to be realized simultaneously: the suppletive comparative worse plus the comparative suffix -er.

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Similarly, in its blend uses, dare combines properties of modal auxiliaries with those of main verbs. Situations like these would translate into two winning candidates becoming expressed in a single event of language production, a case not provided for by current variationist models of OT. All in all, though the empirical analyses in Chapters 4 and 5 have focus sed on what might be a single OT constraint, namely NO-CLASH, and its interactions with some other factors co-determining the variation phenomena investigated, the task of allocating to this constraint a rank (floating or not) in a comprehensive constraint hierarchy representing the grammar of English remains a challenge. The problems are aggravated if diachronic developments of relevant phenomena are taken into consideration. To accommodate diachronic change in grammar, OT has recourse to constraint re-ranking (cf. McMahon 2000: 90; Slade 2003: 337). In principle, this idea does not predetermine an answer to the actuation problem of language change: it is not evident whether the re-ranking of a constraint is at the origin of a change or whether it is merely a response to an independently occurring change in the grammar (cf. McMahon 2000: 97). In a formal version of OT, in which constraints are inborn features of a language-specific endowment, no statements about the causation of language change are possible (cf. Bermudez-Otero and Hogg 2003: 92). If we however adopt a functionalist perspective on OT, the roles are clearly distributed: while faithfulness constraints represent a conservative influence favouring the constancy of linguistic forms and inhibiting change, well-formedness constraints are a progressive force militating for the facilitation of all aspects of language use. Thus, the latter type of constraint, being a functionally motivated preference, can be considered the driving force behind language change (cf. Kager 1999: 16; Boersma 2003: 64; cf. also Bresnan and Aissen 2002: 84)Even if a functional constraint succeeds in bringing about a change, the effect of the succumbing constraints is not immediately and entirely annihilated because they remain omnipresent in the grammar of the language. In this way, smooth transitions between diachronic states of a language can be integrated better in OT than in a traditional rule-based model which would have to resort to sudden switches of rules or mechanisms (cf. McCully 2002: 342). In an OT model, the number of constraints that can be reranked at anyone time and the number of positions in the hierarchy by which a constraint can move can be limited (cf. Bermudez-Otero 1996: 2; McCarthy 2002: 228-230). Language change by constraint re-ranking has been claimed to obey an "adjacency" criterion, which stipulates that grammars succeeding each other in the evolution of a language as well as geographically adjacent dialects can only have minimally different rankings (cf. Sherrard 1997: 84; Smith 1997: 298).4 Hence, the inclusion of

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functional motivations, the assumed constancy of constraint effects and the restriction of permissible changes that can be deduced from the basic mechanism of constraint re-ranking have a great explanatory potential. A considerable number of linguists have developed versions of OT that integrate language change by constraint re-ranking and derive predictions as to its pathways and effects. Anttila and Cho (1998: 36-42; cf. also Anttila 1997) conceive a very compelling model of constraint re-ranking. This model recognizes the importance of variability, which is both a product of and a precondition to change (cf. Anttila 1997: 49; cf. also BermudezOtero 1996: 4-5; McMahon 2000: 105). In Anttila and Cho's (1998: 4041) system, language change comprises two steps: in the first, two formerly ranked constraints become unranked, so that a period of free variation ensues, and in the second, two formerly unranked constraints become ranked, leading to an invariant state of the grammar (cf. also Boersma 2003: 4854). This corresponds to the observation that a stable grammatical phenomenon may dissolve into a mere preference (as is the case of the dominance of the participial variants drunken and lighted in single attributive uses, which turns into no more than a tendency in the twentieth century) and that a preference may stabilize into an invariant rule (as in the case of variable infinitive marking after active and passive make; for a similar OT model cf. Bresnan and Aissen 2002: 84). Without entering into any further detail, it should be noted that this model allows us to deduce predictions as to which hypothetical constraint orders are possible, to equate these minimally distinct grammars with different invariable or variable (synchronic) dialects or (diachronic) stages of a language, and to foresee the respective probabilities of the outputs of variable grammars (cf. Anttila and Cho 1998: 40,49,54; Anttila 1997: 63). A formal mechanism of language change such as the one sketched out here thus makes strong predictions. Anttila and Cho (1998: 32-39) successfully exemplify their model with reference to the variation between English r-deletion, linking r and intrusive r. However, this example represents a very small and selective section of English phonology and it is doubtful whether the concept remains applicable when the angle becomes wider. Once again, the complex linguistic reality described in Chapters 4 and 5 is extremely hard to model. In addition to rhythmic constraints, an adequate model would have to include constraints on the semantics of words and constructions (which are in part limited to specific items and in part more general in nature, cf. iconicity or the Distance Principle), constraints favouring the biunique mapping between meanings and forms, constraints promoting system integration, grammatical fixation and the elimination of exceptions, constraints on syntactic sequencing such as the Law of the Increasing Constituents, several other constraints on morpho-

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logical marking and parallel processing, constraints against the (unmotivated) repetition of identical elements, constraints taking account of the frequency and entrenchment of a linguistic structure, syllable structure constraints, constraints on higher-level prosody, on the realization of endfocus and on the presence of an upbeat at the beginning of syntactic and prosodic units. Moreover, in addition to dialectal differences (e.g. between national varieties), the model would need to mirror extra-systemic contingencies such as style, text type, standardization, the use of archaisms, etc. In the face of this immense number of factors that need to be reckoned with, the task of assigning to the NO-CLASH constraint an unambiguous rank that is consistent across all the phenomena in which the avoidance of stress clashes is implicated is a mathematical problem that may well turn out to be unsolvable. The alternative solution of subdividing the NoCLASH constraint into a number of more specific constraints relating to individual forms or constructions would, however, mean the loss of the generalization that all phenomena are sensitive to the avoidance of stress clashes. This solution would also lead to a further multiplication of the constraints, which is undesirable for theoretical reasons, and to a loss of their universality, which is incompatible with the fundamental idea of aT. The problems that we encounter when extending this experiment of thought to the diachronic dimension become even more massive. In a model like Anttila and Cho's (1998), the re-ranking of a constraint has repercussions on all the grammatical phenomena to which the constraint is relevant. Thus, if rhythmic alternation loses importance in nineteenthcentury adverbial marking, we would expect it to submerge in a parallel manner in the domain of variant participles, to name but one example. While this is true of the pair broke/broken, there is no substantial change in the distribution of drunk/drunken, while the rhythmically motivated differences in the distribution of knit/knitted and lit/lighted increase drastically. In other cases, for instance during the changeover from a quite to quite a, during the decline of marked infinitives after active make and the increase of marked infinitives after passive make, or during the loss of the a-prefix in -ing-forms dependent on set, the avoidance of stress clashes plays a relatively marginal, but nevertheless constant role, whereas there are substantial diachronic changes in the grammatical constructions themselves. An aT modelling of this scenario would require an orchestration of constraints that seems logically unmanageable as far as current versions of aT go. Such complex scenarios remain a major challenge for future research in the framework. In conclusion, aT has been argued to provide important revisions of the role played by phonological constraints such as the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation in the determination of the output of a grammar. In contrast to

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traditional modular theories of language, the avoidance of stress clashes is one of a set of universal well-formedness conditions, and it possesses the same potential power as any syntactic, semantic, morphological or other constraint. Its actual influence is determined by the importance attached to it by a particular grammar and is subject to diachronic change. Thus, aT emancipates phonology from its subdued status as an interpretive component. What is more, the theory has also inspired many explorations into language variation and change which have led to a progressive adaptation and refinement of many of its original notions. Aspects that deserve to be incorporated into the theory are the functional motivation attributed to constraints, the integration of probabilistic data, the additive treatment of constraint violations, and the criterion of continuity bearing on dialectal and diachronic variants of the same language. Despite its merits and despite all attempts to uphold the theory against criticism, aT has in sum not been found adequate to the complex empirical data provided in Chapters 4 and 5. The problems that persist hinge on its fundamental concept of the strict dominance hierarchy on which each constraint is assigned a rank (whether constant or floating). It is impossible to construct such a hierarchy so as to satisfy the requirement that all actual outputs can be derived from it, and the by-pass strategy of postulating different hierarchies for different morphemes or constructions is disqualified on theoretical grounds. In a nutshell, the conclusions drawn from the present examination of aT call for an output-oriented, functionally grounded, multifactorial and non-modular model that has to do away with the hierarchical ranking of constraints. We therefore fully concur with Kager (1999: 407-422), who writes: "numerical ranking indeed replaces the principle of strict domination, partly bridging the gap with connectionism" (p. 422; italics in the original). With the term "numerical ranking", Kager refers to an index that should be assigned to each constraint, representing its strength and replacing a hierarchical ranking, and with the term "connectionism", he alludes to neurologically inspired models of the kind first proposed by Rumelhart and McClelland, which will be discussed in the next section.

6.3.

Spreading activation models

As Kager's (1999: 422) remark quoted in the preceding section indicates, spreading activation models of language are not completely dissimilar in nature to an aT grammar involving weighted, additive constraints, although their outward appearance suggests a different conclusion. It is true that their origin is fundamentally different: while theories like aT are for-

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Theoretical implications

mulated on the basis of certain regularities that grammarians discern in linguistic structures and for which they invent an abstract formalism, spreading activation models take as their point of departure insights into the mechanisms of neural action in the brain and use them to implement linguistic structures. However, if we end up finding that the latest offshoots of formal grammar and recent neurolinguistic research converge, we can optimistically assume that both scientific paradigms are eventually on the right track. Though there is no general consensus on the subject, an increasing number of linguists have recently demanded that linguistic theory be isomorphic with the neural processes underlying language production and perception (cf. Jackendoff 1997: 9; Berg 1998: 20; Lamb 1999: 293; Pulvermiiller 2002: 271). Over and above the minimal requirements of descriptive and explanatory adequacy, invoked by Chomsky (1965: 24-25), it will be argued that a more highly valued and nevertheless achievable aim of linguistic theory should consist in the integration of grammatical descriptions and neurophysiological facts. The corresponding requirements are those of operational plausibility, i.e. an account of how the linguistic system a theory proposes can be put into operation in real time speech production and perception, as well as of neurological plausibility, i.e. compatibility with what is known about the brain from cognitive neuroscience (cf. Berg 1998: 20; Lamb 1999: 293). In particular, aspects of the phenomena subjected to an empirical investigation in Chapters 4 and 5 will now be spelled out in terms of a hypothetical neuronal hardwiring. This responds to Pulvermiiller's (2002: 271,275) call for "ideas about how to connect the level of language description to that of the description of neurons." The point of departure of the following line of argument is thus linguistic, not neurophysiological in nature. It draws on some basic neurophysiological concepts, develops and refines them. While it is true that thanks to modem technological and methodological advances, the field of neuroscience has boomed in the past twenty years (cf. Pulvermiiller 2002: 271), it is as yet restricted either to microscopic insights into the workings of individual neurons and small systems of neurons, or to a macroscopic localization of linguistic processes, for instance in Broca's and Wernicke's areas (cf. Anderson 1995: 286; Jackendoff 1997: 9; cf. also Lamb 1999: 63). The intermediate structures and mechanisms, in particular those requisite to the implementation of a grammar, have largely remained inaccessible to neuroscientific methods. These would provide the "much-needed bridge between the structures found in high-level cognition and the nervous system" postulated by Anderson (1995: 185). This is not to deny that the kind of spreading activation models made use of in linguistic research hardly take into account the full range of neurophysiological knowledge at our dis-

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posa!. However, the fact that the relevant branches of neuroscience to some extent lag behind linguistic research leaves linguists in the fortunate position of being able to set up hypotheses that can be verified by neurophysiological studies. The linguistic models that will be described and evaluated here are variously known as spreading activation, neural network, connectionist, interactive activation or parallel distributed processing (PDP) models (cf. Goldsmith 1993: 7). Their distinctive characteristic is that they dispense with a central computational unit and replace it with a network of simple distributed units that work cooperatively and competitively. These are linked by connections transmitting excitatory or inhibitory signals from one unit to the other (cf. McClelland, Rumelhart, and Hinton 1986: 10). The units and the properties of their connections represent the information store as well as the processing devices of the system. There are no modular subdivisions and no interfaces in the network; all processing is rigorously parallel and makes use of the same basic processes (cf. Blumstein 1995: 365). The actual output is selected from among a number of possible outputs by means of a summation of signals. Section 6.3.1, which forms an excursus into neurophysiology, will introduce the fundamental principles of the propagation and summation of signals as far as they are relevant to linguistic modelling. The advantages of a spreading activation model with regard to the exigencies of a realistic theory of language processing are obvious. The network is - up to a certain point - translatable into a neurological system of the type that is known to exist in the brain: its nodes can be conceived of as (bundles of) neurons, the transmission of signals has its counterpart in the propagation of electrophysiological activation, and the interconnections between neurons correspond to synapses between neurons (cf. McClelland, Rumelhart, and Hinton 1986: 10; Berg 1988: 205). Section 6.3.2 sketches out the structure of a linguistic network model in terms of nodes and connections and its functioning in language production and perception. A further essential advantage of spreading activation models consists in the fact that the structural and functional properties of the networks may by hypothesis furnish the functional motivations for linguistic phenomena such as rhythm. Language production and comprehension rely on the motor and sensory functions of the human cognitive apparatus, the "articulatory and auditory bottleneck", to borrow Berg's (1998: 23) expression. Articulation and audition are themselves of course coordinated by neural mechanisms, which impose certain requirements on the form of language. In Berg's (1998: 23) words, "only that which is producible and perceptible can play a linguistic role." Section 6.3.3 will argue that the temporal characteristics of neural action are one of these constraining factors: they can

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Theoretical implications

be held responsible for the preference for alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. Thus, the potential causes of the ill-formedness of stress clashes as well as the mechanisms conspiring to avoid them are tied together within a single model. The argument is now coming full circle. In Chapters 4 and 5, ample evidence has accumulated that supports the hypothesis that stress clash avoidance strategies are not only to be found in the phonology of English (Beat Deletion, the Stress Shift Rule, etc.), but also in its morphology and syntax. This interactivity between traditionally distinct domains of linguistic structure is another basic characteristic of spreading activation models. Section 6.3.4 deals with precisely this aspect of the architecture of a neural network, demonstrating how forward and backward connections between different systemic layers cooperatively select the option that becomes realized. This assessment of the possibilities opened up by interactivity is followed by an equally important assessment of its limits in section 6.3.5. Functionalist linguistics maintains that an appeal to perceptual and productive principles inherent in the "articulatory and auditory bottleneck" has the potential to yield explanations for the structure of a language and for the change that it undergoes (cf. Berg 1998: 23). Thus, the conditions of pronounceability and perceptibility have more than only momentary effects on language use. On the basis of a spreading activation model, section 6.3.6 develops a far-reaching account of the way in which these tendencies determine the distribution of morphological and syntactic variants and influence the direction of language change. After the numerous assets of neurophysiologically inspired models of language have been established, section 6.3.7 provides a critical evaluation of the uses of this class of models. This concludes our discussion of spreading activation models and reveals very bluntly how much more work will be necessary to arrive at a satisfactory modelling of so complex a system as language.

6.3 .1.

Principles of neural action

This section provides an introduction to the neurophysiological substrate that spreading activation models claim to mirror. A more detailed exposition can be found in Lamb (1999: 307-319), and Crick and Asanuma (1986) provide a helpful survey of the anatomy and physiology of the brain and neural processing. It is estimated that the human brain contains more than 1 billion nerve cells, or neurons, each connecting to about 1,000 other neurons via 40,000 synapses (cf. Lamb 1999: 318). Furthermore, it has been worked out that

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each neuron in the cortex (the outer grey matter) of the brain can contact any other either directly or by no more than two or three intermediate neurons (cf. MUller 1996: 628). Thus, the brain contains an abundance of processing units and interconnections. Its extreme degree of connectivity can be considered its most outstanding characteristic. Any activity in one location can virtually spread across the entire cortex. In contrast, only a relatively small number of neurons and neuronal sets is required for the construction ofa simple model ofa grammar (cf. PulvermUller 2002: 193). Figure 39 presents the schematic structure of a cortical neuron.

Axon hillock

Myelin sheath

Figure 39. The structure of a cortical neuron (based on Lamb 1999: 310)5

A neuron typically consists of a cell body with long extensions. The most numerous among these are the dendrites, which, together with the cell body, form the surface on which the neuron receives signals from other

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Theoretical implications

neurons. One of the extensions (occasionally equipped with additional collateral extensions) is the axon, which fulfils the task of transmitting signals to other neurons. Axons end in terminal buttons which are situated on the cell membrane of other neurons (i.e. on their dendrites or cell bodies) and form connections (synapses) with them (cf. Lamb 1999: 315-316; Pulvermiiller 2002: 18-19). Neurons make use of two kinds of signal transmission by which they communicate. Internally, the signals that they receive on their dendrites and cell bodies are propagated as electrical pulses consisting in a depolarization of the normally negative potential maintained by the cell membrane. These depolarizations are designated as action potentials. The changes of the membrane potential in the course of an action potential have been measured by neurophysiological methods and are outlined in figure 40. 40

;;5 ""iii O"§

8Q

01---+-----4,.-+-----+-----1---.

Q

s::

El

.0

E Q

E

-70 resting level incoming activation

Figure 40. The typical shape of an action potential followed by the recovery cycle (cf. Koester and Siegelbaurn 2000: 158, 161; Previte 1983: 174)

An action potential raises the usual resting potential at the cell membrane from -70 mV to + 40 mY. Due to certain functions of the cell membrane (which need not concern us here), this depolarization is propagated along the cell membrane. The propagation however works in only one direction, which is conditioned by the ensuing changes in the membrane potential. As figure 40 shows, after the peak at 40 mY, the membrane is repolarized and overshoots its resting level. The resultant hyperpolarization has an inhibitory effect which prevents the excitation from running back in

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the direction where it came from: the threshold that a renewed depolarization has to cross is enhanced so that the cell membrane is harder to reactivate during this so-called refractory phase. This hyperpolarization is followed by a weak reversal of excitability to an above-normal state, which is due to a post-inhibitory rebound of the membrane potential. During this phase, the membrane is hyperexcitable, i.e. it requires a reduced amount of incoming activation to depolarize again. It is only in the fourth phase that the potential returns to its resting level. The changes of the membrane potential subsequent to an activation can be referred to as the "recovery cycle"ofaneuron(MacKay 1986: 177; 1987: 11, 12, 143-144). The second form of signal transmission holds between cells and thus specifically concerns the synapses. The terminal buttons located at the ends ofaxons contain chemical substances, the neurotransmitters, which are set free when an action potential reaches the end of an axon. Depending on the type of neurotransmitter produced by a given type of neuron and emitted at its synapses, the connections between neurons can either be excitatory or inhibitory. The membrane of the second (post-synaptic) neuron has different kinds of receptors which, when they receive the neurotransmitters, initiate changes of the membrane potential of the second cell. In the case of excitatory neurotransmitters, the membrane potential is depolarized so as to trigger another action potential. In the case of inhibitory neurotransmitters, the membrane potential is pushed below its resting level, thus building up an inhibition that impedes the creation of a new action potential (cf. Lamb 1999: 312-316).6 Neuroanatomic evidence shows that the excitatory connections mainly hold between neurons of different strata, while within a stratum inhibitory links predominate (cf. Pulvermiiller 2002: 196-197). The neuron performs a summation of all simultaneously incoming activation: excitatory potentials are treated additively and inhibitory ones subtractively (cf. Lamb 1999: 317). The inputs are typically conducted from the dendrites to the cell body or arrive directly from synapses on the cell body. The place where the axon leaves the body of the cell, the axon hillock, is the crucial point in this summation: if the resulting local activation level is high enough, the neuron 'fires', i.e., it sends an action potential along the axon to connected cells. If the activation level at the hillock however turns out to fall below a certain threshold, no action potential is produced (cf. Pulvermiiller 2002: 18-19). Thus, excitatory activation can be neutralized by a sufficient amount of inhibitory activation (cf. Lamb 1999: 317). In general, excitatory connections by far outnumber inhibitory ones, but inhibitory synapses are placed in strategically more important positions, e.g. on the cell body, on or even after the axon hillock (cf. Crick and Asanuma 1986: 362).

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Theoretical implications

Learning processes seem to have a variety of correlates in neurons and their connections. First, the emission of neurotransmitters at a synapse may be facilitated; second, the postsynaptic membrane may become sensitivized and develop more receptors; third, axons and dendrites may multiply or build more synapses; and fourth, axons may develop thicker myelin sheaths, which speed up the conduction of action potentials. All of these changes have been shown to occur as a response to the frequent activation of a connection (cf. Lamb 1999: 317, 322; Pulvermiiller 2002: 41). Put simply, the more often a connection is activated, the easier and faster it becomes to use, and vice versa, the easier and faster a connection is to activate, the more often it is used. At this point, a note on the time scale we are referring to is in order. Electrophysiological and electromyographic measurements provide evidence that the entire activation and recovery cycle of a neuron lasts no more than a few milliseconds (cf. MacKay 1986: 177-183; 1987: 9). The maximal frequency of successive action potentials in a cell runs to 100 per second, and the speed of transmission of action potentials in axons is extremely fast (between 1 mm and 100 mm per millisecond, depending on the degree of myelination; cf. Lamb 1999: 317). We are thus dealing with remarkably short delays for which a completely different time scale is necessary than for observable linguistic behaviour. Remember from section 2.1.1 that the maximal number of syllables pronounced per second was found to be around 8 (cf. Lehiste 1970: 7-8, 155; Lenneberg 1967: 109-119). After this excursus, the present discussion will therefore leave the domain of the hard neurophysiological facts and turn back to linguistic models. These models of course operate on a larger time scale than actual neural networks, and the processing units have more complex properties than individual neurons. Linguistic models define certain parameters for their units, such as the different types of units that play a role, the use of excitatory and inhibitory connections, the directions of the spread of activation, the temporal characteristics of the propagation of activation, the summation function of input activations to a unit, the output functions of the units and the ways in which timing and sequencing are controlled (cf. Levelt 1989: 19-20). With the help of these parameters, a number of neural network models working with spreading activation have successfully been implemented (e.g. McClelland and Rumelhart 1981; Tabor 1994; Levelt, Roelofs and Meyer 1999; Pulvermiiller 2002). What all models however have in common is the implicit commitment to structures and mechanisms that are known to exist in the brain, and the hope that abstract and real neural networks will ultimately converge. A finding that may help to bridge the gap between the microscopic neural basis and macroscopic behaviour is adduced by MacKay (1970: 211).

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He quotes an unpublished paper by Ohala and Hirano (1967), where the authors report a second peak of electromyographic activity (a second contraction ofthe muscles) in the lips of subjects about 200 milliseconds after the production of a labial consonant. Given that muscular action is induced by neural activation, MacKay interprets this second peak as being due to a post-inhibitory rebound, "which is known to follow the activation of central neuronal aggregates by as much as 200 msec." If this isolated finding could be replicated, this would furnish a solid piece of evidence that larger groups of neurons, the so-called "neuronal aggregates", mirror on a larger, linguistically significant scale the small-scale properties of single neurons, down to significant details such as the recovery cycle. Solid evidence in favour of the role played by activation and inhibition phases in observable behaviour also comes from electromyographic analyses of muscular action outside the articulatory apparatus. A detailed analysis is, for instance, provided by Paillard (1955: 102 and passim), who finds that a reflex-induced contraction in the muscles of the leg is followed immediately by a short inhibitory phase, after 130 to 300 milliseconds by a rebound, after around 450 milliseconds by another weak inhibition, and after 600 to 1000 milliseconds by a return to the resting state. Fraisse (1974: 111) adduces these physiological facts as potential causes for the rhythmic organization of language. More recent findings based on visual and auditory perception tasks are reported in Frisch (2004: 354-355; for further references see there). These experiments show that subjects are prone to fail to perceive repeated morphemes, words or semantic concepts, which Frisch ascribes to a temporary inhibition of the relevant units immediately following their first activation. In view of such results, the assumption that neural activation and recovery can ultimately shape human behaviour, including linguistic behaviour, seems highly plausible.

6.3.2.

Networks in production and perception

This section roughly outlines the basic structure of a neural network model. While those linguists who have developed or implemented spreading activation models have naturally made differing assumptions concerning the details of their models, there is widespread consensus about their fundamental structures. The following discussion is confined to these basics and largely follows Dell and O'Seaghdha (1994: 412). A network consists of nodes (or, in Lamb's 1999 terminology, nections) and their interconnections. The nodes are simple units, all of the same mould and having the same functional properties. In a perceptual system modelling language comprehension, they represent possible input ele-

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ments, Le. when the system perceives an input, the corresponding node(s) become(s) active. In a production system, the units represent potential outputs, Le. instructions for articulation (cf. Rumelhart, Hinton, and McClelland 1986: 46-48; MacKay 1987: 8; Tabor 1994: 61; Dell and O'Seaghdha 1994: 412). There is some evidence that the nodes of a neurolinguistic model have realistic correlates in the cortex of the brain. The latter contains myriad cortical columns, cylindrically arranged groups of about 100 neurons each, which are strongly interconnected by excitatory synapses and function as units (cf. MUller 1996: 628-629; Lamb 1999: 217, 323, 326). These neuron assemblies are sufficiently complex to perform all the necessary computations and arguably constitute the smallest "meaningful" neural substrates (MacKay 1987: 9; cf. Anderson 1995: 283-286). It is obvious that the properties of these nodes mimic by design the basic properties of neurons, including such characteristics as activation, refractoriness, excitatory and inhibitory connections, etc., but the mechanisms and time scales are not necessarily identical (cf. MacKay 1987: 145; cf. also McClelland and Rumelhart 1981: 378). For instance, refractoriness in neurons is a physiochemical recovery process, whereas refractoriness in nodes is due to complex (probably inhibitory) neuronal uions and evolved for reasons other than the need for recovery. As mentioned above, MacKay (1970: 211; 1987: 9) finds some evidence that nodes operate on a much larger time scale than neurons. While the refractory phase of a neuron takes less than a millisecond, in connection with nodes we rather seem to be dealing with time frames in the domain of hundreds ofmilliseconds. 7 Apart from these structural facts, the 'hard-wiring' of the model, certain further relevant properties have to be defined that relate to the quantification of its computational processes. Firstly, each node has a variable activation level, which is a summation of the excitatory and inhibitory inputs it receives. As in the case of neurons, excitatory potentials have positive and inhibitory potentials have negative values (cf. Rumelhart, Hinton, and McClelland 1986: 46,49; McClelland 1987: 8; Dell and O'Seaghdha 1994: 412). Moreover, the activation level may also be influenced by its own recent states (self-inhibition or priming; cf. Blumstein and Milberg 2000: 169; Goldsmith 1993: 9). Secondly, each node has an output function that depends on the accumulated activation and on a threshold level, which determines the output strength and below which the node does not fire. Thirdly, each node is equipped with a learning mechanism that modifies the patterns of connectivity on the basis of experience (cf. Rumelhart, Hinton, and McClelland 1986: 48-53; Tabor 1994: 64). In the initial stage (at birth), the network has abundant latent connections which start out very weak. Learning a language basically consists in acquiring the correct inter-

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connections and interconnection strengths. The acquired connection strengths between nodes in the model reflect the strengths of the contingencies that hold between the units represented by the nodes (cf. McClelland, Rumelhart, and Hinton 1986: 32; McClelland 1987: 8; Lamb 1999: 78; Pulvermliller 2002: 20-22). Fourthly, the strength of the activation, which is thought of as pulses similar to action potentials, corresponds to the frequency of pulses transmitted (cf. Lamb 1999: 78). In a neural network model, the nodes are arranged in layers that roughly correspond to different levels of abstraction: nodes representing more mental information (semantic concepts) are conventionally represented as occupying higher layers, while those representing more physical information (auditory and articulatory units) occupy lower layers (cf. McClelland and Rumelhart 1981: 377; McClelland 1987: 5; Dell and O'Seaghdha 1994: 412). Incidentally, it has to be kept in mind that what is referred to here as layers represents abstract processing levels rather than anatomic constellations. Similarly, the concept of a vertical space in terms of 'top' and 'bottom', 'up' and 'down', 'high level' and 'low level' is merely metaphorical and has no real existence as such in the brain. The literature yields a great number of sketches that can serve to illustrate such hierarchical networks. 8 The connections holding between nodes are typically assumed to span only one layer (cf. Lamb 1999: 173). In a lexical network like the one conceived by Dell and O'Seaghdha (1994: 412), for instance, phonetic or articulatory features are situated at the lowest layer. They are dominated on the next higher layer by phonological segments (phonemes),9 which are in turn combined into syllables and words on the higher layers and subordinated to semantic concepts at the top layer (cf. also Dell and Reich 1981: 627; Berg 2005: 119). Figure 41 delineates the structure of such a network in an abstract way. This five-layered model is certainly a gross simplification of the kind of networks necessary in actual language processing. To take only the evidence collected from speech errors by Berg (1988: 125; 2003: 253), the network must minimally contain layers for phonetic features, phonemes, consonant clusters, rhymes, syllables, morphemes, word stems, words and syntactic phrases. More psycholinguistic evidence for levels of processing is summarized in Bock (1987: 120-121; cf. furthermore MacKay 1987: 30-34 ).10 In language processing, it is assumed, activation spreads throughout the network, starting from one of the two outside layers. In production, it propagates in a top-down direction from the highest to the lowest layer, i.e. from conceptual nodes to phonetic feature nodes, and in perception in a bottom-up direction from the lowest to the highest layer, i.e. from phonetic feature nodes to conceptual nodes (cf. Dell and O'Seaghdha 1994: 412; Lamb 1999: 125; Jackendoff2000: 14-15; Frisch

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Theoretical implications

2004: 352). Since language is articulated and perceived in a linear fashion, processing does not proceed layerwise, but incrementally, i.e. processing at the next layer starts as soon as any fragment at the prior layer becomes available (cf. lackendoff 2000: 15-16).

semantic concepts

words

syllables

phonemes

phonetic features

Figure 41. A structural blueprint for a neural network model

At this point, a note of caution is necessary to clarify the significance of the concept of a 'node' in the model. Claiming that a node 'represents' a linguistic unit is again a gross simplification, a merely symbolic usage intended to facilitate the conceptualization of the system. In actual fact, the information about potential inputs and outputs is not embodied in particular nodes, but coded in an abstract way in the relationships particular nodes entertain with other nodes and represented by certain activation states of these connections of nodes. If anything, the representation of a linguistic unit is distributed, not local. II To exemplify this, a node can metaphorically be referred to as the node representing the phoneme /hI by virtue of

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the fact that it is connected to the phonetic features [voiced], [bilabial], and [plosive] on the lower layer, and to syllables, morphemes and words containing the phoneme Ibl on higher layers, but a linguistic representation would properly be understood as a particular pattern of activation in a network (cf. Dell and Reich 1981: 627; McClelland 1987: 6; Goldsmith 1993: 8; Blumstein and Milberg 2000: 169). Thus, the system is capable of interpreting and producing symbols such as words, but it does not itself contain symbols (cf. Lamb 1999: 63,229,375; Ritt 2004: 175-177). Its store of linguistic information resides in its connectivity, and the actualization of language is the activation of the relevant connections. The nature of the activation flow through the network is such that it primes (or pre-activates) all nodes that entertain an excitatory connection with the targeted one (cf. Berg 1988: 157; 2004: 1087). Excitatory connections mainly exist between layers of the system. For example, when an auditory stimulus containing the phoneme Ibl is presented to the network, this involves, among others, the feature [plosive]. The corresponding feature node for [plosive] becomes active and in its turn primes not only Ibl but also other consonants which are equally linked to it, e.g. Id/, Ig/, Ip/, ItI and Ik/. The same happens with the feature nodes for [bilabial] and [voiced], which in turn prime other groups of consonants. 12 The processing of a single utterance thus implicates more or less the whole system, while the degree of priming received by individual nodes correlates with their degree of similarity to the target (cf. Frisch 2004: 363). All nodes in the same systemic layer that receive simultaneous activation compete with each other. In the given example, the phoneme node for Ibl is the most likely to accumulate the highest amount of priming since it is the only node at the intersection of all three features in the input. The next likely candidates are Ip/, Id/, Ig/ and Im!, which only differ from the target in a single feature. Nodes differing minimally from each other act as close competitors, and the selection of the actual output is decided in favour of the competitor accumulating the highest momentary activation level (cf. Dell and Reich 1981: 625-626; McClelland 1987: 8). This illustrates the fundamental selection mechanism of neural action, which MacKay (1987: 20) defines as follows: "the most-primed-wins principle acts as an either-or gating mechanism so that when nodes in the same domain receive simultaneous priming, only the node receiving most priming from whichever (e.g., contextual) sources will become activated" (cf. also Aitchison and Todd 1982: 188-189). The sources of this priming will come under further scrutiny in section 6.3 A. A node that becomes selected fires, i.e. it sends activation to all connected nodes on neighbouring layers (cf. McClelland 1987: 8; Lamb 1999: 206; Berg 2005: 119). In the given example, the Ibl node for instance acti-

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Theoretical implications

vates the syllables bin, black, rub, and many more. Besides the excitatory connections linking a node with nodes at different layers, the network has inhibitory connections between nodes at the same layer, in particular between close competitors (cf. McClelland and Rumelhart 1981: 378-379; McClelland 1987: 6; Dell and O'Seaghdha 1994: 412; Lamb 1999: 219222; Pulvermtiller 2002: 194). When the winning node fires, it simultaneously sends inhibitory signals to its competitors. This lowers their activation levels so as to prevent them from intervening with the action of the winner (cf. McClelland 1987: 8). In our example, once the /b/ phoneme has accumulated sufficient activation, it becomes active and thereby inhibits all similar phonemes with which it stands in a mutually incompatible relationship (for another example, see Berg and Schade 1992: 406).13 An issue concerning the architecture of a spreading activation model that has not yet been completely settled is the question of whether language production and perception make use of the same network or of different ones, or, if they share the higher (conceptual, lexical, syntactic, possibly morphemic nodes), from what level onwards the two systems are separate. Opinions on the matter diverge widely. MacKay (1986: 174; 1987: 29-34) and lackendoff (2000: 14-15) go so far as to propose that nodes are shared down to the level of phonological structure, while only motor and auditory information are separate. Lamb (1999: 127-128) alleges that the pathways are shared except for two phonological subsystems, which are specific to production and perception. Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999: 7), in contrast, assume that the network is only common to production and perception from the lemma level upwards. Parenthetically, we may note that most models and discussions of language processing that are not based on spreading activation networks conceptualize production and perception as completely separate departments inside the language system, interacting only by means of self-monitoring (cf. for instance Levelt 1989: 9-16; Garrett 2000: 48). Hence, the fact that neural network models make use of bidirectional processing sets them apart from most other psycholinguistic theories. As we will see in section 6.3.4, the possibility of a bidirectional activation flow within the same network turns out to be an essential asset of these models. Empirical data such as those presented in Chapters 4 and 5 do, however, not permit any conclusions as to the extent of the overlap between production and perception. Therefore, this question will have to remain unanswered, pending further research on the topic. This concludes the general outline of spreading activation models. Their basic structure and functions as well as their neural basis have now been introduced as far as they are relevant for present purposes. The following sections will focus on the implications that the empirical findings concerning influences of linguistic rhythm on the grammar of English have for

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neurolinguistic modelling. This discussion will add some significant refinements and extensions to the existing model space. What is more, as the following section will show, the mechanisms involved in the action of nodes have a considerable explanatory potential for the existence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation.

6.3.3.

Implications of the alternation of activation and recovery

In several respects, the present section and the following three are the central ones in the present chapter. They tie together numerous loose ends of the empirical and theoretical arguments presented so far. Although they contain frequent references to the existing literature on spreading activation models, the bits and pieces gleaned from these sources represent only building blocks that will be pieced together to make up the coherent model developed here. It will be seen how the functional properties of the nodes account for the preference for alternating patterns, how such alternating patterns are enforced by the network, to what extent they may prevail against other constraints and how they manifest themselves in language variation and change. As was mentioned at the end of section 6.3.1, Ohala and Hirano (1967) adduce electromyographic evidence suggesting that neurally induced, observable behaviour bears witness to a rebound effect following the initial action after about 200 milliseconds. MacKay (1970: 211) concludes from this that behaviourally relevant neural aggregates undergo the same circuit of activation and recovery as individual neurons, only on a larger time scale. Fraisse (1974: 104) independently arrives at the same conclusion on the basis of the findings reported in Paillard (1955: passim). This hypothesis will now be considered from the perspective of spreading activation models and substantiated on the basis of linguistic evidence. Bridging the gap between neurons and nodes, Fraisse (1974: 46), MacKay (1987: 141) and Berg (2004: 1087) surmise that the time course of the activation of nodes mirrors that of neurons, represented in figure 40 above. Accordingly, after having fired, nodes undergo a refractory phase during which their priming level briefly falls below the normal resting state (selfinhibition). This does not mean that the node is impossible to re-activate in this phase, but it needs a greater amount of incoming excitation from external sources to surpass its usual threshold level plus its self-inhibition. The mechanisms responsible for this refractoriness are unlikely to be the same as in the case of individual neurons (cf. Fraisse 1974: 46). Instead, MacKay (1987: 145; cf. also Houghton and Hartley 1995) hypothesizes that neuronal aggregates forming a functional unit contain inhibitory satel-

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lite neurons that stop and inhibit the activation of the excitatory ones for a certain lapse of time. The duration of the self-inhibition in the node can therefore take considerably longer than in a neuron (cf. MacKay 1987: 145-146). After this period, a rebound phase follows, during which the activation of the node rises somewhat above its resting level (priming). Berg (2004: 1087) assumes that this rebound is not caused by the neural recovery cycle either, but represents a genuinely psychological process. Whatever the mechanisms, MacKay (1986: 184; 1987: 144-145) and Berg (2004: 1096) maintain that the duration of the entire recovery cycle of a node correlates positively with its level in the hierarchy: phoneme nodes have relatively short cycles, syllable nodes have longer ones, and nodes on even higher layers may have even longer ones, although these effects may be obscured on account of competing influences. The recovery cycle plays such a crucial role in the present context because the results of the interplay of activation, refractoriness and rebound are traceable in the structure of languages. The alternation between similar and contrasting units is a fundamental construction principle that holds for all structural levels (cf. Berg 2004: 1095-1097). This has been shown most convincingly for the phonemic level, where the categories are clearly distinct and of a limited number. MacKay (1970: 207; 1987: 152) and Frisch (2004: 356-360) show that a particular phoneme is unlikely to be repeated in immediate sequence and assume that the reason is that the nodes responsible for it are still in the refractory phase (cf. also Fraisse 1974: 46; Berg and Schade 1992: 409; Berg 2004: 1063-1070). By contrast, the probability of phoneme repetition is above average at a distance of one intervening phoneme, presumably because the nodes are on the rebound, so that their activation threshold is reached more easily. Thus, the realization of a phoneme is followed by a phase during which the same phoneme is underrepresented, which is in turn followed by a phase during which it is overrepresented, before the probability of its occurrence finally returns to a chance level. MacKay (1970) and Berg (2004: 1070-1075) furnish quantified evidence of this effect for the structure of Croatian and Hawaiian as well as English lexemes. Further evidence from experimental settings, dysgraphia, perception and recall of misspellings, omission, masking and anticipation of phonemes in speech, and letter omission in typing is accumulated in MacKay (1986: 177-184; 1987: 150-153) and Berg (1988: 100-103, 149, 154-155).14 As we have seen in the preceding section, most neural network models involve coherent, hierarchical part-whole relationships between different units. Accordingly, the phonemic layer is connected to an inferior layer, which analyzes phonemes into distinctive features. The higher layers synthesize phonemes into syllables, morphemes and lexemes, and lexemes into

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semantic concepts. In this system of content units, the place of prosody, which is defined as the relationships between units, is difficult to define (cf. already Lehiste 1970: 1). There is evidence that prosodic information becomes available online in an integrative and interactive manner, as the morphosyntactic structure is built up, and not before or after this process (cf. Warren 1999: 176-183). Thus, we may conclude that prosody resides in a third dimension of the network, orthogonal to the concrete part-whole relationships of the first two dimensions and interconnected with them. This third, suprasegmental dimension has frequently been neglected in the literature on neural network models. IS The following discussion will make up for this shortcoming insofar as it focuses on the rhythmic properties of morphosyntactic structure. A neural network model implies that linguistic structure at all levels is determined by the same processing principles, since processing on all levels is based on the same units sharing crucial properties such as the alternation between activation and recovery. Therefore, rhythm should also be amenable to an explanation in terms of the recovery cycle. In the present discussion, the hypothesis will be proposed that the connectivity of the neural network causes all nodes representing linguistic units that have any kind of feature in common to connect to a node responsible for that feature. Since languages like English involve a distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables, this distinction arguably has to be coded in some way in the neural network model. Unlike the "detector cells" for phonemes that Keidel (1992: 347-348) finds (cf. note 9), there are no neurophysiological insights available to prove the presence of any structures that take care of the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables. However, Ritt (2004: 259-262) proposes a convincing chain of arguments showing that binary oppositions between elements and alternating structures represent ideal configurations in terms of neural processing. Therefore, gradual oppositions will tend to be simplified and ultimately converge on binary patterns. In the absence of concrete evidence, the simplest possible case will thus be assumed, which is that the features [stressed] and [unstressed] are each represented by a single node. Ritt (2004: 181) makes a very similar assumption: his node for [strong] syllables links to the perceptual feature [more prominence] and to the articulatory feature [increase effort], whereas his node for [weak] syllables links to the perceptual feature [less prominent] and to the articulatory feature [decrease effort].16 In our model, any syllable that receives stress in an utterance will be linked to the feature [stressed], and any syllable that is stressless in an utterance will be linked to the feature [unstressed]. The relevant fragment of the network for the noun phrases drunken sailor and drunk sailor may serve as an example. It is sketched out in fig-

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Theoretical implications

ure 42. The figure concentrates on the excitatory connections, which typically hold between layers of the system. The inhibitory connections between nodes on the same layer have been omitted to simplify the picture. The figure also neglects the structural dimension of the part-whole relationships: of course, all the syllables also have links to the phonemes constituting them at the next lower layer, and to the words to which they combine at a higher layer. The focus of the present discussion is however on the rhythmic properties of the syllables in the third dimension of the network.

Figure 42. A partial network for the noun phrases drunken sailor and drunk sailor

In the first layer, each node represents a syllable of the words drunk, drunken and sailor, while the second layer contains no more than two nodes, one for the feature [stressed] and one for the feature [unstressed]. The three stressed syllables are linked to the former, and the two unstressed syllables to the latter. On this basis, the processes resulting from the production of the two noun phrases can now be considered in turn and compared. When the quadrisyllabic sequence drunken sailor is executed, the syllable .drAI). first activates the feature [stressed], then the syllable .k;}n. activates the feature [unstressed], then the syllable .sel. again activates the feature [stressed], and finally the syllable .l;}. re-activates the feature [unstressed]. The activation curves described by the node for stressed syllables and the node for unstressed syllables can be assumed to resemble the curves in figure 43. The two curves are superimposed on each other and aligned on the same time scale. They display an alternating activation of the [stressed] and [unstressed] features. This alternation is an ideal constellation in many respects: the refractory phase of a node is not violated since the complementary node steps into the breach, and the subsequent reactivation of the node falls in its rebound phase and is thereby facilitated.

Spreading activation models

.drAI).

.bn.

.sel.

275

.1;).

Figure 43. The activation curves of the feature nodes for [stressed] and [unstressed] syllables in the production of the noun phrase drunken sailor

Figure 43 can now be compared with figure 44, which delineates the activation curves of the same nodes when a speaker tries to execute the trisyllabic sequence drunk sailor. In this case, the first and second syllables are stressed and appeal to the same feature node.

.drAl)k.

.sel.

Figure 44. The activation curves of the feature nodes for [stressed] and [unstressed] syllables in the production of the noun phrase drunk sailor

As is immediately obvious, the latter constellation is much less ideal. Due to the prior occurrence of the stressed monosyllable drunk, the reactivation of the [stressed] feature for the first syllable of sailor falls in its refractory phase. The node is therefore hard to re-activate since not only its own threshold level, but also its self-inhibition impede a renewed activation. In figure 44, the incoming activation for the second syllable fails to cross the critical threshold and the realization of the sequence is prevented.

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Theoretical implications

It is of course not impossible to pronounce the sequence drunk sailor. A

speaker wishing to do this can either draw out the first syllable so as to give the relevant node sufficient time to recover, or expend a greater amount of articulatory effort sufficient to boost the pre-activation level of the second syllable beyond the threshold. This model has the potential to explain the preference for alternating stress patterns. On any layer of the network, the avoidance of sequences of identical elements makes a lot of sense within the model space (for parallel arguments referring to the segmental layer, see Frisch 2004: 353). With regard to rhythm, this avoidance turns out to be particularly critical since the rhythmic layer basically contains only two nodes: disregarding such effects as prosodic overshadowing for the sake of simplicity, syllables have to be either stressed or unstressed; they cannot by-pass this bottleneck. The interplay of these nodes leaves all strings of syllables that conform to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation unobstructed, but blocks or seriously hampers those involving a stress clash or lapse. l ? This account applies both to language production and to perception: in a bidirectional model in which both processes share the same pathways and nodes, it is evident that both have to pass by these two nodes and to conform to the requirement of rhythmic alternation. Even in the model of a network in which the rhythmic layers for production and perception are not shared, as long as there are no more than two nodes each for the production and for the perception of rhythm, the binary choice enforces an alternation. Thus, a stress clash will not only be hard to articulate, but also pose problems of perception. Being an ideal in its own right, the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables is imposed on sequences of words that do not fulfil this requirement from the outset. This is only possible provided that the words involved are not a priori confined to a predetermined stress pattern. One can assume, for instance, that the syllables of stress-shifting items like fifteen have no very strong links to either the [stressed] or [unstressed] feature, so that the rhythmic context can decide the choice in favour of initial or final stress in accordance with the alternating activation pattern of the [stressed] and [unstressed] nodes (cf. Ritt 2004: 264). Similarly, the context-dependent stress levels assumed by function words can be determined by the autonomous activation changes in these nodes. As our corpus linguistic evidence has shown, speakers or writers (though not hearers) have another possibility that is frequently resorted to in natural language: they may adapt their choice of grammatical means to the requirements of rhythm. So far, our model does not explain how a speaker or writer, given the choice of two participial variants like drunk and drunken or other kinds of grammatical variants, can arrive at a rhythmically motivated choice between these possibilities. To accommodate such findings, an interaction

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between rhythmic and grammatical preferences has to be assumed. Therefore, the following section will focus on the interactivity between levels in a spreading activation model. As the discussion proceeds, refractoriness will once more become an issue. In the present model, the refractory phase and the rebound undergone by nodes have already played a central role in connection with the universal preference for alternating structures. It has to be pointed out, however, that it cannot be concluded that refractoriness and rebound in actual neurons provide a valid functional motivation of the refractory phase in nodes. It can be shown that the temporary hyperpolarization of neurons and the self-inhibition of nodes as well as the hyperexcitability of neurons and the rebound of nodes can probably not be attributed to the same mechanisms. While changes in the membrane potential of neurons are due to molecular processes at the membrane, the behaviour of nodes has been alleged to be determined by interactions with special satellite neurons (cf. MacKay 1987: 145). Ultimately, without substantial further research into the neural processing of linguistically relevant information, it is impossible to determine whether refractoriness and rebound in functional aggregates of neurons can also provide a functional motivation for the prevalence of alternating patterns. To substantiate this hypothesis, more findings of the type described in the unpublished paper by Ohala and Hirano (1967) would be required. It is, however, evident that, unlike standard versions of OT and other formal linguistic theories, spreading activation models are open to functionally motivated constraints. What is more, since they were developed with a view to isomorphism with actual language processing, their mechanisms can hypothetically be reinterpreted as functional constraints, and these hypotheses are empirically testable.

6.3.4.

Interactivity between levels

Up to now, we have looked at language processing as if it was a simple, unidirectional matter, with production involving a top-down flow and perception involving a bottom-up flow of activation through the network. Among linguists working with spreading activation models, there is, however, some disagreement as to the temporal relationship between processes on different levels (cf. Berg 1988: 116; 1998: 121; Houghton and Hartley 1995; cf. also Pulvermtiller 2002: 11 0). Indeed, linking the hierarchical part-whole relationships of neural network models to the linear character of language in time is not an easy task (cf. Lamb 1999: 248; Pulvermtiller 2002: 147; ef. also Lenneberg 1967: 108).18 The minority (e.g. Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer 1999: 8) assume that processing proceeds serially,

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Theoretical implications

level by level. This means that processing at an anterior layer must be completed before processing on a posterior layer can start, and the posterior layer takes in the ready-made output of the anterior one. Among these serialist conceptions, there are versions doing without any temporal overlap between levels of processing, which means that a posterior layer takes in the completed output of an anterior layer, affording it a full lookahead. Other versions involve incremental processing, which means that processing at different levels runs in parallel on still-incomplete inputs and with only a limited amount of lookahead. In both versions, earlier levels of processing can influence later ones, but any interference of a posterior level with the processing on an anterior level is systematically excluded. This serialist type of spreading activation model however incurs massive counterevidence from findings like those presented in Chapters 4 and 5 (cf. also Berg 1988: 110-116; 1998: 300). The following discussion capitalizes on the fact that neural network models are bidirectional. This property has been alluded to in section 6.3.2 and is essential in models in which language production and perception share the same pathways. In addition, neuroanatomical evidence supports the view that most connections between neurons are reciprocal: at least in the forebrain, virtually all feedforward connections are coupled with corresponding feedback connections (cf. MUller 1996: 622; PulvermUller 2002: 110; cf. also Berg 1988: 207), which renders the hypothesis unlikely that language production should differ from other cognitive processes by being serial and unidirectional. Figure 45 shows a connection between neurons that are members of different layers in a neural network. In a language production task, where activation spreads top-down, the solid arrow represents the feedforward direction and the dashed arrow represents the feedback direction. In a perception task, where activation propagates bottomup, the connections function in the reverse direction.

production:

perception:

Figure 45. The bidirectional connection between nodes at different systemic layers in language production and perception

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In fact, the majority of linguists working in the framework of spreading activation networks hold that processing occurs in parallel on all systemic levels and that lower levels can exert an influence on higher ones. 19 If networks are used for both production and perception, bidirectional interconnections between levels are requisite anyway, and the mechanisms of processing (to be specified below) are inadequate for conceptions of serial, unidirectional processing without (an effect of) feedback. It will be argued that bidirectional interactivity between levels of processing is one of the most distinctive and attractive features of spreading activation models. Its great explanatory potential lies in the fact that information is processed in parallel at different layers of the network and decisions are not taken at anterior levels before the potential results of this decision at posterior levels have been taken into consideration. To allow the system to evaluate processes at anterior and posterior layers and to home in on its actual output, some planning or lookahead indeed seems necessary (cf. Levelt 1989: 24, 373-374). For instance, a speaker about to pronounce the noun phrase sixteen paintings minimally has to anticipate the second word and the width of the intervening juncture to produce the stress-shifted version of sixteen instead of the citation form. For more wide-ranging adjustments as in sixteen abstract paintings, a speaker needs a lookahead of two words and the intervening junctures, and so on. Stress Shift is arguably a relatively simple rule for which no more than a lookahead of a few syllables is necessary, and the required modification remains confined to the rhythmic layer: the nodes for stressed and unstressed syllables can settle the adjustment of metrical stress relations among themselves by playing their activation curves off against each other. For cases in which the preference for rhythmic alternation however exerts influences reaching up as far as the morphological and syntactic levels, a considerable amount of lookahead seems to be needed. Therefore, MacKay (1986: 175; 1987: 9) and Berg (1988: 194-195) opt for a two-stage model: at the planning stage, all elements making up a planned utterance as well as their potential competitors receive priming, or pre-activation simultaneously, and during this phase, the nodes can take in the feedforward and feedback information and perform a summation. At the execution stage, the primed elements get fully activated, one after another, and all nodes that eventually become realized inhibit their competitors according to the "most-primed-wins principle" (cf. MacKay 1986: 175; 1987: 19-20; cf. also McClelland and Rumelhart 1981: 378; Menn and MacWhinney 1984: 532; Berg and Schade 1992: 422-423).20 In this way, higher-level nodes are kept active simultaneously with lower-level nodes. This pre-activation of all the elements in an utterance that is only in preparation is possible because all the information necessary for the processing of language is

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embodied in the structure of the network itself and only needs to be appealed to (cf. Lamb 1999: 376-377). The decisive question that needs to be answered is how the network can revise a choice made at a higher (grammatical) layer on account of a rhythmic problem ensuing on a lower layer. The answer that we will propose resides in the interplay of the activation curves of the nodes and the feedforward and feedback flow of activation. In more concrete terms, a bidirectional network model posits that the level of pre-activation or priming attained by a candidate node is a function of (at least) four different influencing factors (cf. McClelland and Rumelhart 1981: 379-380; McClelland 1987: 8; cf. furthermore Pulvermliller 2002: 201). Each node in the network performs a summation of the following factors: excitatory signals from nodes on the anterior layer (feedforward), excitatory signals from nodes on the posterior layer (feedback), inhibitory signals from nodes on the same layer, and - the present activation state of the node itself (resting state, selfinhibition or priming). Moreover, due to the threshold function of the node, the resultant activation of a node stands in a nonlinear relation to the net result: sometimes, an input can be a crucial determinant of the outcome and at other times have no effect at all (cf. McClelland 1987: 8). Now, a node on an anterior layer usually pre-activates more than one node on a posterior layer (feedforward). The nodes on the posterior layer will usually return the preactivation by their feedback connections to the anterior one (cf. figure 46).

Figure 46. The summation of feedback from a posterior layer in an anterior node

If posterior layers pose no problems, they contribute to the activation of the anterior ones by means of feedback, and the activation of the whole system quickly converges on the appropriate analysis. If posterior layers

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however do present a problem, then strong competition between candidate analyses at the anterior level arises (cf. McClelland and Rumelhart 1981: 382). A possible problem may be one of timing: it may be the case that a certain anterior node sends activation to a set of posterior nodes, one of which has been active beforehand and is still in its self-inhibition phase and therefore hard to boost above its threshold level. This node will not answer to the incoming pre-activation from the anterior node and thereby not contribute to the further activation of the latter. It may also be the case that another anterior node sends activation to another set of posterior nodes, one of which has been active a little longer ago and now is in its rebound phase. Thus, its threshold will be easily crossed and it will return more activation to the anterior node. Suppose, moreover, that these two anterior nodes are in competition with each other. In this case, the latter will have an advantage over the former and it will be more likely to become realized, even though the processing problem is located only on a posterior layer (cf. Berg 1998: 230). It may also be the case that no ideal solution is available. The system will then home in on a 'best match' candidate, which may only be a probabilistic solution that can be deviated from under slightly different conditions or randomly (cf. McClelland 1987: 8). The summation of feedback thus explains direct interactions between adjacent systemic layers, but since feedback also propagates from node to node across several layers, indirect interactions between non-adjacent layers are rendered possible (cf. McClelland 1987: 6). Let us come back to the example from the preceding section. In what follows, the focus will primarily be on language production, because a speaker or writer has the possibility of making grammatical choices while a hearer or reader has to cope with the linguistic input he or she is confronted with, whether rhythmic or unrhythmic. Assume that a speaker or writer intends to produce an attributive past participle of the verb drink, followed by an initially stressed noun, e.g. sailor. As is often the case, due to the indeterminacy of grammar, two competing candidate forms are at hand for the participle: drunk and drunken. The first variant contains a single syllable and the second variant possesses an additional syllabic suffix. The rhythmic properties of these two variants in combination with sailor have already been established in section 6.3.3 (cf. figures 43 and 44). The production of drunk sailor involves the twofold activation of the node responsible for [stressed] syllables in immediate succession, while the production of drunken sailor conforms with the preferred alternation of activation, inhibition and rebound of the nodes responsible for [stressed] and [unstressed] syllables. Consider the subnetwork for the situation under discussion modelled in figure 47.

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Theoretical implications

Figure 47. The subnetwork for the competing structures drunk sailor and drunken sailor

The summation of pre-activation in the nodes for drunk and drunken can now be compared. Both receive feedforward from the anterior nodes for the verb lemma and for the grammatical category of [past participle]. Both furthermore send pre-activation to the subordinate syllable nodes, while at about the same time or a little later, the noun sailor equally preactivates its component syllables. All five syllables that are under simultaneous consideration now pre-activate the nodes corresponding to their respective specifications as [stressed] or [unstressed]. At this point, the problem incurred by the sequence drunk sailor becomes apparent: the node for [stressed] syllables is called upon twice without an appropriate intervening pause. This is hampered by its activation cycle, due to the self-inhibition phase sapping some of the incoming pre-activation. As a result, the [stressed] node sends a reduced feedback activation to the syllable node .drAI]k. responsible for this problem. As a further result, this syllable returns less feedback activation to the participial form drunk. In contrast, none of the syllables of drunken incurs such a problem; on the contrary, the feedback they receive is enhanced by the fact that the pre-activation of the

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[stressed] and [unstressed] nodes falls in their rebound phases and is thus reinforced. In the event, the participial variant drunken accumulates more pre-activation than its competitor drunk. When the planning stage thus gives way to the execution stage, drunken is more likely to be activated and to become realized. At the same time, it inhibits its direct competitor drunk?l As a consequence of the comparison between drunk and drunken, the disyllabic form emerges as the winner almost every time that a stressed syllable follows (cf. the data in section 4.4.1). At other times, the monosyllabic form prevails, which suggests that the lemma DRINK and the grammatical category [past participle] has stronger connections to the variant drunk than to the variant drunken. Nevertheless, the variant favoured under normal circumstances is disfavoured under rhythmically critical conditions. In this way, a processing problem occurring at a lower (phonological) level can influence a higher (grammatical) level by making its difficulties known at the higher level and causing it to re-compute its output (cf. Berg 1998: 231; cf. also Jackendoff 1997: 106). In a similar way, all the other grammatical choices that have been motivated by the preference for rhythmic alternation in Chapters 4 and 5 can be explained with reference to the two nodes for stressed and unstressed syllables and their feedback to higher levels of the system. Thanks to the interconnectivity of the system, there are always a number of alternative solutions available which automatically receive simultaneous pre-activation. If a candidate node incurs a processing problem (e.g. if it implies a violation of the refractory phase of a rhythmic node), this problem propagates back in the form of reduced feedback, and the nearest possible competitor gets a chance to become realized instead. If, in turn, one or more of the candidate nodes are particularly advantageous in terms of rhythm in that they activate the rhythmic nodes during their rebound phases, these nodes receive a reinforced feedback and their chances of becoming realized are enhanced accordingly. Once again, the hypothesized mechanism for filtering out the optimal candidate during the planning stage makes it clear that no entirely satisfactory solution has as yet been found to the problem of sequence management in the framework of spreading activation models (cf. Houghton and Hartley 1995: passim; Lamb 1999: 248; Pulvermiiller 2002: 147; cf. also Lenneberg 1967: 108). To generate noun phrases like drunken sailor, not only a lookahead of at least one word is required, but also a very precise control of the timing of the succession of syllables. It is not enough to preactivate all structural parts of the noun phrase simultaneously in an indistinct order, but the system has to 'know' in some way that in the noun phrase drunk sailor two stressed syllables will be adjacent in time, and draw its consequences. The conception of the planning phase proposed by

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MacKay (1986: 175; 1987: 9) and Berg (1988: 194-195) does not answer this requirement. However, timing control is necessary for many other linguistic processes besides the manipulation of rhythm. Linguists working in the framework of spreading activation models will independently have to find a solution to the problem of sequence management, which they might want to seek in the neurophysiological reality. In this context, the inhibition phase that follows the activation of a node merits some further comment. As we have seen (section 6.3.3), the cause of its existence remains obscure, and one was left to wonder why the nodes seem to possess special components to induce a phase of self-inhibition consequent on an activation. The teleology of this mechanism is, however, evident: an interactive activation network in which activation can travel in both directions needs a means of putting a halt to the threatening escalation of its excitation. If all nodes react to incoming activation by becoming activated themselves and in turn activate all other nodes to which they are linked, a system without appropriate inhibitory mechanisms would risk working itself up into a heat death. Thanks to the post-excitatory selfinhibition of the nodes, however, activation decays after outputting an element since the responsible nodes are relatively hard to re-activate (cf. MacKay 1986: 176; 1987: 143-144; Houghton and Hartley 1995; Berg 2004: 1089; cf. also Levelt 1989: 354). Thus, self-inhibition in nodes has the effect of avoiding an unintended reverberatory re-activation of units that have already been realized. While being indispensable for the workability of the entire system (cf. also endnote 6), it is also at the bottom of the preference, observable in many domains of language (and other domains of behaviour), for alternating patterns, for instance the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. It has been hypothesized that a breakdown of the selfinhibitory mechanism in the language system might account for word repetition errors in aphasics (cf. Berg and Schade 1992: 416) and phoneme repetition in stutterers (cf. MacKay 1987: 143).22 It remains to be seen whether self-inhibition can also contribute an avenue to the problem of sequence management in a neural network model. Language production has to generate outputs that satisfy many constraints, among them the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. The complex interactions necessary for the system to accomplish this have been discussed. Spreading activation models assume that language perception largely shares the pathways of production or is at least based on the same mechanisms. Therefore, the perception of rhythm likewise has to rely on the binary distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables and to use two corresponding nodes in order to recognize the stress pattern of a perceived utterance. By hypothesis, an utterance containing stress clashes or lapses would thus pose serious perceptual problems. However, in natural

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language, the speaker usually takes over the task of implementing an acceptable rhythm (except possibly in the case of a language impairment), so that the hearer merely needs to take in a pre-arranged and rhythmically optimized sequence of syllables. It can be predicted that a hearer exposed to an artificially synthesized string of syllables in which no stress alternation is discernible will experience noticeable processing problems, which may be due to the violation of the activation cycles of the nodes responsible for rhythmic structure. Since the present discussion deals with natural rather than synthesized language, the focus will, however, remain on the production side of language.

6.3.5.

Limits to interactivity

In the preceding section, a bidirectional spreading activation model has been developed which allows both feedforward and feedback activation to travel from one systemic layer to another. In language production, the impulse comes from the top layer, containing semantic ideas and concepts, and propagates downwards to the bottom layer, containing phonetic features. As the activation flows downwards, each layer sends a feedback reaction up to the higher layer, which considers it in the summation it performs and may send it even further up to the next higher layer. In principle, there is no limit to the number of layers that feedback activation may cross. By extension, this model predicts wide-ranging interactions between all kinds of information encoded in it as well as between all kinds of constraints founded on the processing routines of the network. The influence of rhythmic preferences on the selection of grammatical variants such as those amply described in Chapters 4 and 5 represents only one of a range of phenomena that testify to the interactivity of the language production system. In contrast to the modular conceptions prevailing in many formal and psycholinguistic theories of grammar, the model thus has a greater descriptive adequacy. So far, it is comparable to OT, which equally allows for interactions between requirements of all kinds. Notice that in OT, there is no limit to the degree to which semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonological constraints can be intertwined in the same hierarchy. As we will see, spreading activation models are more restrictive in this respect. A noteworthy contribution in this respect is provided by the experimental studies by Levelt and Maassen (1981: 250) and Bock (1987), which demonstrate influences of phonological encoding problems on syntactic encoding at the sentence level: due to the temporarily reduced accessibility of a phonological word form, the word order in the target sentence was changed so as to place the inhibited word late in the sentence. This refor-

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mulation gives rise to dysfluencies and longer reaction times. On the basis of these findings, Levelt (1989: 281) draws the conclusion that phonological problems can impinge on syntactic planning by means of feedback, but he denies the possibility that phonological feedback can also exert an influence on the semantic planning of an utterance (cf. Levelt 1989: 282283). Although the latter restriction will have to be revised to a minor degree, these experimental results imply two kinds of predictions which, as will be shown, are presumably interrelated: first, the effect of the feedback that phonology can send to upward layers is limited to the grammatical domain, and second, the manipulation of the grammatical form of an utterance in favour of a better phonological realization takes up additional processing time. The empirical results obtained in Chapters 4 and 5 can be used to shed some further light on these interesting predictions. Beginning with the first hypothesis, we can study the extent of the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation by categorizing the variation phenomena analyzed. These include numerous cases in which the application of the Stress Shift Rule or of Beat Deletion suffices to render the construction acceptable. Thus, the presence of premodifying material receiving the stress from monosyllabic participles like knit and lit or from end-stressed a-adjectives like ashamed and aware, or the presence of a stress-attracting following syllable after monosyllabic verbs is enough to make any additional buffer syllables superfluous. In many cases, however, the presence or absence of a grammatical morpheme is determined by the need for a buffer syllable. Instances include the comparatives worse/worser, all the participles with optional syllabic suffixes (drunk/drunken, broke/broken, struck/stricken, knit/knitted, lit/lighted) and suffixed and suffixless adverbs (quick/quickly, slow/slowly, scarce/scarcely). The number of examples of past participles and adverbs with optional suffixes could be multiplied and their analyses would predictably lead to similar results to those of the representative examples selected in the present work. There are some variation phenomena concerning optional morphemes that still are or used to be free syntactic forms, for instance the infinitive marker following the superordinate verbs make, bid and dare and the a-prefix preceding -ing-forms dependent on set and go. These occupy the borderline between morphology and syntax. Some other phenomena clearly belong to the domain of syntax, for instance the attributive placement of a-adjectives, the order of the indefinite article and the degree modifier quite, the sequencing of attributive colour adjectives and the negation of attributive adjectives and sentence adverbs. The evidence collected for rhythmic influences on morphology and syntax is thus ample.

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Some repercussions of the preference for rhythmic alternation have been made out even on the level of lexical choices. In the context of the loss of a-prefixation in -ing-forms, it has been argued that several prepositions and particles could take the place of the obsolescent prefix. In particular in the case of out in the construction go out Ving, the putative buffer element does not seem to be completely void of semantic content, though compatible with the meaning of the construction. Similarly, negated initially stressed attributive adjectives and sentence adverbs almost regularly take an intervening adverb apparently for the sole purpose of avoiding a threatening stress clash. The semantic contribution of these adverbs is certainly not overly strong, but a comparison with noninitially stressed adjectives and adverbs shows that they are significantly overrepresented in rhythmically critical contexts. These findings indicate that Levelt's (1989: 281) hypothesis does not go far enough: even the semantic contents of an utterance seems to be susceptible to the requirement for an alternating rhythm, though only to a limited extent. In addition to the qualitative statement that rhythm manifests its effects in morphology and syntax as well as in semantics, the quantitative studies in Chapters 4 and 5 allow us to assess the relative strengths of these effects. In morphology, we find some extremely robust rhythmically motivated distributions, of which a few have at least temporarily become quasiobligatory (e.g. drunk/drunken, lit/lighted). However, the rhythmically motivated adaptation concerns only the presence of an optional grammatical morpheme. Among the phenomena occupying the borderline between morphology and syntax, a moderate correlation with rhythmic preferences manifests itself: the complete split between active and passive uses of make with regard to the marking of infinitives is at least in part motivated by stress clash avoidance, but is also a result of grammatical complexity. The analyses of the a-prefix yielded a narrow margin between rhythmically critical and uncritical contexts. The same applies to the syntactic variation phenomena, most of which were primarily determined by semantic factors, leaving only little scope for rhythm. If syntactic adaptations occur, however, they are rather substantial: the sequencing of quite relative to the indefinite article and the order of two colour adjectives relative to each other entail a considerable modification of the word order, and the licensing of a-adjectives in prenominal position and of attributive adjectives and sentence adverbs in connection with the negator not can trigger the insertion of an additional buffer adverb. The modification of the semantics of a sentence on account of rhythmic problems is arguably only minimal. While the insertion of more or less dummy material is tolerated, we have so far found no reason to assume that the meaning of a planned utterance is revised in any substantial way. It has to be pointed out, however, that rhyth-

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mic influences on semantics have not been at the centre of the present work. Those that have cropped up in the course of the discussion are merely by-products of the study of grammatical variation phenomena. Presupposing that the selection of the grammatical variation phenomena investigated in Chapters 4 and 5 is more or less representative, it can be concluded that the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation diminishes with the increasing height of a layer in the neural network model. The qualitative and quantitative gradation of rhythmic influences on morphology, syntax and semantics can incidentally be taken to justify the layered structure of a neural network. In this network, the layers (corresponding to the modules in traditional grammatical theory) interpenetrate each other, but only to a limited extent. Morphological choices are very strongly determined by the resultant rhythmic constellations, syntax is much less under the sway of rhythm, and semantics tolerates at most minimal adjustments in favour of a better rhythm. This finding may be accounted for in a spreading activation model in two ways, which are mutually compatible. On the one hand, the nature of the feedback mechanism is such that it seeks out the closest possible stress clash avoidance strategy. In case a problem arises on the rhythmic level, if possible, it is merely the stress pattern that is modified directly through the interaction of the two nodes for stressed and unstressed syllables and their alternating activation cycles. If this is impossible, the problem is relegated in the form of a reduced feedback to the next higher layer, where potential solutions are considered. If an alternative offers itself on this layer, the greatest amount of activation will travel down this alternative line and become reinforced by the corresponding feedback. If there is no alternative available, due to the lack of this reinforcement, a reduced feedback reaches the corresponding node on the next higher layer and a solution is sought there. The mechanism at the basis of these phenomena is always the same: a stress clash or lapse saps a good amount of the activation on the rhythmic level and sends a diminished feedback up the same connections. This lack of feedback can have repercussions across several layers up to the candidate node responsible for it. The latter thus incurs a disadvantage in the competition between different candidate nodes, which results in its rejection in favour of one of its competitors. Thus, the system seeks to circumvent a problem on the rhythmic level by means of minimal modifications as close as possible to the place where the problem arises. For this reason, most rhythmic problems are solved on the rhythmic level itself, many are solved on a morphological level, some on a syntactic level and only a few on a semantic level. Furthermore, along with McClelland (1987: 8), Levelt (1989: 355) and Berg and Schade (1992: 409), it may be assumed that the strength of the feedback decays as a function of the distance it covers in the processing net-

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work. At the same time, it tends to get obliterated due to the overwhelming number of conflicting signals that run together on higher systemic layers. Thus, the distance factor represents one possible account for the gradual diminution of rhythmic effects on higher systemic layers. As a second account, the role played by the time factor can be brought to bear on the re-computation of outputs. In a neural network model that proposes to be isomorphic with actual language processing, it is obvious that the propagation of feedforward and feedback activation requires a certain amount of time. However, the time that a language user can dispose of is limited. Thus, the requirement for a certain amount of lookahead (equivalent to the so-called planning stage) on one side and the necessity of incremental processing on the other side hold a considerable potential for conflict. Along with Berg (1998: 122-123), it is to be expected that in realtime processing, decisions at higher layers cannot be held in unlimited suspense since a language user does not normally have an infinite amount of time at his or her disposal. As we have seen in the experiments by Levelt and Maassen (1981: 250) and Bock (1987), the adjustment of syntactic plans conditioned by phonological problems takes an appreciable amount of time. An interesting question is when the point occurs at which no further re-computation is feasible and what factors may influence the occurrence of this point. A likely hypothesis would be that the minimal time required for the realization of an output is equal to the time needed for topdown information to spread from the top layer to the bottom layer and to activate the relevant articulatory mechanisms. Beyond this baseline delay, all bottom-up feedback that is taken into account, all alternatives that are considered and all efforts that are made to calculate the best possible output cost extra time. It can be assumed that the amount of extra time available depends on the characteristics of the language production task (cf. also Levelt 1989: 384-384). In slow speech styles (e.g. formal speech), the 100kahead is relatively large. As a consequence, many hierarchical layers and many linearly ordered elements can be kept active at the same time and many rhythmically motivated adjustments can be performed, if necessary reaching up to the highest layers of the system. In this way, the system has the chance to home in on the optimal output, including a maximally rhythmic metrical structure. In contrast, fast speech does not afford enough time to perform many revisions of the output that offers itself as the first solution. The necessity to output an utterance (the execution stage) arises soon after the first pre-activation, whether any re-computations are completed or not. In other words, the higher the speed required by circumstances of the communicative process, the less optimal the solution selected by the processor. Two extreme cases on the rapidity scale are writing and reading tasks. In ordinary, premeditated writing, a language user disposes of a

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comparatively large amount of time that he or she can use to plan the arrangement of words and morphemes so as to achieve a maximal conformity to constraints like the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. In reading out a ready-made text, these decisions have been taken in advance by the writer, and all that is left to the reader are such minimal adjustments as stress shifts and the deletion and addition of beats. This reasoning can explain roughly why writing takes so much longer than speaking, which in turn takes much longer than reading. The central argument of this section combines the insight that the strength of rhythmic influences diminishes with an increasing distance of the systemic layer concerned from the rhythmic layer and the hypothesis that the evaluation of feedback takes up a measurable amount of time. By hypothesis, processing time is a limiting factor in the scope of rhythmically motivated adjustments of the grammar of an utterance. Minor adjustments that remain confined to the rhythmic level can be executed online without recourse to any higher level. The addition or omission of morphemes however happens on the morphemic level, which takes into account any rhythmic effects causing the relative activation strengths of two morphological variants to become inverted on account of feedback. Since such morphemic changes involve the interaction of systemic layers with a short distance between them, they are more time-consuming and presuppose a longer latency between the initial activation and the realization of the utterance during which these adjustments can be performed. The manipulation of syntactic word order or the blocking of certain syntactic structures are induced by feedback from the rhythmic layer travelling as far up as the syntactic layers and under certain circumstances even causing the introduction of an additional word, which has repercussions on the semantics of the utterance. The maximal degree of rhythmicity is defined by the scope of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation itself, which is limited in its application to syntactically and prosodically closely bound constituents (cf. section 5.6). If all constituents of a sentence conform to the rhythmic ideal, no further changes are required for the sake of rhythm. It can be assumed that such a far-reaching coordination of relatively distant levels of information, leading to a complex summation of feedforward and feedback activation, takes a substantial amount of time. This delay corresponds with the noticeable dysfluencies recorded by Levelt and Maassen (1981: 250) and Bock (1987). Since the circumstances under which natural language is produced do often not leave the speaker the time required for re-computations of this extent, syntactic and semantic adjustments fail to be realized in all but the most elaborate speech styles. In sum, we predict that the feasibility of rhythmic adjustments depends on an interaction between the systemic dis-

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tance between the rhythmic level and the level that needs to be modified, and on the time available for the re-computation of the output. This hypothesis can be brought in connection with the above reflections on the phonology of written language and with the corpus-linguistic evidence in favour of rhythmic effects in written texts. The fact that ample manifestations of rhythmic preferences have been found in written texts buttresses the hypothesis, set up in section 3.2, according to which speaking and writing are necessarily intimately related since the articulatory and graphic representations of linguistic units are closely linked in the processing system. Since writing relies on the same 'hard-wiring' as speaking, basic principles such as the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables naturally underlie both types of production. The only direct comparison between spoken and written language that has been performed in the present book shows a wider rhythmically explained discrepancy between selections of a quite and quite a in written than in spoken language (cf. section 4.5). This fosters the hypothesis that writers tend to devote more time to the optimization of their output than speakers. Thus, it may by hypothesized that spoken language in general and fast speech in particular will exhibit a diminished adaptation to rhythmic alternation. This prediction is empirically testable in large corpora of spoken language or in appropriate experimental setups, but it has not been studied in any greater detail here due to the lack of adequate data. It is not astonishing to find a graded influence of rhythm, which belongs to the low-level aspects of linguistic description, decreasing with the height of the level of description concerned (cf. Berg 1998: 26). The neural network model thus accommodates interactions between rhythm and other domains of the grammar. In this respect it is superior to traditional modular conceptions of grammar. On the other hand, it does not predict an unlimited interpenetration of the domains, which is confirmed by qualitative as well as quantitative measures applied to the empirical data. In this respect it has a greater explanatory potential than OT, in which any constraint can in principle dominate any other. Moreover, OT incurs numerous problems related to the integration of grammatical variation and change and the synergetic or subtractive influences of different constraints. The following section addresses the question of how spreading activation models fare with regard to these issues.

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6.3.6.

Theoretical implications

Language variation and change in a neuro- and psycholinguistic perspective

Like aT, spreading activation models are based on the hypothesis that the output of language processing is the winner in a competition between numerous candidates that are evaluated against a set of criteria. In aT, the candidates are generated in a special component of the grammar; in spreading activation models, they are permanently available and encoded in the structure of the network. Due to the connectivity of the system and the parallel flow of activation, many more nodes are active than will ultimately be needed, and they are the more active the more similar they are to the winning candidate (cf. Berg 1998: 284). By hypothesis, the distinctive properties of the candidates constitute different degrees of compliance with preferences such as the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. In aT, the effects of these preferences translate into hierarchical ranks of different degrees of precedence. In spreading activation models, compliance with such preferences results in an increased activation of the candidate, while noncompliance has an inhibitory effect (cf. Boersma 1998: 299, 331). And finally, like aT, spreading activation models integrate a large number and variety of universal constraints. This is as far as the parallels between aT and spreading activation models go. In contrast to aT, where constraints are standardly assumed to be innate parts of Universal Grammar, spreading activation models consider constraints to be functionally grounded in the processing of language. Furthermore, in spreading activation models, there is no equivalent to the strict dominance hierarchy of aT. The models are thus able to integrate the synchronic and diachronic variability characteristic of natural language in an intuitively plausible manner. The present section widens the perspective adopted on spreading activation models to include a large number of constraints that have played a role in the empirical studies and their interactions in language variation and change. For the case of the preference for rhythmic alternation, the mechanisms that might be responsible for the strengthening or weakening of particular candidates have been amply illustrated. This has been relatively simple since all that is required is a binary distinction encoded by two nodes which are moreover located on a low level in the network where it is comparatively obvious what should count as a unit. Most of the other functional tendencies that have figured in the analyses of relevant phenomena are also amenable to a modelling in a neural network. Without entering into much detail, some suggestions will be made as to the neural mechanisms underlying factors like syllable structure constraints, horror cequi, frequency effects, regularization tendencies, the 'one meaning - one form'

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principle, the Complexity Principle, the Law of the Increasing Constituents, iconicity and parallelism. The preference for alternations on different levels of the language system can be accommodated in the network in a similar way to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. The studies of the a-prefix in -ing-forms have, for instance, testified to the tendency to avoid hiatuses and consonant clusters. By hypothesis, the network model would capture the shared properties that make up the category of vowels (e.g. high sonority; a relatively wide opening of the vocal tract; the use of particular groups of muscles) as connections to a (set of) category recognizer node(s) for vowels, and those that make up the category of consonants (e.g. low sonority; a constriction of the vocal tract, the use of a different group of muscles) as connections to a (set of) category recognizer node(s) for consonants (cf. Lamb 1999: 271; see furthermore Fowler 1977: 105, 149-150). For these two opposite (sets of) category recognizer nodes, the same mechanism applies as for the binary distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables. On account of their activation cycles, including the same refractory and rebound phases, alternations of vowels and consonants are favoured, while sequences of vowels or consonants are disfavoured since they present a processing obstacle. As a consequence, if violations of this preference are avoidable, as in the case of the variable a-prefix, the network selects a complying candidate. A similar preference for alternation may be at the bottom of the avoidance tendency referred to as the Horror .iEqui Principle. It has been shown that the adjacency of two a-prefixes with different functions seems to be avoided. By hypothesis, this avoidance could be due to the refractory phase of the node or nodes responsible for the realization of the form. Following MacKay (1986: 184; 1987: 144-145) and Berg (2004: 1092), the duration of the recovery cycle of a node correlates with its height in the hierarchical network. This seems plausible considering the teleological motivation of the refractory phase, which has been argued to be the prevention of a reverberatory re-activation of the node due to incoming feedback. Accordingly, the node responsible for the prefix a- seems to be in its refractory phase when it is called upon again. Thanks to the lookahead required for language production, this violation of the refractory phase can then result in the anticipatory omission of an optional a-prefix where another one follows. It would be worthwhile to test the prediction that due to a diminished lookahead, regressive horror cequi effects (i.e. the prophylactic avoidance of an optional element due to a following identical element) are reduced in high-speed language production, while progressive horror cequi effects (i.e. the avoidance of an optional element due to a preceding identical element) remain intact. Notice that this account does not prejudge the question as to

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whether it is the identity of two elements on a grammatical or phonological level that is responsible for the horror cequi effect. Furthermore, the frequency of each candidate output can conveniently be interpreted as the strength of the connections running to and from it. As we have seen, the conduction qualities of actual neural fibres (axons) improve every time that these pathways are activated, which in turn leads to an increased probability of use for that particular connection. In the model, processing likewise tends to concentrate on certain fixed and frequently used pathways (cf. MacKay 1987: 12-13; Lamb 1999: 206; cf. also McClelland 1987: 8). This concentration facilitates and accelerates processing and thereby makes it more effective in terms of the required expense of activation, computation and time. Note that if language production and perception make use of the same network, or at least of interconnected networks, the frequency with which a candidate is perceived can also serve to enhance the probability with which it is produced. In other words, the frequency with which a particular structure echoes through a language community helps it to survive (cf. Lamb 1999: 246). For instance, a speaker not conversant with cricket terminology might hesitate to pronounce an attributive structure like a not-out player (mentioned in section 4.7) on account of the objectionable stress clash between not and out. He or she would take some time to find a way around the rhythmic obstacle and possibly come up with a predicative structure. In contrast, someone who has frequently heard or read the structure might also pronounce it more readily. In the same way, the drop in frequency of the construction go (a-)Ving, observed in the eighteenth century, may be due to the unavailability of the obsolescent a-prefix that served as a buffer, and the tolerance of the resultant stress clash in later centuries may have been a by-product of the enormous increase in the frequency ofthe structure. This explains why it has often been found that items characterized by a high incidence in usage are little subject to change and why they often preserve archaic and/or exceptional features (cf. Haspelmath 1999a: 191; Bybee and Scheibman 1999: 583; Bybee 2002: 271-272): the connections are utilized so often that they are extremely strong and easy to activate (cf. Berg 1998: 285; Lamb 1999: 246). We may assume that verbal past participles preserving the old ending -en (e.g. drunken, broken and stricken) would have died out long ago (like other participles of less frequent strong verbs) if they had not remained well entrenched in attributive uses. However, drunken and stricken are clearly in the minority as compared to their monosyllabic competitors. This fact leads to a conflict with the preference for alternating stresses. In the model depicted in figure 47, the higher frequency of drunk as the past participle of drink would translate into a greater connection strength, resulting in a higher initial pre-activation of

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drunk as opposed to drunken. Crucially, the processing problem that drunk incurs on the rhythmic level however saps so much of this pre-activation that the less problematic candidate drunken is selected despite its initial handicap. In sum, the integration of frequency in the form of connection strengths in the neural network gives rise to an interesting number of supplementary hypotheses with a considerable explanatory potential. The corpus analyses in Chapters 4 and 5 have also provided evidence for a tendency to establish or maintain regular and exceptionless morphological patterns. This accounts, for instance, for the rise of the regularized comparative worser. In a neural network model, the emergence of a regularized form besides an irregular one is easily accommodated: in the given example, each time the nodes for bad and for the feature [comparative] become active, they jointly activate the irregular form worse, which has strong links to the node for bad. At the same time, the feature [comparative] of course activates the regular comparative suffix -er, with which it is strongly associated and which represents the highly entrenched majority pattern. In connection with the node for worse, this gives rise to the redundantly marked candidate output worser, and in connection with the node for the positive bad, to the additional candidate badder (equally attested in nonstandard usage).23 Though worse may initially be the strongest of all candidates, in case a stressed syllable follows, the system may eventually home in on the regularized variant worser, which is rhythmically superior to the former and receives a reinforcing feedback from the rhythmic level. The advantage of regularized forms like worser (and badder) lies in the fact that they render the storage of exceptions in the network superfluous and that language processing can constantly employ the regular pathways. Moreover, patterned material is easier to learn and to remember since all members of a regular class reinforce each other (cf. Lamb 1999: 246). Thus, morphological regularity in principle speeds up production and saves computational effort. Problems arise, however, where the regular form is not at the same time the most frequent one. In the case of worse/worser, worser remained in the minority for system-external reasons, so that in standard PDE, frequency and standardization tendencies have obviously won out over regularity and rhythmic adaptability. Pairs like worse/worser and drunk/drunken thus bear witness to another conflict in the neural network: on the one hand, the presence of rhythmically different variants is an advantage in terms of the preference for an alternating rhythm, but on the other, the permanent competition between alternative outputs and the re-computations that this renders necessary lead to a costly processing effort. A situation in which there is only one viable option incurs no such competition, but leads to rhythmic obstacles, which in turn require a greater articulatory effort to surmount the activation

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threshold of a node during its refractory phase. This shows that a spreading activation model can integrate a range of tendencies that are well motivated by the functions of the model itself, but that are nevertheless not mutually consistent. It is therefore not astonishing to find that language use is probabilistic and variable. At different points in time, different solutions can be adopted, depending on a variety of other factors and, possibly, random variation. The corpus analyses have furthermore testified to various tendencies serving to avoid non-uniform mappings between semantic and formal levels of representation or to circumvent difficulties of syntactic processing. Instances of the general preference for a one-to-one mapping between the intended meaning and the output of processing are the functionalization of free grammatical variation for the coding of semantic nuances, the iconicity of form and meaning, and the 'one meaning - one form' principle, referring mainly to the elimination of semantically unmotivated morphological variation. Instances of the striving to avoid syntactic obstacles are the use of explicit structural signals in the case of complex processing tasks (the Complexity Principle), the tendency to place bulky constituents at the ends of sentences (the Law of the Increasing Constituents), and the attempt to encode parallel meanings in parallel forms. While it is impossible to treat every determinant in detail here, it appears that all of these tendencies in one way or another promote the economy and efficiency of processing. In terms of a neural network model, the avoidance of semantic ambiguity culminates in a direct mapping from one conceptual node to one word node by a unique, extremely strong connection. This can be interpreted as a form of "object constancy" (cf. Mayerthaler 1987: 49), which is a fundamental principle of human information processing, facilitating the identification of objects in general (and of morphemes in particular). Ideally, no serious competitors should come into play and no re-computation of the output should take place, since these processes use up time and activation. The same maxim of economy and efficiency of processing applies to syntactic encoding. In an ideal state of affairs, the processor should never be obstructed by the lack of sufficiently explicit information. It should also not be forced to hold in unnecessary suspense an incomplete syntactic construction, because a high memory load implies the maintenance of simultaneous activation in an extensive subsection of the network. Finally, semantically parallel structures share a number of features, and these shared properties should be expressed in the re-activation of the same grammatical nodes resulting in a parallel output. Given an appropriate time lapse between two parallel structures, this re-activation may even be supported by a rebound phase which, like the refractory phase, can be assumed to take longer with the increasing height of the nodes in the hierarchy. This may

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account for the observable preference for sequences of comparatives that are both suffixed in -er (favouring the use ofworser instead of worse) or of adverbs that are both either suffixed in -Iy or suffixless. 24 It is not astonishing that language processing thus seems to give priority to processes that economize on the resources of the underlying neural network. First, it tends to implicate only a minimal number of nodes and connections; second, it prefers to use constant and strong routes through the network and to reinforce them by frequent use; and third, it avoids effortful re-computation that on the one hand saps activation and on the other necessitates a surplus of processing time. Some of the corpus analyses have provided evidence for rhythmic effects on grammatical variants, which however have different baseline frequencies in regional varieties, in written or spoken usage and in different types of written texts. Such differences have been found for British and American English usage, which has been shown to differ in the respective frequencies of lit/lighted, knit/knitted and a quite/quite a (cf. for more details Schliiter, to appear). Furthermore, written (non-dramatic) and writtento-be-spoken (dramatic) prose have been shown to differ with regard to the selection of the variants worse/worser, broke/broken, struck/stricken, a quite/quite a, active make with or without to and the a-prefix before -ingforms. For the pair a quite/quite a, spoken language moreover differs from fictional prose, which in turn differs from newspaper language. This kind of variation between subsystems of the same language has turned out to be incompatible with such deterministic grammars as those proposed by OT, which would have to postulate different grammars for each case. Spreading activation models can, in contrast, accommodate variations of the same system: speakers of different varieties of English may have acquired slightly different connection strengths, which account for grammars differing only gradually from each other, while all other relationships between variants remain the same. Speakers of American English may, for instance, merely have internalized a somewhat stronger connection between the lemma of the verb light and the past participle form lighted, a weaker connection between the lemma knit and the past participle form knitted, and a stronger link between the the degree modifier quite and the pre-determiner position than speakers of British English. However, the rest of the grammar remains untouched by these divergences. Similarly, depending on the extra-linguistic context, language users can employ different registers which they have permanently at their disposal. These registers involve in principle the same grammar, but the awareness of the requirements of the extralinguistic situation keeps certain centres of the brain involved that send appropriate signals to the linguistic system and thereby interfere with its computational processes. Thus, situations characterized by a higher degree

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Theoretical implications

of formality can be assumed to correlate with a higher degree of attention and a more stringent monitoring of the linguistic output. This alone may result in shifted probabilities of use of grammatical variants. For instance, the regions of the brain responsible for self-monitoring in formal situations may be taken to entertain inhibitory links with the form worser and other informal variants, excitatory links with the suffixed participles drunken and stricken and the structure make + to pertaining to the formal standard, and exert a strict control over the canonical sequence of the determiner a and the degree modifier quite in attributive structures. In a very similar way, the influences of standardization pressures may be modelled, which involve an element of conscious self-monitoring of rules that the language user is aware of, interacting with the largely unconscious language system. These standardization effects may be another source of conflict with functionally grounded processing preferences. The discussion up to this point has shown that a spreading activation model is not only particularly apt to incorporate the functional basis of the preference for rhythmic alternation and its impact on the higher levels of grammar, but that it likewise assigns an appropriate place to other determinants of grammatical variation, affords insights into their neural correlates and motivations, and provides for interactions and even conflicts between different processing tendencies. Thus, multiple constraints and sources of information can influence the construction of an output. While the model does away with the traditionally recognized barriers between modules, the representation of information is only local and hard-wired in the structure of the network. Hence, each unit in the system performs only a very simple computation (cf. McClelland 1987: 9-10). However, the model does not predict an output in a deterministic fashion (cf. Berg 1998: 285). There are always a number of competing solutions that are all more or less viable and evaluated simultaneously (cf. Lamb 1999: 220). Moreover, due to the extreme interconnectivity of the neural network, language processing is not informationally encapsulated. Rather, it receives inputs from all sorts of processes running in parallel in the human brain, whether conscious or unconscious. In addition, it is dependent on the recent state of the system itself. As a result, there is always a noise factor in language processing, which makes the output unpredictable if only linguistic factors are considered. However, a complete analysis of the background noise in natural language use is not feasible and may ultimately not be realistic. Instead, we assume that the model contains a random component that is responsible for a probabilistic outcome. In this way, the spreading activation model predicts a permanent oscillation between different candidate outputs, which is measurable in corpora of naturalistic language. There is no need to mention that the neural network model does away with the distinction between

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competence and performance: if performance is variable, this is not due to its imperfection, but to the fact that competence itself is variable. Errors are no more than extreme deviations form the statistical norm of the system, but they, too, testify to the processes that are characteristic of linguistic competence. The availability of alternative outputs of the system, language variation, is also the basis for the susceptibility of the system to language change. In a neural network, language change is simply modelled as changes in connection strengths between nodes (cf. also Tabor 1994: 18, 184). By means of such changes, the system gradually gives up one route through the network in favour of a different one. Thus, change is not sudden and catastrophic, but proceeds continuously by adjustments of the neural representations that are reflected in continuous shifts in the relative frequencies of linguistic variants (cf. also Tabor 1994: 183-184). This way of conceptualizing language change predicts that change is in principle possible throughout a language user's lifetime: the reinforcement of specific connections between nodes of the language system - just like other types of learning by experience - is possible even in persons of an advanced age. However, we would expect that major changes occur during language acquisition, and that the extent of the system's susceptibility to change is negatively correlated with age. As we have seen, any state of a language is no more than a temporary compromise between a large number of conflicting tendencies and preferences, determined largely by the conventions established in former generations and handed down to each generation of children acquiring the language. The tendencies and preferences that are violated in this conventionalized system however represent a permanent pressure for change, and so it may happen that a constraint that was formerly suppressed begins to manifest itself, first in a limited number of cases, but then, as the pathways through the network become strengthened and more and more viable, expanding over a certain percentage or all of the cases concerned (cf. Berg 1998: 285). In this way, a neural network integrates both the causes and the underlying mechanisms of change in a unique model. This conceptualization of language change has a remarkable number of assets. Firstly, it addresses the problem of the causation of language change (cf. Kroch 1989: 238). The permanent presence of functional constraints that are conventionally overruled by incompatible factors yields a sufficient cause for change. The dynamic and competitive character of the processing system, which has an intrinsic tendency to generate more than one candidate output at a time, can moreover explain the emergence and spread of formerly latent innovations (cf. Berg 1998: 288, and furthermore Croft 1995: 524). Secondly, the direction of change is predetermined by

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the current state of the system: it is inherent in the presence of constraints whose effects are submerged under the dominant influence of conflicting constraints. In this respect, any change in a direction favoured by functionally motivated factors is natural, leading from more marked or less natural to less marked or more natural forms (cf. Mayerthaler 1987: 51). Thirdly, the occurrence of intermediate forms such as redundant markings and hybrid structures, which may arise as characteristics of periods of transition, becomes explicable. In a network where competing variants receive simultaneous activation, both may become expressed if the activation of both neural structures exceeds the threshold level before one of the variants is inhibited by the other (cf. Tabor 1994: 167-181, 185). Thus, the comparative of bad(ly) may select the suppletive stem worse plus the regular suffix -er, and dare may blend auxiliary and main verb features (as when a marked third-person singular form dares is followed by an unmarked infinitive). Fourthly, the model addresses the "problem of linkage" (Kirby 1999: 19; cf. also Haspelmath 1999b: 259), i.e. the question of how functional preferences in speech come to be reflected in patterns of the grammar. A spreading activation model integrates the synchronic and diachronic perspectives on language (cf. Berg 1998: 293). The same functional principles are in effect in synchrony as in diachrony: a functionally favoured variant will not only be more numerously represented in a certain context at a synchronic snapshot, but it will also be diachronically earlier to arise or later to disappear in this context. Vice versa, a functionally disfavoured variant will not only be synchronically underrepresented in a certain context, but it will also be later to arise or earlier to disappear in the same context (cf. Stein 1986: 129).25 However, due to the intervention of competing factors, functional preferences sometimes fail to manifest themselves at a synchronic stage of a language. Diachronic change, however, can even respond to minor, frequently suppressed preferences, since their effects are cumulated in the usage of numerous speakers over long periods of time. As a result, through their barely noticeable impact on language use, these principles infiltrate the synchronic structure of a language (cf. Kelly and Bock 1988: 399; Kelly 1988: 126; Kelly 1989: 691; Berg 1998: 288; cf. also Boersma 1998: 381). In fact, in many of the diachronic studies outlined in Chapters 4 and 5, we have seen instances of stable grammatical states giving way to a variable situation in which a grammatical element becomes optional, as well as variable situations leading up to a stable state in which an optional element is either completely banned or becomes compulsory. In both types of development, we may hypothesize that the factors determining the variable situation are equally valid in the fixed state, though they may not be able to prevail against contrary influences. It cannot be concluded that the Princi-

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pIe of Rhythmic Alternation is or was inactive in these situations, even though no rhythmic alternation effects are observable in the case of worselworser in the eighteenth century, though the participial suffix -en was not variable in forms like drunken, stricken and broken in early ME and though it is no longer variable in PDE broken, though in EModE we find no instance of the suffixed form knitted alternating with knit, though spoken Present-Day British English almost exclusively uses the positional variant quite a irrespective of rhythm, though quick, slow and scarce are hardly used any more as adverbs, though the use or omission of the infinitive marker after make and bid is nowadays grammatically (not rhythmically) determined, and though the a-prefix on -ing-forms is obsolete in standard uses. Rather, the validity of the principle is sufficiently evidenced by the fact that stable states in the usage of these grammatical patterns are connected by transitional phases in which variation phenomena testify to the influences of rhythm. In this context, it is important to note that cases where a phenomenon that once was subject to rhythmic constraints loses its susceptibility to rhythm do not invalidate the assumption that the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is a universal preference enforced by processing tendencies: just as the increase in rhythmicity of a structure is achieved at the expense of other well-motivated functional factors, the loss of rhythmicity usually optimizes the structure in other respects, e.g. with regard to regularity or the biunique formal encoding of meanings. In sum, the increase of naturalness in one respect usually goes hand in hand with the decrease of naturalness in another. Consequently, the grammar of a language as a whole can neither be claimed to 'improve' nor to 'deteriorate' in the course of time. And finally, while specific structures may bear witness to the effects of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation to varying degrees at different points in time, the principle itself is universal and constant. As has been pointed out in the summary to Chapter 5, this conclusion is confirmed by naturalistic corpus data: the representative selection of variation phenomena surveyed in the corpus analyses does not provide any evidence to the effect that the overall rhythmicity of the English language has 'increased' or 'declined' since ME times.

6.3.7.

Limitations of interactive activation models

As can be seen from the preceding discussion, spreading activation models have a vast scope: they cross the boundaries between the traditionally recognized modules of a language system, between synchronic and diachronic linguistics, between language structure (the representational aspects) and

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language use (the processing aspects), between motivations and their effects. All of these domains derive from properties of the neural network as the central processing system and the principles according to which it works. Thus, spreading activation models are superior to formal models of grammar, including innovative constraint-based models such as OT. What is more, the models are largely isomorphic with structures in the brain and therefore have operational and neurological plausibility in addition to descriptive and explanatory adequacy. The specific model described in the preceding section has furthermore generated some hypotheses that can make a worthwhile subject for further research. To give some examples, it is predicted that a hearer exposed to a string of syllables that do not differ in the amount of stress attributed to them will encounter difficulties of decoding, - that none of the processes of language production and perception is informationally encapsulated, but rather receives inputs from all kinds of processes running in parallel in the brain, - that the degree to which rhythmic alternation is implemented correlates negatively with the rapidity of language production, - that the extent of anticipatory adaptations such as stress shifts or the omission of elements due to horror cequi is limited by the amount of time that a speaker has at his or her disposal, - that the strength of phonological influences on higher layers of the language system decreases with an increasing distance to the phonological layers, - that latent forces in language use can be traced in their cumulated influence on language change, and - that the use of different registers or speech styles correlates with certain activation states of the brain which are still in need of further elucidation. It has to be recognized, however, that the model has certain limitations that have not yet been addressed satisfactorily. These will be pointed out in the present section, beginning with the global problems concerning all models of this class and progressively narrowing the focus down to the model proposed in this work. Linguists have successfully modelled and implemented a number of linguistic processes in spreading activation conceptions. Lexical retrieval, word recognition and phonological encoding have been most prominent in neurolinguistic model-building (cf., for instance, Dell and Reich 1981; Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer 1999; McQueen, Otake, and Cutler 2001: 126). However, what is completely missing in the relevant literature to date is a modelling of creative syntactic and semantic processes (cf. Tabor 1994:

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210; for a few preliminary ideas, see MacKay 1987). This may have to do with the fact that the hierarchical part-whole relationships that are easy to formalize on the lower structural levels are not necessarily given when it comes to the highly intricate and flexible syntactic structures or to the formation of concepts and ideas. Conceiving a network structure for the syntactic and conceptual aspects of the human language faculty remains an extremely challenging task, particularly since the linguistic network will at this level be strongly interwoven with the full scale of human cognitive abilities. Spreading activation models typically incur a problem in their temporal dimension (cf. Houghton and Hartley 1995). On the one hand, the actualization of language is always linearly ordered; only one unit is pronounced or perceived at a time. On the other hand, a spreading activation model relies heavily on the simultaneous activation of units occurring in a linear order. This sequencing problem is a multi-faceted one. For one thing, ideation, i.e. the mental formation of ideas that are linguistically encoded, is almost certainly not a linearly ordered process which can be translated one by one into a sequence of words. For another, the neural network, which stores structural information, has a static structure that does not tell us anything about its procedural implementation: a word, for instance, consists of a linear sequence of phonemes that are simultaneously activated by the word node, but have to be pronounced one after another. Similarly, many models of language production have postulated a planning phase, in which all elements constituting a particular utterance and their competitors are simultaneously pre-activated or primed, followed by an execution stage, in which the elements become expressed in their proper linear order (cf. MacKay 1986: 175; 1987: 9; Berg 1988: 194-195). The planning stage is indispensable to allow for the necessary interactions between levels, the comparison of candidates and the re-computation of the actual output. At the same time, it is obvious that the temporal sequence of elements in the output has to be known and taken into consideration at the planning stage. Otherwise, sequence-dependent phenomena like rhythm, horror requi, the Law of the Increasing Constituents, the preventive use of structural signals so as to avoid processing difficulties caused by an upcoming complex structure, etc. could not be accounted for. Considering that both the planning and the execution stages of an utterance have to take into account the linear sequence of elements, it has to be concluded that the two are essentially not as distinct as has been suggested. Rather, it seems to be the case that the division of language production into two phases is no more than a theoretical construct serving to facilitate neurolinguistic modelling. To date, a satisfactory account of how this timing is controlled and implemented in language production is still missing.

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Theoretical implications

A further problem connected to the temporal aspects of processing in the spreading activation model is the existence of different timing strategies in the languages of the world. Though the classification into stresstimed, syllable-timed and mora-timed languages has frequently been questioned, recent findings suggest that a gradual distinction, though not a categorical one, is empirically well-founded (cf. section 2.1.2). In syllabletimed (and mora-timed) languages, we do not find a similarly strong alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables, so that the interplay between two nodes representing these features that has been assumed to enforce an alternating rhythm in stress-timed languages has no explanatory value in these languages. However, they manifest different timing strategies for which an adequate account needs to be found. This gives rise to the question of whether the rhythmic organization of language is a universal and in what way this presumed universal is coded in the neural network. Are the nodes responsible for rhythm in stress-timed languages also responsible for rhythm in syllable-timed languages? Do extra-linguistic rhythmic activities appeal to the same nodes? Are they genetically predisposed to the function of creating rhythm? If they are, how do they come to favour such divergent patternings as are found in different types of linguistic timing? If they are not, how much of the human language capacity is universal and how much is acquired? Is it possible that it is no more than a structural blueprint, consisting of a network of nodes with myriad underspecified connections and certain constraining universals of neural action, that forms the innate basis of language? On a more general level, spreading activation models thus demand a reconsideration of the concept of Universal Grammar. The neural network model outlined in the preceding sections has so far evaded two questions of detail surrounding the conceptualization of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. The first, which is probably easy to accommodate, is the empirical finding that stress in English is not a binary matter: besides stressed and unstressed syllables, there is a third category that has been labelled 'prosodically overshadowed'. This has played a role in the analyses of the pair scarce/scarcely and of the variably marked infinitives dependent on make and bid. In each case, if the probability of selection of a buffer element is a valid measure, the degree of prominence of a prosodically overshadowed syllable has proved to be intermediate between those of stressed and unstressed syllables. Thus, the concept of prosodic overshadowing seems to possess a considerable explanatory potential. The neural network model as presented so far does not encompass this third possibility since it merely contains two nodes responding in an either-or manner. This predicts that syllables can only be either stressed or unstressed. The evidence for prosodic overshadowing could, however, be

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integrated in (at least) two ways. Firstly, if the either-or mechanism is preserved, the intermediate status of prosodically overshadowed items could be taken as evidence of a probabilistic decision-making in the network. In a certain percentage of cases, the collision of two stressed syllables may cause one of the two to have so much of the activation sent to the stressed syllable node sapped away due to the node's refractoriness that the node fails to reach its threshold level. As a result, the syllable concerned would end up being unstressed and render an additional buffer superfluous. In the remaining cases, the stressed syllable node may accumulate a sufficient amount of activation (whatever the factors contributing to this), so that it fires despite its momentary self-inhibition. In these cases, the syllable would remain stressed and a stress clash buffer would be called for. In large corpora like those examined in Chapters 4 and 5, such a probabilistic quantification would manifest itself in exactly the way that it does: the frequency with which additional buffer syllables are required would hover somewhere between that for unequivocally stressed and unstressed syllables. As a second approach to the problem, the model could be adapted so as to allow for different degrees of activation of a node. In this case, we would postulate a pair of more complex nodes responsible for stressed and unstressed syllables which allow for a transmission of signals not in an either-or fashion, but in a graded response. Thus, an inhibitory state of the node for stressed syllables interfering with a renewed activation would not remain without effect, but lead to an intermediate reaction strength and a moderately strong stress on the syllable concerned. The phenomenon described as prosodic overshadowing is therefore not incompatible with the neural network model designed in this chapter. The precise manner in which it can be integrated is, however, a matter for discussion. A second question that has remained unanswered refers to the finding that stress clashes are more strongly avoided than stress lapses, or that ternary stress patterns, involving stressed syllables separated by a sequence of two unstressed syllables, are among the basic rhythms in many languages including English. Both facts imply that a re-activation of the node for unstressed syllables is not as strongly avoided as a re-activation of the node for stressed syllables. Again, this result could be integrated in (at least) two ways. On the one hand, we could postulate that the node for the feature [unstressed] has a different internal structure, for example dispensing with the self-inhibitory mechanism, which has been hypothesized to depend on special inhibitory satellite neurons (cf. MacKay 1987: 145). Like phonetic features (cf. endnote 22), this node would therefore not be subject to the recovery cycle and present no obstacle to a repeated activation. On the other hand, a more wide-ranging modification of the model might dispense with the node for unstressed syllables and postulate a unique node for the

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feature [stress], which can adopt a marked value, [+ stress], and an unmarked value [- stress]. The corresponding node would only become activated if a syllable receives stress, and due to its recovery cycle, a sequence of stressed syllables would be impeded. In contrast, unstressed syllables would not involve this node and could therefore be pronounced in unlimited sequences. The introduction of an additional stress (Beat Addition) to avoid a stress lapse could thus only be attributed to a post-inhibitory rebound of the [stress] node, and not to a post-excitatory inhibition of a node responsible for unstressed syllables. Both accounts can be implemented in a neural network model, but the ultimate question is of course which account comes closest to the actual structures in the brain. In conclusion, the spreading activation model developed in this chapter for the theoretical conceptualization of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation and its effects on language variation and change has taken us a long way. It has allowed us to develop a probabilistic, variable conception of grammatical choices, to include interactions with other detenninants of grammatical variation, to model linguistic change and even to fonnulate a hypothesis as to the functional factors underlying the preference for alternating patterns. Hence, the attempt to bring linguistic theory in line with neurophysiological facts has proved to be a worthwhile and successful enterprise. What is more, the linguistic model adopted and developed here is based on solid empirical evidence collected from an extensive text corpus, mirroring an intricate linguistic reality. Though the model uses nodes, not neurons as its smallest functional units (and this distinction is a crucial one), it has certainly refuted to some extent the scepticism expressed by Pulvenniiller (2002: 1) in the following statement: "However, a systematic model of language at the level of neurons as to date is not available, at least, not an approach that would be both grounded in empirical research while at the same time attacking a wide range of complex linguistic phenomena." To say the least, the present model has shown that linguistic description, model-building and neurophysiological research will ultimately be brought to converge. The resultant theory can be expected to confonn to the ambitious criteria of descriptive and explanatory adequacy as well as operational and neurological plausibility.

Chapter 7 Conclusion

The present chapter is subdivided into two sections: the first (section 7.1) contains a synopsis of the main findings of the book. These allow us to draw a fairly comprehensive picture of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, its effects on the grammar of English and its integration into a model of grammar. To round off the discussion, section 7.2 provides an assessment of what remains to be done in research at the crossroads between neuro- and psycholinguistics and corpus-based studies of earlier and present forms of English. It suggests a number of avenues for further research which would usefully complement the work begun in this book.

7.1.

Synopsis

The various insights that can be drawn from the preceding chapters will be presented as comments on the aims of the present book defined in section 1.2. They present a progression from empirical studies to theoretical implications, with the bulk of the results bearing on the empirical side. For a start, a survey of the literature on the rhythmic organization of different types of languages (section 2.1) has strongly fostered the view that rhythmicity is indeed a universal of linguistic and extra-linguistic behaviour (cf. e.g. Selkirk 1984: 19; Couper-Kuhlen 1986: 60). A combination of articulatory, perceptual and other processing-related factors has been adduced as a functional motivation for rhythmicity in language: most obviously, the perception and decoding of a speech signal is made more reliable by the presence of sufficient contrast between successive syllables (cf. DressIer et al. 1987: 12; Boersma 1998: 2). There is, however, evidence, that language production and the memorization of linguistic information are likewise facilitated by alternating rhythm and that rhythm may be exploited as a vehicle for certain communicative functions of language (cf. Lehiste 1977: 488; Bolinger 1981: 33; Berg 1998: 79). Despite the universality of rhythmic organization, individual languages may employ different strategies to implement it. These strategies seem to be determined by the localization of an individual language on the scale from stress timing to syllable timing (cf. Dauer 1983: 55-60; Auer and Uhmann 1988: 244-251; Nespor and Vogel 1989: 70). While languages of both types can use

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rhythmic rules like Beat Deletion, Beat Addition and Stress Shift, only stress-timing languages can moreover manipulate the duration of syllables, crowding unstressed syllables together in stress lapses and drawing stressed syllables out in stress clashes. These strategies are confined to the manipulation of rhythmic constellations in an utterance. A stronger hypothesis that is central to the present work maintains that other strategies may also manipulate the grammatical structure of an utterance. As a first substantiation of this thesis, a selection of relevant findings has been gleaned from the secondary literature (section 2.2). Observations by perceptive linguists antedating the age of computer-assisted corpus analysis, some modem corpus studies and research on lexical phonology have contributed important results (cf. in particular Fijn van Draat [1910] 1967; Stroheker 1913; Bihl 1916; Franz [1939] 1986; Bolinger 1965b, 1978, 1980a, 1981, 1986a). In the empirical main part of the present work (Chapters 4 and 5), these have been complemented and amplified by studies of diverse grammatical phenomena pertaining to the domains of morphological and syntactic processing. As morphological phenomena, the redundant marking of the irregular adjectival and adverbial comparative worse, the variation between five different pairs of mono- and disyllabic past participles, and the variable suffixation of three different monosyllabic adverbs can be adduced. On the borderline between morphology and syntax, the variable presence of the infinitive marker after directive verbs and the marginal modal dare and the alternating use of the a-prefix in -ing-forms dependent on verbs of beginning and motion bear witness to the influence of rhythm. In the domain of syntax, rhythmic effects were found in restrictions bearing on the position of end-stressed a-adjectives, in the variable ordering of the degree modifier quite in combination with the indefinite article, in the sequencing of monoand disyllabic attributive adjectives exemplified by pairs of colour words, and in the constraints on the rhythmic shape of attributive adjectives and sentence adverbs negated by not. This overview may serve as a representative, though incomplete illustration of the considerable range of grammatical phenomena that are sensitive to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. Each analysis can be considered in its own right as a contribution to the description of selected aspects of English grammar. These insights should in the future be assigned their due place in descriptive grammar-writing. What unifies the above inventory of analyses is the recognition that the preference for rhythmic alternation provides an innovative generalization that ties together a large array of phenomena in the grammar of English, which would be inexplicable without it. Such a conclusion implies that a phonological preference has the power to decide grammatical choices. This amounts to a refutation of the tenet, frequently upheld in modular theories

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of language, that the connection between grammar and phonology is a unidirectional one, ruling out influences from 'posterior' phonological representations on 'anterior' grammatical ones (cf. e.g. Chomsky 1965: 141; 1995: 229; Chomsky and Halle 1968: 7; Pullum and Zwicky 1988: 255). Furthermore, the resutls argue against proposals to the effect that functionally motivated determinants like the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation need not be assigned a place in the grammatical description of a language because they are universal and constant (cf. Myers 1997: 147). As has been shown, the tendency towards rhythmic alternation can produce many different effects that are decidedly linguistic in nature: the distributional patterns of grammatical variants may be skewed, grammatical morphemes can be left out or added, modifiers can be inserted that are semantically superfluous, entire constructions may be avoided unless a redeeming stress shift is possible, the order of words in a sentence may be changed, and so on. Some of these effects, such as the introduction of additional buffer material and the manipulation of syntactic sequencing are more than a simple exploitation of grammatical variants that are independently given, but they represent proper creative processes. This indicates that it is insufficient to acknowledge the generality of the preference for an alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, and that the way in which it is implemented in a particular grammatical structure has to be part of the description of that structure. More evidence for the need to integrate rhythm in linguistic descriptions comes from the finding that the influence exerted by rhythm on a particular grammatical feature is susceptible to change over time. In some cases, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has been shown to take over control of grammatical variants as soon as they become available, leading up to an almost entirely rhythmically conditioned distribution. In the case of the pairs drunk/drunken (section 4.4.1) and lit/lighted (section 4.4.5), the need to keep stressed syllables separated by unstressed ones practically brought the loss of the disyllabic form to a standstill up to the nineteenth century. In the case of the marking of infinitives dependent on make and bid (sections 5.4.1, 5.4.2 and 5.4.3), the establishment of a grammatical morpheme was prevented almost completely in contexts where rhythmic alternation was regularly secured for independent reasons. In other cases, the effects of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, though clearly noticeable, have turned out to be less absolute. They had a considerable share in the preservation of the old syllabic participial suffix in the pair struck/stricken (section 4.4.3), they slowed down the introduction of the adverbial suffix in scarce/scarcely before noninitially stressed verbs (section 5.3.3), they resisted to a certain degree the decline of the a-prefix before -ing-forms (section 5.5), they speeded up the rise of the additional

310

Conclusion

participial suffix in knit/knitted (section 4.4.4), and they encouraged the inversion of the indefinite article and the degree modifier quite (section 4.5). In the case of short-lived grammatical variants such as the monosyllabic participle broke (section 4.4.2) and the redundantly suffixed comparative worser (section 4.2), rhythmic alternation largely determined the contexts in which they arose. Similarly, the suffixless adverbs quick and slow (sections 5.3.1 and 5.3.2), which only made a temporary appearance in the corpora of the written standard language, were distributed in accordance with rhythmic considerations. These findings allow for an integration of synchronic and diachronic findings under a single conception: a synchronic distribution that can be expressed as a 'more' and a 'less' tends to be mirrored in a diachronic evolution in terms of an 'earlier' and a 'later' (cf. Stein 1986: 129). This means that a rhythmic alternant that is for some reason more ideal and preferred in a certain context will tend to be established earlier in that context than an alternant that is less ideal and is therefore dispreferred in the same context. Conversely, an alternant that is rhythmically inappropriate in a certain context will tend to be disestablished earlier than one that is more convenient with regard to rhythm. The influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is thus manifest in synchrony as well as in diachrony, and both are two sides of the same coin. When carried to the extreme, such an evolution results in a situation of functional split. This has almost been completed with regard to drunk, representing the normal participial use, and drunken, occurring in attributive functions (section 4.4.1), or with regard to active make, invariably taking unmarked infinitives, and passive make, invariably taking marked ones (sections 5.4.1 and 5.4.2). In the end, the skewing may, however, be reinterpreted as a grammatically determined distribution and become fixed. In this case, the rhythmic flexibility is lost, though in the majority of tokens, an alternating rhythm is secured. In contrast, in many other cases, rhythm has not been able to assert itself as forcefully. To date, it accounts for a more or less considerable divergence between rhythmically critical and uncritical situations in the use of the pairs struck/stricken (section 4.4.3), knit/knitted (section 4.4.4), lit/lighted (section 4.4.5), a quite/quite a (section 4.5), scarce/scarcely (section 5.3.3), dare with marked or unmarked dependent infinitives (section 5.4.4), and set with a-prefixed or prefixless -ing-forms (section 5.5.1). Furthermore, it co-determines the sequencing of pairs of colour adjectives in attributive uses (section 4.6) and the use of buffer adverbs before negated attributive adjectives and sentence adverbs (sections 4.7 and 5.2). In some other cases, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has been prevailed against in the long run by competing motivations, so that there is practically no more scope for rhythmically motivated

Synopsis

311

variation in the cases of worse (whose redundant suffix has been lost; section 4.2), broken (whose suffixless counterpart serves a different semantic function; section 4.4.2), quickly and slowly (which are hardly ever suffixless in adverbial uses; sections 5.3.1 and 5.3 .2), and go with dependent -ing-forms (which now does without the a-prefix; section 5.5.2). The question as to whether the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has in the history of the English language gained or lost influence has received no clear answer. All in all, the present work contradicts the claim that the rhythmicity of the English language has been decreasing in the past few centuries (for a suggestion to this effect, see Markus 1994: 187-198; see furthermore Minkova 1990: 332; 1991: 180). The fact that many of the grammatical variation phenomena have settled into a stable pattern and can no longer respond adaptively to requirements of rhythm is to some degree compensated for by the greater number and versatility of grammatical patterns available in PDE, which provide more scope for adaptive stress shifts. As a result, attributive structures, which constitute the parts of the sentence most liable to stress clashes, have become rhythmically disencumbered. There may be additional effects making up for the loss of grammatical variants that have not yet been discovered. In addition, many of the variants investigated in the corpus analyses have not been eradicated by standardization pressures and continue to alternate in PDE. Moreover, the loss of unstressed final syllables in ME, leading to the creation of many rhythmically awkward monosyllables, has its counterpart in the reduction of the remaining unstressed and secondarily stressed syllables in EModE (cf. Bolinger 1965b: 179; 1986b: 37-40). In the corpus findings described in Chapters 4 and 5, there is no justification for the claim that the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is less powerful in PDE than it once was. However, it must be conceded that prior to the large-scale standardization of the language, the principle stilI had a greater number of variants to operate on (cf. also Stroheker 1913: 2; Markus 1994: 193; Rohdenburg 1997: 106). Parenthetically, it may be noted that if we assume that the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables has a functional motivation and is a linguistic universal, such a diachronic trend would seem highly unlikely. What has been established with certainty is that the preference for rhythmic alternation has solid evidence in its favour throughout the period from EModE to PDE, while its impact with regard to individual phenomena has varied over time. The fact that these diachronic variations do occur despite the assumed constancy of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation is accounted for by the co-existence of competing factors that similarly impinge on variable domains of the grammar. All of these determinants are functionally well motivated and describe ideals apt to make the processing of language for the

312

Conclusion

user easier in some respect or another. These motivations can abstractly be described as a striving to functionalize free grammatical variation so as to encode fine semantic nuances in the form of an utterance (cf. Stroheker 1913: 2), - to mirror the extra-linguistic reality in the linguistic form(s) encoding it (iconicity; cf. McMahon 1994: 86; Fischer 1995), - to encode one and the same meaning in a unique form and to interpret one and the same form as having always the same meaning (biuniqueness or the 'one meaning - one form' principle; cf. Bolinger1977b: x; Mayerthaler 1988: 26), - to establish or maintain uniform and exceptionless morphological patterns (system congruity; cf. Wurze11987: 92), - to facilitate processing by providing additional structural signals in the case of increased complexity (the Complexity Principle; cf. Rohdenburg 1996: 151), to dispense with additional grammatical signals where they are not required for the processing of the sentence, to alleviate the processing load of a sentence by adapting its syntax to preference laws such as the Law of the Increasing Constituents and the parallel encoding of parallel meanings (cf. Behaghel 1909: 139; Havers 1931: 69-70,181), - to avoid the confusing use of parallel forms if no parallel in meaning is intended (the Horror /Equi Principle; cf. Rohdenburg 2003: 236-242), - to preserve advantageous structures characteristic of earlier states of the language in high-frequency collocations and archaisms (cf. Haspelmath 1999a: 191; Bybee and Scheibman 1999: 583), to reduce the frequency of (rhythmically or otherwise) inconvenient constructions, to avoid phonotactic difficulties such as hiatuses (cf. Wolfram 1980: 124-126), and to adapt one's usage to the prestigious standard variety by avoiding stigmatized forms (cf. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 134). The type of grammar in which the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation can be assigned its proper role has to be a pluralistic one, integrating a multiplicity of functionally motivated factors impinging on the linguistic material selected for a particular utterance. All factors relevant in a particular case determine interactively which form is best suited and therefore most likely to be realized. This presupposes that different kinds of information (semantic, morphological, syntactic, lexical, phonotactic and, last not least, prosodic) are simultaneously available and can be weighed against each other, but it does not necessarily imply that the outcome is completely predetermined in every single case. Notice that, while the strength of the

Synopsis

313

Principle of Rhythmic Alternation as a determinant varies with the grammatical phenomenon under consideration, this prosodic factor is not subordinate to other, extra-grammatical influences on any principled grounds. It does not merely fill the gaps left underdetermined by grammatical or semantic constraints, but extends its influence much further. Thus, we have seen that the control over a given grammatical phenomenon can pass from one determinant to another in a diachronic process of change. Hence, the momentary balance of powers is the distinctive characteristic of a synchronic grammar and has been the central object of study in the present work. In addition to diachronic differences, some of the preceding analyses have shown that different types of text, written or spoken modes and national varieties may present distinct pictures with regard to the frequency of one or the other variant. These differences can be interpreted as due to different degrees to which a diachronic evolution is advanced. It has for instance been shown that written-to-be-spoken language was faster in the move towards monosyllabic participles like broke and struck, in the establishment of the pre-determiner use of quite and in the loss of infinitival marking after (active) make, but more reluctant to give up the a-prefix on -ing-forms dependent on the verb set. The rhythmically motivated differences however remain stable in both text types. Similarly, spoken British English has been demonstrated to be more advanced in the evolution towards the pre-determiner use of quite than British fictional prose, which in turn is more advanced than British newspapers. Again, the rhythmically motivated differences persist. Finally, the two major national varieties of English have been found to differ markedly in the frequencies of certain grammatical features (cf. in particular Schliiter, to appear): American English is faster in establishing the innovative pre-determiner use of quite, and it has been argued by a number of authors (for references see section 4.5) to have promoted the transition of dare to the category of main verbs. But on the other hand, American English is lagging behind in the introduction of the monosyllabic participial variant lit and of the disyllabic participial variant knitted, both of which are further advanced in British English. What however remains unchanged is the contrast in the frequency of the two grammatical variants in rhythmically distinct contexts, which has been accounted for by the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. This result supports the conclusion that the principle is a universal that manifests itself in every system or subsystem of the English language, whatever the baseline frequency of the variants under consideration may be. The multifactorial approach has of course always been revolving around the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, which had initially been defined as the preference for stressed and unstressed syllables to alternate, with stress

314

Conclusion

clashes being more strongly avoided than stress lapses. Thus, the avoidance of stress clashes has provided the principal object of investigation, whereas stress lapses have been argued to be more easily by-passed, for instance by conferring an additional stress on one of the unstressed syllables. In the course of the discussion, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation itself has received some additional clarification. In most of the above analyses, it has proved sufficient to use a binary distinction between stressed syllables (which were equated with the strong syllables of content words) and unstressed syllables (which group together those syllables in plurisyllabic content words not bearing the primary stress and most monosyllabic function words). In assigning syllables to the one or the other category, the workings of three basic rules regulating the rhythmic structure of English words and phrases were taken into account. One is the Stress Shift Rule, moving clashing stresses leftwards on the condition that there is an appropriate landing site, another one is the Compound Stress Rule, fixing the main stress on the first member of most English compounds, and the third is the Nuclear Stress Rule, attributing the highest prominence to the rightmost member of a phrase. The emphasis of the studies of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, which, by hypothesis, determines the prosodic structure of sentences on all levels (represented, for instance, in the metrical grid convention as columns of grid marks of different heights), has thus been laid on the lowest levels, which adhere most strictly to the principle. A less mechanistic classification would have been hard to implement in a quantitative approach largely based on written language. Two qualifications of the stressed/unstressed dichotomy were, however, rendered necessary. Firstly, the concept of prosodic overshadowing proved to have a considerable explanatory potential: the strong stress on a content word can be reduced on account of a following word carrying an even stronger stress. I This diminution of the stress level, known as the Beat Deletion rule, is another form of stress clash avoidance and is in full accordance with the empirical data: while sequences of two fully stressed syllables trigger the highest proportion of intervening buffers and sequences of one stressed and one unstressed syllable are the most likely to do without a buffer element, combinations consisting of a stressed syllable and a prosodically overshadowed one have been shown to be statistically intermediate in their affinity with buffers. And secondly, it has been assumed (and the data are in good fit with this assumption) that sequences of unstressed function words are subject to another rule enforcing rhythmic alternation, i.e. the rule of Beat Addition. Prepositions are among the most likely candidates for this kind of stressing due to stress lapse avoidance. Rules like Beat Addition, Beat Deletion, the Stress Shift Rule, the Com-

Synopsis

315

pound Stress Rule and the Nuclear Stress Rule represent purely prosodic rules adapting the phonological structure of a sentence to a definite ideal (cf. e.g. Chomsky and Halle 1968: 17; Hayes 1995: 368; Kager 1995: 385386; Nespor and Vogel 1989: 75-76); for our purposes, they have, however, only been of interest insofar as they are relevant to phenomena in which the grammatical structure of a sentence is altered so as to conform to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. For the same reason, lexical avoidance strategies have only been covered anecdotally in the context of the addition of largely meaningless buffer material. In addition, the characterization of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has been complemented with a definition of its scope of application. The width of the prosodic boundary between the clashing syllables (in other words, the duration of the pause) is an important determinant of the stringency with which rhythmic alternation is observed. Within syntactically and prosodically closely integrated phrases, stress clashes provoke particularly strong avoidance effects. Syntactic structures consisting of a noun and its attributive premodifiers represent the most striking exponents of such phrases and have exhibited an extraordinary range of avoidance phenomena. These findings have prompted a limitation of the scope of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation: the preference for alternating stresses extends only as far as the prosodic phrase, which is demarcated by relatively wide prosodic boundaries, i.e. pauses, at each end (cf. section 5.6). A more precise definition of the prosodic phrase has been eschewed due to the incalculable influence of factors such as prosodic weight, focus and speaking rate. These results concerning the parameters underlying rhythmic alternation are certainly not unprecedented; what is new is, however, the evidence that stress level and boundary width have a quantifiable effect in naturalistic corpus data. The collection of empirical data permits quantified statements about the strength of rhythmic influences on grammatical variation in different domains of the grammar of English. In accordance with virtually all models of language production and perception, a hierarchical structure has been posited, with semantic concepts and ideas at the top and the smallest phonetic units in the bottom layer. Language production is assumed to proceed from semantic aggregates to syntactic structures, to individual words, to parts of words (morphemes and syllables), to phonemes, to phonetic features. In general, it can be stated that the lower the level of a grammatical unit in the layered structure of the grammar, Le. the nearer it is to phonological representations like rhythm, the more noticeable its sensitivity to stress clashes. This conclusion is motivated by the fact that the variance in the use of certain grammatical morphemes is in at least some of the corpus subsections determined to a large degree by rhythm alone. This is particu-

316

Conclusion

larly true of the participial suffixes (section 4.4) and the redundant comparative suffix in worser (section 4.2). As for the adverbial suffix, some syntactic factors have to be controlled for, but after their exclusion, rhythm accounts for a large amount of the skewing. Semantic factors have relatively little influence in this domain (section 5.3). As we move up the structural hierarchy, we find that the infinitive marker (section 5.4) and the a-prefix (section 5.5), being (originally) free morphemes endowed with a larger degree of syntactic independence and with some semantic import, bear witness to only moderate rhythmically motivated discrepancies. It can be assumed that syntactic and semantic factors have a more considerable sway over the use or omission of these morphemes. Among the phenomena belonging to the domain of syntax proper, some (e.g. the positional variants a quite/quite a, analyzed in section 4.5, and the sequencing of attributive colour adjectives, analyzed in section 4.6) exhibit only very small margins of variation that can be attributed to the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, while the remainder of the variance is due to other, mostly semantic factors. Others (e.g. the syntactic restrictions bearing on a-adjectives, studied in section 4.3, and the licensing of attributive adjectives and sentence adverbs negated by not, studied in sections 4.7 and 5.2) show extremely strong effects that conform to the predictions made by the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, but in the analyses, semantic factors could not be eliminated. Without doubt, these give rise to substantial synergies with rhythmic factors. Lastly, an infringement of the semantics of a construction has been shown to occur when certain dummy adverbs are inserted as buffer syllables between two stresses (cf. sections 4.7 and 5.2). In sum, from the quantitative evaluation of the corpus data, the conclusion can be deduced that the strength of rhythmic influences declines with an increasing distance between the rhythmic level and the higher levels of the language system, with morphology relatively close to rhythm, syntax somewhat more distant, and semantics at the other end. Taken together, these empirically based conclusions present a massive set of challenges to linguistic theory-building. They have allowed us to compare and evaluate two types of theories and to propose further refinements to the more suitable type, i.e. a spreading-activation model. The recent model of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993; McCarthy and Prince 1993; cf. section 6.2) replaces the traditional syntactocentrism of formal grammars with an output orientation which is well adapted to accommodate phonological determinants such as the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. Phonology is thus emancipated from its former subdued function and is assigned the important role that it demonstrably plays in grammatical variation and change. An OT grammar relies on a set of soft universals, Le. constraints that are ascribed the status of linguistic

Synopsis

317

universals, but are at the same time violable on account of the fact that they impose conflicting requirements on the output. This conception has equally received strong support from the corpus studies. Though these constraints were not originally related to functional motivations but assumed to be specific to Universal Grammar, Functional Optimality Theory successfully reinterprets innate constraints as functional universals (cf. Boersma 1998: 5; McMahon 2000: 81). Moreover, there are no longer any dividing lines between the traditionally recognized modules. In principle, any constraint can dominate any other, including the possibility that a phonological constraint dominates morphological, syntactic and semantic ones. While the corpus analyses have demonstrated that rhythm does exert an influence on these domains, they nevertheless suggest that OT overshoots the goal in some respects. As has been shown, the results concerning the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation have shown that the extent of its influence decreases systematically along a dimension on which linguistic units are arranged in an order of increasing abstractness. This presupposes an internal structure of the language system with distinct, hierarchically arranged levels for morphology, syntax and semantics. While the interactivity of an OT grammar is thus not sufficiently constrained, the strict dominance hierarchy of constraints on the other side over-determines the output. In standard OT, every constraint has to be assigned a consistent rank that is the same in all operations of the grammar and that moreover strictly overrules the conjoined effects of any number of lower-ranking constraints. The results of the corpus analyses rather suggest that violations of different preferences are treated additiveIy and that the gravity of a violation of one and the same factor varies with the phenomenon under consideration. Even the limited range of grammatical phenomena investigated in the present work would be hard to accommodate in a single constraint hierarchy. Further substantial incongruities between theory and reality become apparent in the fact that data on actual language use are inherently probabilistic. Some of the empirical studies have moreover testified to a systematic variation between usage in different kinds of extra-linguistic situations. Language change also depends crucially on the presence of variants in a synchronic grammar. All of these facts have no genuine place in OT, since the strict ranking of constraints deterministically predicts a unique outcome for each input. Attempts to adapt OT accordingly have failed to convince. This is due to the fact that a unique constraint hierarchy remains at the centre of the grammar, which is impossible to define across the full range of grammatical phenomena in a language. A final point of criticism refers to the fact that OT is utterly inappropriate as an isomorphic model of actual language processing.

318

Conclusion

The maximal possible isomorphism with current knowledge of neural processing in the brain is one of the distinctive characteristics of spreading activation models (McClelland and Rumelhart 1981; Dell and Reich 1981; Rumelhart, Hinton, and McClelland 1986; McClelland 1987; Berg 1998; Lamb 1999; Ritt 2004; cf. section 6.3). This type of model shares with OT the emphasis on the interaction between a multiplicity of constraints. Unlike standard OT, however, it does not consider these constraints to be part of the language-specific genetic endowment, but attributes to them a functional motivation deriving from universal conditions of language use. For the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, the dichotomy of activation and recovery typical of neurons and, by extension, nodes has provided a promising explanatory hypothesis. Though other determinants of grammatical variation have not been treated with the same amount of detail, some hypotheses as to their functional motivations have been suggested. These derive from the maxims of economy of resources and efficiency of processing, both of which are plausibly grounded in the functions of the network itself. As the network for the processing of language is not autonomous, but part of the larger network also subserving other cognitive activities, it can accommodate such extra-linguistic factors as stylistic level and situation of language use. The influences exerted by these factors are modelled as manipulations of the activation level of the nodes representing candidate outputs. In contrast to OT, the activation levels result from a summation of all the incoming signals plus the recent activation level of the node itself. This additive treatment has turned out to be more in line with grammatical variation phenomena than the absolute ranking typical of OT. Furthermore, the similar activation levels attained in this way by close competitor nodes, in combination with a noisy component, explain the probabilistic output of the model, which corresponds to the measurable indeterminism of corpus data. A further difference to OT is the distinct internal structure of neural network models. The networks are based on hierarchical part-whole relationships with semantics at the top, syntax and morphology on the middle layers and phonology and phonetics at the bottom. The existence of these layers is buttressed by the different degrees of influence exerted by rhythmic alternation on grammatical variation phenomena pertaining to these levels of representation. In contrast to traditional modular conceptions, which also have an internal structure, the network levels interact by means of bidirectional connections: each process in the network involves a feedforward as well as a feedback flow of activation. This interactivity between levels provides the mechanism necessary for influences from posterior levels on anterior ones, such as have been amply illustrated in Chapters 4 and 5. Incidentally, the interactivity has also been alleged to necessitate the

Synopsis

319

introduction of a refractory phase in the nodes. A comparison between written and spoken corpora has produced some preliminary evidence in favour of the hypothesis that the degree of interaction involved in the production of an utterance is limited by real-time pressures on processing: while morphological adaptations are relatively fast to execute, syntactic modifications can only be implemented in slower speech styles or writing. The spreading activation model proposed in section 6.3 differs from OT (which predicts unlimited interactivity between all different constraints irrespective of temporal restrictions) in that it constrains the depth of interactions with reference to the processing time required in the online assembly of an utterance. Quantitative evidence indicates that the more restrictive spreading activation account is superior to the overly permissive OT conception. Last not least, spreading activation models surpass formal grammars in their treatment of language change, and this has proved to be a crucial aspect in the foregoing analyses. The permanent effectiveness of functional preferences that are in many cases overridden by conflicting preferences provides a plausible cause for the occurrence of change, and the permanent presence of competing nodes provides the necessary substance. In many of the corpus analyses, a change has been shown to occur in the direction of a rhythmic optimization, just as factors conflicting with rhythmic flexibility have prevailed in other cases. What is more, the model has elucidated the manner in which the subtle adjustments in the frequency of a structure involved in language change can arise in the internalized grammar of an individual language user and propagate through a language community. In conclusion, the approach pursued in the present work has investigated numerous grammatical phenomena in the English language that have so far never been completely described or explained. The specific assets of the empirical work can be summarized under seven points. - It focuses on the influences exerted by a phonological principle, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, on grammatical phenomena and thus transcends the traditional boundaries between modules. - Thanks to its corpus-based methodology, it combines qualitative and quantitative statements about the influence of this principle. - It is multifactorial, extending its angle to include a variety of other factors, which may reinforce or work against the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, depending on the individual case. - It combines categorical properties of language use with probabilistic tendencies and abolishes the artificial dividing line between the two sets. It is not confined to the description of relevant effects, but provides explanations in terms of functional aspects of language use.

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Conclusion

It integrates synchronic variation and diachronic change under the same framework and ascribes the same underlying motivations to both. - And finally, it yields evidence for grammatical differences between various synchronic subsystems of the English language, such as written and spoken registers, different types of written texts, and the British and American national varieties. In a second step, the present book has attempted to tie up the empirical findings with different theoretical approaches to language. The one that complies best with the empirical facts and unifies all the interpretations derived from them is the spreading activation model, which is moreover to a large degree isomorphic with actual neural networks. In fact, this is the result one might have expected, considering that the corpus data represent naturalistic language produced by writers and speakers whose performance is of necessity based on the neurophysiological properties of their brains. However, this conclusion is anything but self-evident in view of the longstanding belief, upheld not only by generative linguistics, that the language faculty has a modular structure and the remarkable acclaim received by such formalisms as OT, which are far from being plausible models of language processing. This suggests that theories of language aiming at maximal descriptive adequacy perforce have to be maximally isomorphic with the structure of the brain. It is true that spreading activation models are still a long way from being fully developed comprehensive models of language. This is not astonishing since they are dependent on input from descriptive linguistics as well as from neuroscience. The model outlined here is, however, sufficiently constrained so as to have inspired a number of predictions, which represent promising avenues for future research at the intersection between descriptive linguistics and neurolinguistic research. A final word is in place regarding the empirical basis of the present study. The overwhelming majority of the data come from written sources. It is only in the study of the variation between a quite and quite a that a distinct corpus of spoken language has been investigated separately. Apart from a minor contrast in the average likelihood with which one or the other variant is used, the results indicate the same rhythmically conditioned difference as the written text types to which they have been compared. If anything, the difference is clearer in the written texts than in the spoken ones. With very few exceptions, all the other corpus studies likewise provide robust evidence in favour of rhythmic effects in written texts. These findings should suffice to dispel any doubts as to the suitability of written corpora as a basis for analyses of phonologically motivated effects. It is obvious that written language is subject to preferences bearing on the phonological implementation of utterances even though they are not necessarily pronounced or auditorily processed. While this result lends further

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321

credence to the influence of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, it also allows for conclusions concerning the processing of written language. The inference seems to be justified that linguistic utterances that are intended for writing are nevertheless processed as if they had to be adapted to the needs of the articulatory and auditory apparatus. Thus, writing seems to be more or less directly linked to the processing of spoken language, crucially including such constraints as the preference for rhythmic alternation.

7.2.

Outlook

The findings presented in this work suggest extensions into several specific domains of research, from which this outlook will select only three exemplary ones: first, the analyses accumulated here could be complemented by more studies of a similar kind; second, further potential phonological factors could be investigated with regard to their functional motivations, their impingement on grammatical variation and change in English and their implications for a theory of language; and third, recent neurophysiological and -anatomical insights could be evaluated with a view to bringing them to bear on data about language use. As for the corpus analyses constituting the main part of the present work, it has only been possible to present a limited, but more or less representative assortment of phenomena with the required amount of detail. The studies could of course be multiplied by an inclusion of, for instance, a greater selection of past participle variants, variably suffixed adverbs, verbs with dependent infinitives that alternate between marked and unmarked forms, -ing-forms that gradually lose their a-prefix, and many more. Furthermore, the countless variation phenomena pointed out by observant linguists like Fijn van Draat (1912a, 1912b, 1967), Stroheker (1913), Bihl (1916) and Franz (1986) will be worthwhile objects of study, as well as many others that have not yet received the due attention. We predict that studies of this kind will amplify the evidence already obtained. Going beyond the scope of this work, further corpus-based analyses could, however, explore other promising avenues, some of which have been mentioned along the way. The upbeat phenomena alluded to in section 5.4.1, for instance, are in urgent need of further investigation (for a first attempt, see Schlliter, in preparation a). Similarly, the entire domain of lexical choices that may be decided by the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has merely formed a side-issue to the argument pursued here (cf. sections 4.7, 5.2 and 5.5.2). It may only be speculated that Bolinger's (l965b: 143) hunch holds some truth according to which different lexical units may enter into a competition that is decided on the basis of their rhythmic suitabil-

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Conclusion

ity. A related subject that has completely been left out of consideration is the avoidance of stress lapses. One way of dealing with these violations of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation certainly consists in applying the Beat Addition rule, but another way might be the omission of optional grammatical morphemes, which would represent another influence of the principle on grammatical variation. Finally, it would of course be very interesting to extend the corpus studies to earlier forms of English going back as far as ME and OE. Though appropriate and sufficiently large corpora will be hard to compile, this might reveal interesting facts about the English stress system prior to the massive influence of French. It remains to be seen whether the claim that, taking everything into account, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation has neither gained nor lost influence in the history of English can be upheld in view of earlier stages of the language than have been considered here. The present work has been concerned with just one phonological factor, whose influence on English grammar has been investigated. This has opened up many perspectives that were formerly barred due to the syntactocentrism of the influential generative research paradigm with its supposedly autonomous modules. There is, however, reason to believe that other phonologically motivated preferences can likewise exert an influence on grammatical variation and change and in this way contribute to an improved understanding of the relationship between phonology and grammar. One phonological factor that deserves more attention than it has so far received is located on a level beneath that of syllables and concerns the sequencing of consonants and vowels. The inapplicability of the a-prefix before -ing-forms beginning with a vowel illustrates the preference for consonants and vowels to alternate. Further preliminary results on syllable structure effects have been published in Schliiter (2003: 78-83). It has been shown, among other things, that the presence of the final -n in the ME verb be(n) depends largely on whether the following sound is a consonant or vowel (cf. also Moore 1925: 237-242; Dobson 1972: cxxxvii). Since the-n in ME had the status of a suffix demarcating the infinitive, the past participle and plural verb forms of the indicative and subjunctive from other verb forms, the phenomenon clearly represents a phonological influence on grammar. Many further examples of this type are known to have existed in ME and EModE (cf. Schliiter 2003: 78) and await further investigation. Prosodic units situated on higher systemic levels than the syllable (e.g. the phonological word, the clitic group, the prosodic phrase, the intonational phrase; cf. Shattuck-Hufnagel 1996: 205-250) have frequently been shown to control the applicability of phonological rules, such as assimilation, palatalization, velarization, aspiration, auxiliary reduction, flapping, phoneme deletion, glottalization, linking r, intrusive r and contraction (cf.

Outlook

323

Nespor and Vogel 1986: 6). What is more, it has frequently been shown that they also have the power to determine certain grammatical rules. For instance, the Law of the Increasing Constituents, formulated by Behaghel (1909: 139) and referred to in section 4.6 above, basically represents a phonological sequencing principle: syntactic units of the same grammatical type (e.g. coordinated colour adjectives) tend to be arranged in such a way that their phonological bulk increases towards the end of the sentence. Gil (1987: 121, 129, 131) understands this tendency as an effect of prosodic processing strategies that can be subsumed under the general preference for iambicity (cf. also section 2.1). Bock (1982: 18) favours a different, but not incompatible account. She relates the ordering of elements in the sentence to accessibility, which is, among other factors, determined by the degree of phonological difficulty of a word (in particular, its length and number of segments). On both accounts, the Law of the Increasing Constituents depends - at least in part - on phonological criteria, not on grammatical complexity. All of these phenomena strongly suggest that prosody is not a separate component, coming into play once the syntactic construction of an utterance is completed, but that it interacts with syntax in a complex fashion, forcing massive changes in constituent ordering or the inclusion of additional words. Moreover, as is predicted by a non-modular, interactive grammar, the higher levels of prosody can also interact with the rhythmic level: Franz (1986: 594) argues that stress clashes as well as lapses are particularly objectionable under the main sentence accent, where they would be extremely prominent. A further property of the larger prosodic units is their tendency to end with a strong final prominence (cf. Havers 1931: 179; Bolinger 1965b: 157-164).2 This effect is by no means automatic, but several grammatical strategies have been shown to be required to place appropriate linguistic material in this focus position. Thus, since the main sentence-final accent causes the accent-bearing material to be interpreted as new and informative, conversely, only material fulfilling this expectation is licensed in sentence-final position. This sometimes necessitates a considerable syntactic modification of the sentence (cf. Bolinger 1977c). In a similar vein, Rohdenburg (1976: 198-200) shows that short, mono- or disyllabic adjectives are avoided in sentence-final focus position (e.g. ?Was the harvest good?; ?The town is small.). Instead, either full noun phrases are used or the adjectives are expanded by additional material (e.g. Was the harvest a good one?; Was it a good harvest?; The harvest was very good; The town is small in size.). These strategies all serve to provide sufficiently ample phonological material to accommodate the major sentence-final accent. All of these prosodic phenomena deserve to be studied more systematically. In written corpora, the possibilities are somewhat limited since pro-

324

Conclusion

sodic structure can only be inferred indirectly on the basis of criteria such as syntax and punctuation. Prosodically annotated corpora of spoken language are scarce and of a restricted size. There are, however, experimental methodologies that present an avenue to research on prosodic influences on syntax. A superordinate task would consist in the attempt to integrate higher-level prosodic factors in a neural network model. This would presumably imply a further elaboration of what has been referred to in section 6.3.3 as the third dimension of the neural network, which has so far remained relatively underdeveloped. The Horror ./Equi Principle constitutes a further phonological constraint with the potential to exert an influence on grammatical structure. The term and the first description of the effect stem from Brugmann (1909: 146147), who characterizes horror cequi as an aversion against the repetition of two similar (strings of) sounds, leading to different types of avoidance effects that serve to eliminate this identity. 3 Manifestations of identity avoidance have later on been studied under the labels of the "repeated morph constraint", "morphological haplology" or the "Obligatory Contour Principle".4 Although there may well be morphological, syntactic and even semantic components in such avoidance effects (cf. Bauer 1992: 190; Menn and MacWhinney 1984: 529; Tang 2000: 57), phonological identity or similarity is the sine qua non condition of horror cequi effects (cf. DressIer 1977: 46). Thus, the various definitions of the phenomenon all involve a phonological criterion. Like the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, the Horror ./Equi Principle is no categorical rule (as Bauer 1992: 190 seems to assume), but a weak universal that interacts with other determinants of grammatical variation (cf. Menn and MacWhinney 1984: 529; Tang 2000: 57). Horror cequi effects have been shown to cut across morphological, syntactic and semantic constraints as well as prosodic factors such as stress, boundary width and pause (cf. Bolinger 1979; Booij 1998; Bauer 1992: 190; Tang 2000: 57) and to determine the syntax of English sentences to a considerable extent (cf. Rohdenburg and Schlliter 2000: 462-465; Rohdenburg 2003: 236-242 and references therein; Vosberg 2003: 315-322). As for the functional motivation underlying the Horror ./Equi Principle, DressIer (1977: 44) adduces the need for perceptual differentiation of semantically non-identical morphemes. As has been hinted in section 6.3.6 above, this may be successfully implemented in a spreading activation model in a similar way to the avoidance of sequences of identically stressed syllables. A detailed proposal as to how the different motivations for the avoidance tendency can be disentangled and integrated in a model of language is, however, still pending. A final suggestion as to a phonological tendency apt to influence syntactic word order groups together a set of segmental contrasts that have

Outlook

325

been shown to detennine the ordering of elements in frozen binomials and, by extension, also in less rigid syntactic structures. Landsberg (1994) provides a comprehensive overview of this relatively well-described domain at the borderline between syntax and phraseology. Accordingly, elements with high vowels tend to precede those with low vowels (e.g. tittle-tattle), such with short vowels precede such with long vowels (e.g. wax and wane), such with front vowels precede such with back vowels (e.g. gewgaw), such with spread vowels precede such with rounded vowels (e.g. seesaw), such with fewer initial or final consonants precede such with more (e.g. by hook or by crook), and such with more sonorous initial consonants precede such with less sonorous ones (e.g. hanky-panky; cf. Landsberg 1994: 39-40, and references therein). These segmental phonological criteria moreover interact with prosodic ones, such as the Law of the Increasing Constituents, and with semantic ones. What remains to be elaborated, however, are at least two things: first, the different phonotactic criteria are in need of a functional motivation; and second, a linguistic model has to be developed that is able to accommodate the intricate interactions between multifarious constraints of widely differing levels. The neurolinguistic aspects of the present work have only scratched the surface of an immense field of research that has been flourishing in the recent past and can be expected to continue this way in the future. The present outlook can only mention a few ramifications of the line of argument pursued here with regard to neurophysiological and neuroanatomical research. Since we are as yet far from a precise identification of linguistically relevant units and processes with their neural counterparts, we can only approach the neurocognitive basis of language from two sides: a microscopic and a macroscopic level. Research on the microscopic, neurophysiological level needs to clarify the structures that correspond to the nodes in a linguistic neural network model. The cortical columns described by Anderson (1995: 282-286) and MUller (1996: 628-629; cf. also Lamb 1999: 217,323,326) are the most promising candidates, but hard and fast evidence for this hypothesis is still lacking, and assigning a definable function to a given cortical column is even less realistic. Furthennore, the properties ascribed to the nodes in a neural network model, such as self-inhibition and rebound, which were moreover assumed to correlate in their duration with the height of a node in the system, have to be verified against the neurophysiological reality. Linguistic behaviour (in particular errors in language production) has provided evidence in favour of the psychological reality of linguistic units like phonetic features, phonemes, syllables, etc. However, the current state of neurophysiological research offers no findings to suggest that the hierarchical part-whole relationships that characterize linguistic conceptions of neural

326

Conclusion

networks have their counterparts in the brain. It is also not clear whether and to what degree language perception and production make use of the same units and pathways (as postulated in many linguistic models), or whether the processes are completely separate. Finally, creative semantic and syntactic processes have to date neither been successfully implemented in a model, nor discovered in the brain. In sum, a vast amount of work remains to be done on the microstructure of linguistic processes in the brain. At the other end of the scale, in the neuroanatomical macrostructure of the brain, some findings have been accumulating that might in the long run turn out to be relevant to the linguistic study of the roles played by phonology and grammar. To begin with a very rough subdivision, the two hemispheres of the brain in most people do not have the same share in the processing of language. PulvermUller (2002: 35--43) and MUller (2003: 67) inform us that in 95 percent of normal right-handed people (which make up 85 percent of the entire population) and between 70 or 80 percent of normal left-handed people, language processing is mainly located in the left hemisphere of the brain. In the remaining cases, either the right hemisphere is dominant (in 15 percent of normal left-handed people), or language is represented bilaterally. The neuroanatomical correlate of lateralization is a greater development in the respective hemisphere of the brain areas responsible for language processing. Two important areas are the Wernicke region and the Broca region. 5 According to the surveys prepared by Mayer et al. (1999) and MUller (2003: 74), in the dominant hemisphere, the more narrowly linguistic aspects of language are processed, including an analysis in terms of phonological segments and low-level prosodic aspects such as rhythm. The dominant hemisphere likewise contains the lexicon, storing phonological and morphological information. In contrast, the subdominant hemisphere is responsible for more subtle language-related abilities, for instance the higher-level prosodic analysis of intonation curves and the affective interpretation of the linguistic input (cf. also Ross 1997; Warren 1999: 176; Mayer et al. 2001; PulvermUller 2002: 35--43; MUller 2003: 74). It should, however, be kept in mind that there is no strict localization of language in regions of the brain: with the possible exception of the Wernicke and Broca areas, there are mainly 'virtual' components that have variable neural substrates (cf. MUller 2003: 61). As a further caveat, it has to be pointed out that the secondary literature on the subject also contains evidence contradicting the above generalizations (cf. Mayer et al. 1999). This survey seems to suggest that the lateralization of different components of phonology is fairly clear-cut, with segmental and rhythmic analysis situated in the left hemisphere and intonation and similar aspects in the right hemisphere. Some more specific neuroanatomical findings have shown that the reality is considerably more complex, and they have fur-

Outlook

327

nished hypotheses about the instantiation of phonological processing that can be expected to exert an influence on inter-individual language variation. Interestingly, Shaywitz et at. (1995), Pugh et at. (1997: 311) and Caplan et at. (1999: 1505) report neuroimaging results showing that phonological processing creates activation that is strongly left-Iateralized in males, but more bilateral in females. They interpret this to indicate that males and females rely on different strategies for processing phonology. To take one example, in reading, the average male tends to exploit more direct routes from the visual representation to the lemma, while the average female makes use of the phonological rules of the language to assemble written words and access their meaning, which results in a greater activity of the right hemisphere. In experiments involving words with regular as opposed to irregular grapheme-to-phoneme relationships (e.g. wade /weId/ vs. pint /pamt/), the consequences of these strategies can be discriminated. However, both among males and females, there are different types of readers. These inter-individual differences, though correlated with gender, account for a greater part of the variance in reading performance than gender alone. On the basis of such findings, Caplan et at. (1999: 1514-1515) develop a dual-route model for reading: one route accesses lexemes on a whole-word basis, while the other makes use of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences. 6 These relatively robust findings concern the retrieval of the segmental structure of words. For our purposes, it would be essential to elucidate whether there are any comparable contrasts in the processing of rhythm. So far, the only suggestions with a potential bearing on this domain come from an article by Fodor (2002: 129), who tentatively proposes a distinction between readers with "strong inner prosody" and readers who are immune to implicit prosody effects: the former group make more ample use of (higher-level) prosody in silent reading, whereas the latter group are less prone to errors induced by prosodic interference. A research hypothesis that can be derived from these inter-individual differences is that the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation should play a relatively more prominent role in a group of people that might be classified as having a strong implicit rhythm and/or in female language users. Furthermore, research in neurolinguistics should be extended to other domains of linguistic performance, such as reading aloud, writing, speaking and hearing. It will be interesting to know whether inter-individual and possibly also gender-related contrasts can be detected in the impact of prosody and rhythm on these tasks. In section 3.2, it has been hypothesized that the degree of experience and practice possessed by a writer correlates with the amount of recourse he or she has to the articulatory representation of what he or she is writing. Some further hypotheses concerning the degree to which the preference for rhythmic alternation is implemented under

328

Conclusion

different conditions of language use have been proposed in section 6.3.5. These were motivated by differences in the scope of the lookahead employed in language production. It can be speculated that there might be a relationship between the degree of rhythmic perfection achieved by a language user in a certain situation and the amount of lookahead he or she can marshal, given his or her individual processing capacities. These few, but far-reaching questions demonstrate the innumerable possibilities that are open to research at the crossroads between corpus-based studies and neuro- and psycholinguistic methodologies. It is to be hoped that the considerable advances both in neuroscience and in the computeraided analysis of modem mega-corpora that have been made in the past two decades will continue to progress towards the common goal of all linguistic research: a correct understanding of the way natural language works, given its universal and language-specific conditions.

Appendix

Table 3 provides a survey of the typical stress patterns of English nouns, adjectives and verbs. It has been constructed from the word lists published in Francis and Kucera (1982), which are based on the Brown Corpus, a representative 1 million word corpus of written American English from the year 1961. The lists contain all word lemmas (including basic and inflected forms) of a frequency higher than or equal to five in the Brown Corpus. For the present table, only the 1000 most frequent nouns and verbs have been chosen. In the case of adjectives, Francis and Kucera's list includes only 894 lemmas. There are no pentasyllabic or hexasyllabic verbs among the 1000 most frequent ones. The attribution of primary stress to the first, second, third or a later syllable carried out in the construction of table 3 follows lones (1997). In cases where a lexerne has variable syllable numbers (depending on rate of speech, formality of the situation, etc.), the full form with the highest number of syllables has been chosen. Items in which the location of the primary stress is variable were kept separate. The columns labelled percentage give the proportion of mono-, di-, tri- and multisyllabic noun, adjective and verb lemmas out of the total of 1000 (or 894) sharing the respective syllable numbers and stress patterns. Within the monosyllabic, disyllabic, trisyllabic, etc. categories, the percentage of the lemmas with one particular stress pattern refers to the total for the category. As a basis for the column labelled cumulated frequency, the adjusted frequencies calculated by Francis and Kucera were chosen since these take into account the dispersion of a lemma in the corpus, thus avoiding an undesirable skewing of the data (for details, see the exposition in Francis and Kucera 1982). To obtain an impression of the frequency of each subtype, all lemma frequencies of the words of a particular length in terms of syllables and stress pattern were added up. A cumulated frequency of 32,695.21 for initially stressed disyllabic nouns, for example, means that in a corpus of 1 million words, this type of noun can statistically be predicted to occur 32,695.21 times (dispersion taken into consideration). The column labelled frequency percentage compares the cumulated frequencies and thus represents the chance that any noun, adjective or verb in a representative corpus will have that number of syllables and stress type. A frequency percentage of 48.9 for monosyllabic nouns means that of the sample of 116,667.73 nouns, 48.9 percent are monosyllabic (and thus inherently stressed on their initial syllable). A value of 87.1 percent for initially stressed disyllabic nouns means that of the sample of 37,549.79 disyllabic nouns, 87.1 percent are initially stressed. A much more palatable and reduced version of these data is to be found in figures 2 and 3 in the introduction to Chapter 4. In the creation of these figures, all nouns, adjectives and verbs that have their primary stress on their initial or only syllable were summed up, and similarly for all those that have their stress on their second, third, fourth, etc. syllables.

nouns lemmas

percentage

adjectives

cumulated frequency

cumulated percentage

percentage

cumulated frequency

cumulated percentage

lemmas

percentage

cumulated frequency

cumulated percentage

1i)

!-'J

total

1000

monosyllables stress on 1st syll.

390 390

39.0% 100.0%

57003.91 57003.91

48.9% 100.0%

178 178

19.9% 100.0%

14322.91 14322.91

36.8% 100%

432 432

43.2% 100.0%

53599.55 53599.55

63.4% 100.0%

disyllables stress on 1st syll.

344 296

34.4% 86.0%

37549.79 32695.21

32.2% 87.1%

277 229

31.0% 82.7%

10900.68 9659.83

28.0% 88.6%

427 105

42.7% 24.6%

24506.37 5605.95

29.0% 22.9%

stress on 2nd syll.

47

13.7%

4794.14

12.8%

48

17.3%

1240.85

11.4%

321

75.2%

18856.31

76.9%

variable stress trisyllables stress on 1st syll.

1

0.3%

60.44

0.2%

0

1

0.2%

44.11

0.2%

184 97

18.4% 52.7%

15255.88 8860.62

13.1% 58.1%

256 144

28.6% 56.3%

8381.12 5656.67

21.5% 67.5%

115 60

§ '"

83 4

45.1%

6164.85

102

31.1% 1.2% 0.2%

17.4%

799.66

47.9% 14.2%

§ go

0

99.94 19.66

33 20

variable stress

230.41 0

39.8% 3.5%

2604.85

2.2%

40.4% 1.5%

5633.18 2025.23 2696.65

6.7% 36.0%

stress on 2nd syll. stress on 3rd syll.

11.5% 52.2% 28.7%

111.64

2.0%

tetrasyllables stress on 1st syll.

64 5 32

15.2% 21.3% 55.9%

4424.54 850.51

11.4% 19.2%

752.41 20.52

0.9% 2.7%

2819.68

63.7%

24

1.7% 2.6% 3.8% 92.3%

27

22.8%

754.35

17.0%

1 0

3.8%

2.2%

0 0

0.0%

stress on 2nd syll. stress on 3rd syll. stress on 4th syll. pentasyllables stress on 1st syll.

0 17 0

stress on 2nd syll.

0

stress on 3rd syll. stress on 4th syll.

7 10

stress on 5th syll.

0

hexasyllables stress on 1st syll.

I 0

stress on 2nd syll.

0

stress on 3rd syll.

0

stress on 4th syll. stress on 5th syll.

I 0

stress on 6th syll.

0

116667.73

lemmas

~ \:l-

verbs

894

50.0%

5263.86 374.05 2915.52

55.4%

42.2%

1974.29

37.5%

6.4% 7.8%

4.5% 7.1%

0 1.7%

1478.02 0

41.2% 58.8%

729.66

1.3%

0 748.36

49.4% 50.6%

0 0.1%

100.0%

116.27 0

9 1 136 29 76 31 0 42 0

38944.38

0

0.4%

0 4.7%

859.65 0

0 0

225.46

26.2%

0

66.4%

0

0

4

9.5%

63.46

7.4%

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0.0%

0

0

3

60.0%

39.81

2

15.67

0

40.0% 0.0%

0

0.0%

0.1%

0 0

94.7% 2.5%

0

570.73

55.48 0

0

712.82 19.07

26.2%

0.6% 00%

100.0%

26 1

64.3%

5 0

116.27 0

2

84491.51

11 27 0

0.1%

1000

0.0%

0

0.0%

0 0

0

0

71.8%

0

0

28.2%

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

t"l

[/:J

o q a.~ S'", (JQ"lj

S~

.. a '"rj(l)

8.0

'" ....,

O-(l)

~g

t"l<",

(l)

.....

Pi 1:1' •

(l)

"'..c ~~ \O::s 00 ..... ~::s

:E g o ::s .... 0-.'" =::Pl ~& (l)

t"l .....

:;:-

0.0%

(l)

'" §

0-

~

d-

'"Pl ,

t"l

w

w

o

~

'15 (\l

:::s l:l... ~.

Notes Chapter 1 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

As later exponents of this research tradition, Franz ([1939] 1986) and Bo1inger (1965b; 1981) deserve to be mentioned. An exception is Levelt's (1989: 9) model, which takes account of such influences in the shape of a little arrow running in the opposite direction, from the articulator to the formulator. For a discussion, see Levelt (1989: 279-282). In his most recent re-formulation of the generative model, the Minimalist Program, Chomsky (1995: 187) recognizes the fact that structures that are ideal from a grammatical point of view may violate functional restrictions inherent in the articulatory and perceptual systems and, as a consequence, fail to be realized. Findings that call for a more interactive connection between syntax and phonology are reported, for instance, in Baker (1971), Hetzron (1972: 251-252), Bolinger (1977a), Nespor and Vogel (1986: 300), Zec and Inkelas (1990: 376-377), Inkelas and Zec (1995: 546), Selkirk (2001), Cohan, Quem~, Kager, and Nooteboom (2002). More theoretical discussions are also to be found in Vogel and Kenesei (1990), Mohanan (1995), Inkelas and Zec (1995) and Jackendoff(1997; 2000; 2002). Claims to this effect are expressed by Labov (1969: 759), Bickerton (1971: 483,487), Kiparsky (1982: 116; 1988: 370), Tabor (1994: 14), Hinskens, van Hout, and Wetzels (1997: 2), Anttila and Cho (1998: 32, 40) and Wasow (2002: 132-139).

Chapter 2 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

Lahiri, Riad, and Jacobs (1999: 359) surmise that word-internal stress clash avoidance was only introduced at some stage in the evolution of West and North Germanic. It remains to be seen whether there is a connection between this prosodic change and the development of the stress-timing character of English (cf. section 2.1.2). For instance, Giegerich (1985) and Hayes (1985) use metrical trees only; Selkirk (1984), Nespor and Vogel (1989), Kager (1995) and Hayes (1995) employ autonomous metrical grids, and Liberman and Prince (1977) and Hayes (1984) favour a combination of trees and grids. For a general introduction to the metrical grid convention, the reader is referred to the expositions in Kager (1995: 382) and Hayes (1995: 26-27). For a more complex defmition of rhythm, see Saran (1907: 138). Some matching formulations are to be found in the following sources: Sweet ([1887] 1970: 92), Saran (1907: 58), Jespersen ([1909] 1965a: 156; 1972: 97),

332

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

Notes

Fijn van Draat (1967: 9), Behaghel (1924: vi-vii), Havers (1931: 163-164), Bolinger (1965b: 139; 1981: 72), Schane (1979: 563), Selkirk (1984: 37), Nespor and Vogel (1989: 69, 82). For a contrary opinion, see Bolinger (1981: 33; 1986b: 46), who assumes that ternary patterns tend to be perceived as more natural. About 90 percent of English poetry from the sixteenth century onwards is iambic (cf. Kelly 1988: 108; Kelly and Bock 1988: 389, 399). A seemingly contrary opinion is expressed by Saran (1907: 143), who states that "Die Gliederung, die der prosaischen Rede natiirlich ist, ... ist von Natur umhythmisch oder, wie meist, rhythmuslos", Le. 'the structure characteristic of prose language is umhythmic in nature or, most commonly, devoid of rhythm. ' This evaluation seems to be at least partly due to an understanding of rhythm as the result of a conscious application of rhythmic rules. Similarly, Sievers (1912: 59) assumes that rhythm in ordinary prose is no more than "eine un g e s u c h t e Beigabe zu dem gewollten 1nhalt" [emphasis in the original], i.e. 'an unsought-for addition to the intended contents.' While it is true that speakers and writers in ordinary usage do not consciously adapt their utterances to satisfy the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, the bulk of this monograph is devoted to showing that inadvertently they do take measures to ensure an alternating rhythm, which may at times even go to the expense of the contents. For a study of the influence of poetic metre on the syntax of English verse, see Tarlinskaya (1984). Aijmer, Simon-Vandenbergen and Wichmann (2005) note that the presence or absence of stress may not always be measurable when it comes to natural spoken language. Despite this caveat, for the purposes of the present study, it will be assumed that there is a systematic way in which lexical stress distinctions are reflected in speech production. Statements to this effect are to be found, for instance, in Lenneberg (1967: 109), Hayes (1984: 59), Selkirk (1984: 19), Couper-Kuhlen (1986: 60), Kager (1989: 2) and Nespor and Vogel (1989: 69, 87). To complete the rhythmic typology, a third type of language, of which Japanese is an example, has been argued to be mora-timed. A mora is a subsyllabic unit which can be of five different types: V, CV, CCV, a nasal coda consonant or a geminate consonant (cf. Shattuck-HufuageI1996: 219; Ramus, Nespor, and Mehler 1999: 266; McQueen, Otake, and Cutler 2001: 104). The mora is the basic timing unit of this class of languages which are therefore close to syllable-timed languages; but note that syllables can consist of one or two morae. See furthermore Bertinetto (1989: 113), Plank (1998: 217), Ramus, Nespor and Mehler (1999: 268), Grabe and Low (2002: 518-535). In the examples here and elsewhere, acute accents indicate primary stress. Grave accents are used to mark secondary stress only where this is required by the argument. See, for instance, Jones (1969: 253-254), Selkirk (1984: 46-49, 169-186), Giegerich (1985: 211), Halle and Vergnaud (1987), Nespor and Vogel (1989:

Notes

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

333

75), Schane (1979: 593), Kager (1995: 386), Getty (2002: 130), lackendoff (2002: 113). To the notion of stress shift, some authors prefer the idea that the relevant items have two stressab1e syllables, one of which receives the stress, depending on the rhythmic context (e.g. lones 1969: 253-254; Bolinger 1986a: 60; Gussenhoven 1991: 25). Of course, this trade-off is in no way unique to the phonological domain. Speakers similarly have to adapt their choice of words, syntactic structures, semantic and pragmatic explicitness, etc. to their interlocutors' expectations. This rhythmic account is relativized by Burnley's (1982: 170-172) fmdings to the effect that the presence of variable -e in Chaucer's adjectives is primarily determined by the following phonotactic context (V, or C) and by grammatical class membership. This is not to deny that the origin of the stress asymmetry between nouns and verbs lies considerably deeper in the history of Germanic word stress (cf. Kurylowicz 1975: 9-11). For further discussion of the diffusion ofthe typical stress patterns through the lexicon, see Sherman (1975). A count carried out by Kelly and Bock (1988: 390-391) reveals that 89 percent of the most frequent disyllabic nouns but only 46 percent of the most frequent disyllabic verbs are initially stressed; multisyllabic nouns tend to have their main stress on the antepenultimate syllable, e.g. Canada, America, telephone, attribute, while multisyllabic verbs tend to have theirs on the penultimate syllable, e.g. attribute, solicit, endeavour, imagine. See furthermore McCully (2002: 339-341), who provides some evidence that right-hand stress functions as the default stress pattern for English verbs.

Chapter 3 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

For the dating of the plays, the earliest date mentioned has been adopted, be it the year of the first performance on stage, be it the year of publication in print (which sometimes antedates the first performance). For instance, on this scale, sermons, though spoken, tend to use literate strategies, while personal letters, though written, are relatively close to the oral extreme (cf. Nevalainen and Raurnolin-Brunberg 2003: 29). This is not to deny the fact that a lot of narrative prose was written to be read aloud. Dickens' novels are a prominent example from the nineteenth century. This diachronic comparison neglects the fact that the genre has demonstrably changed in character between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries (cf. Biber and Finegan 1989: 498-512 and the discussion in section 4.8). For an expression of similar hypotheses, see Hayes (1995: 372).

334

Notes

Chapter 4 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

Getty (2000: 63) comes to the conclusion that function words (in his case, auxiliary-like words) do not possess a prosodic structure of the kind that content words have: while the latter place defmite requirements on the location of primary stresses, the former are rhythmically adaptable to the context. For more detailed discussions of prosodic roles played by function words, see Seppanen (1997) and Shattuck-Hufnagel (1996: 215). For the present work, this is, however, only a side issue. Compare also the data provided in Mondorf (2003: 276), which show that attributive uses correlate with a high probability of stress clashes. In the CELEX database, Berg (2000: 274) finds an even more extreme tendency for nouns to involve initial stress. As many as 94.1 percent of his disyllabic nouns are initially stressed, as opposed to 90.1 percent of his adjectives and 58.9 percent of his verbs. Among his trisyllabic words, the nouns are initially stressed in 71.6 percent of the cases, the adjectives in 49.3 percent and the verbs in 71.3 percent. The corresponding figures based on the Francis and Kucera list can be found in table 3 in the Appendix. Among the disyllabic nouns, 86.0 percent are initially stressed, as compared to 82.7 percent of the adjectives and a mere 24.6 percent of the verbs. Among the trisyllabic words, 52.7 percent of the nouns, 56.3 percent of the adjectives and 52.2 percent of the verbs are initially stressed. Note that the lemmas included in the calculation of figures 2 and 3 represent a twofold distortion of the original database, the Brown Corpus. For one thing, Francis and Kucera (1982) restrict their lists to the lemmas occurring at least five times in the corpus. For another, the figures extracted for current purposes are limited to the 1000 most frequent nouns and verbs within these lists. As a consequence, the less frequent lemmas present in the Brown Corpus are excluded from the study of stress patterns. This presumably means that a truly representative selection of nouns, adjectives and verbs would involve relatively more plurisyllabic and thus fewer initially stressed lemmas. If these data are, however, taken with a pinch of salt, they nevertheless afford a convincing argument in favour ofthe initial stress of nouns. Though these are the main points to be derived from the analysis of the Francis and Kucera data, some further interesting observations can be made on the rhythmic properties of English words, only some of which can be highlighted here. One fmding that stands out in figures 2 and 3 is that adjectives are intermediate between nouns and verbs, the latter showing a relatively high proportion of lemmas stressed on their second syllable. These results are in line with Berg's (2000) argument to the effect that nouns and verbs in English form a continuum with regard to many very diverse characteristics, on which adjectives occupy an intermediate position. Furthermore, table 3 of the Appendix strongly supports Kelly and Bock's (1988: 391) premise, quoted in section 2.2, that English nouns exhibit a predisposition towards initial stress, while verbs incline towards fmal stress. In table 3, disyllabic nouns, for instance, have initial stress in 86.0 percent of the lemmas and 87.1 percent of the to-

Notes

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kens. Disyllabic verbs in contrast have fmal stress in the majority of cases: 75.2 percent of the lemmas and 76.9 percent of the tokens. For trisyllabic nouns and verbs, this clear contrast is of course watered down, but the main stress of nouns still shows a pull to the left and that of verbs one to the right. The data also buttress Berg's (2000: 284-286) conclusions concerning adjectives: like nouns, disyllabic adjectives have their main stress on the initial syllable in 82.7 percent of the lemmas and 88.6 percent of the tokens since they are subject to a pressure towards early stress placement, especially in attributive position. 6. The alternative explanation holding that worser derives from a ME disyllabic pronunciation of worse, is considered unlikely by Erades (1963: 234) and fails to convince due to the absence of any attested parallels. 7. Erades (1963: 234-235), in contrast, alleges that there is a similar meaning distinction between worse and worser as between less and lesser: accordingly, worser is used only in explicit or implicit opposition to better. From the corpus examples, such a distinction is, however, not evident (cf. also Arnold 1970: 295), and explicit oppositions of worser to better can be accounted for in a different way (cf. below). 8. For an overview of grammarians' statements on worser and lesser, dating from EModE onwards, see Rohr (1929: 91-92), Knorrek (1938: 45-46), Sundby, Bj0rge, and Haugland (1991: 351-354), Graband (1965: 192-193) and ArnoId (1970: 287-288). 9. The double comparative near underwent a different fate after phonological changes had obscured its relationship to the original positive nigh: near was re-interpreted as the positive and a redundantly marked form nearer took over the comparative function. Although convincing empirical data are hard to fmd (but compare the line from Shakespeare's Macbeth quoted in (i)), it may be speculated that in the transition phase, while both near and nearer could function as comparatives, rhythm played a determining role in their choice. (i) The neere in blOod, the neerer blOody. (William Shakespeare: Macbeth, 1605; OED 21994, s.v. near (adv.)) While it was prescriptivism that decided the fate of worser, in the case of nearer, system congruity prevailed. 10. The figures in brackets give the size of the respective corpus sections in million words. 11. Though it is true that the ME and EModE stress systems differed in some systematic ways from the system as it has come down to us (cf. Dobson 1968: 445-449; Strang 1970: 86-87; Ekwall 1975: 5-9; Markus 1990: 72; 1994: 188-192, 196-197), the labels 'preceding a stressed syllable' and 'preceding an unstressed syllable' have been assigned following PDE usage. For native English words, this assumption is largely uncontested. For French loanwords, which had word-fmal stress in the language of origin, this relies on Minkova's (2000a: 440, 451) evidence from ME verse, suggesting that Romance loan words (in particular nouns and adjectives) generally adopted the Germanic initial stress pattern immediately without a period of vacillation.

336

Notes

12. Despite the apparent vagueness of this defmition of pause, none of the relevant corpus examples leaves any doubt about whether or not the pause is sufficiently marked, since worse and worser typically occur clause-finally. For a more technical description of pause as a syntactic and prosodic disjuncture, see Selkirk (1984: 301-320). 13. The results of the chi-square test applied to the proportions of worse- and worser-selection in single attributive and other contexts for the individual centuries yield highly significant results for all subperiods but the ei~hteenth century, in which the worser-variant is too infrequent: 1518-1600: X = 14.50, df = 1, P = 0.0001 (***); 1601-1700: X2 = 71.76, df= 1, P = 2.43'10- 17 (***); 1701-1780: X2 = 0.01, df= 1, P = 0.91 (n.a.); 1781-1903: X2 = 12.25, df= 1, P = 0.0005 (***). 14. Similar effects have been noticed by linguists in a variety of contexts; cf. Havers (1931: 69-70; 181), Kuno (1987: 7-11), Rohdenburg (1998: 205). 15. Quirk et al. (1985: 408) and Jacobsson (1996: 206) distinguish between aadjectives (e.g. afraid, alert, asleep, awake) and a-adverbs (e.g. aboard, abroad, around, awlry), which due to their adverbial nature are even less likely to appear in prenominal position. 16. Compare also Rohdenburg (1997: 105) with regard to the item alike. 17. Adverbs that do not modifY the a-adjectives in a narrow sense but have scope over the entire predication have not been included among the premodified uses (e.g. actually, obviously, alwlrys, suddenly, etc.). 18. The contrasts are both statistically highly significant: ashamed: X2 = 4220.34, df= 1, P = 0 (***); aware: X2 = 168.19, df= 1, P = 1.84'10-38 (***). 19. The same conclusion is reached by Jacobsson (1996: 217). Bolinger (1967: 2 et passim) contains a more general, but concurring critique of this view. 20. Exceptions are provided by a few cases where -ed forms an adjective, e.g. dogged, wicked, crooked, learned, naked, blessed, aged (cf. Bolinger 1965a: 147-149; Bailey 1987: 150). Bolinger motivates this with the need for a buffer syllable in these adjectives, which often occur prenominally. 21. The stem vowel in both the suffixed and the suffixless forms can vary between u, a and o. For the sake of simplicity, no distinction was made in the presentation of the data between different vocalisms, but care was taken to eliminate all instances of past tense forms that can equally assume all three vowels, illustrating the longstanding insecurity concerning vowel grades in the English strong verb system (cf. e.g. Bybee and Slobin 1982: 287; Bybee and Moder 1983: 252-253). Interestingly, the eliminated past tense forms bear witness to an increasing establishment of the form drank, at first present in only 69 percent of the cases in the ME subsection, at the expense of the drunk- and dronkforms. The demise of drunk and dronk in past tense uses was virtually complete in the eighteenth century. 22. The chi-square results for the individual subsections are: 1150-1500: l = 3.6, df= 1, f = 0.057 (n.a.); 1518-1700: X2 = 1484.55, df= 1, P = 0 (***); 17011780: X = 1016.91, df= 1, P = 3.78'10-233 (***); 1781-1903: ~2 = 2186.07, df = 1, P = 0 (***); 1960-1993: l = 1120.29, df= 1, P = 1.29·10- 45 (***).

Notes

337

23. The results of the chi-square test for the individual subsections are: 15181700: X2 = 26.70, df= 1, p = 2.38.10-7 (n.a.); 1701-1780: = 9.24, df= 1, P 8 = 0.002 (n.a.); 1781-1903: X2 = 29.16, df = 1, P = 6.66'10- (n.a.); 19608 2 1993: X = 29.15, df= 1, P = 6.69'10- (***). 24. It can be mentioned in passing that the use of brake-variants as past tense forms declines sharply from ME, where they account for over 90 percent of the cases, via EModE, with about 50 percent, to eighteenth-century LModE, where they represent a single percentage point. 25. The difference between single unmodified attributive uses and non-attributive uses is significant in all corpus subsections: 1150-1500: = 1.82, df= 1, P = 0.18 (n.s.); 1518-1700: X2 = 234.91, df= 1, P = 5.08,10- 3 (***); 1701-1780: X2 = 555.83, df= 1, P = 6.78'10- 123 (***); 1781-1903: X2 = 267.06, df= 1, P = 4.95·10--{)0 (***); 1960-1993: X2 = 27.15, df= 1, P = 1.88'10-7 (***). 26. The differences for non-attributive uses between dramatic and non-dramatic 2 works are statisticall~ highly significant throughout: 1518-1700: X = 238.06, 2 df= 1, p = 1.04·10- 3 (***); 1701-1780: X = 131.32, df= 1, p = 2.11'10-30 (***); 1781-1903: X2 = 76.12, df= 1, p = 2.68'10- 18 (***). 27. The chi-square test distinguishing between single unmodified attributive uses and other attributive uses fails to reach statistical significance due to the lack of occurrences of broke. Yet, the figures look more convincing in the middle of the period investigated: 1150-1500: n.a.; 1518-1700: = 8.07, df= 1, P = 0.0045 (n.a.); 1701-1780: = 33.62, df= 1, P = 6.69'10-9 (n.a.); 1781-1903: X2 = 19.49, df= 1, P = 1.01'10-5 (n.a.); 1960-1993: X2 = 3.24, df= 1, P = 0.071 (n.a.). 28. The differences for non-attributive uses between dramatic and non-dramatic works are statistically highly significant for all subperiods except the eighteenth century: 1518-1700: X2 = 130.80, df= 1, P = 2.74'10-30 (***); 17011780: = 1.03, df= 1, P = 0.31 (n.s.); 1781-1903: X2 = 15.03, df= 1, p = 0.0001 (***). 29. The difference between non-attributive uses and complex attributive structures as measured by the chi-square test is highly significant as soon as the numbers of examples in the latter category become sufficient in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: 1150-1500: n.a.; 1518-1700: = 3.21, df= 1, P = 0.073 (n.a.); 1701-1780: X2 = 9.08, df = 1, P = 0.0026 (n.a.); 1781-1903: X2 = 694.08, df = 1, P = 5.80'10- 153 (***); 1960-1993: X2 = 96.77, df = 1, P = 7.8'10-23 (***). 30. The difference between complex attributive structures and single unmodified attributive uses as measured by the chi-square test is highly significant for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: 1150-1500: n.a.; 1518-1700: X2 = 0.38, df = 1, P = 0.54 (n.a.); 1701-1780: X2 = 3.48, df = 1, P = 0.062 (n.a.); 17812 20 1903: X = 83.26, df= 1, P = 7.20'10- (***); 1960-1993: X2 = 12.53, df= 1, P = 0.0004 (***). 31. At the same time, it goes against Bolinger's (1975: 462) suggestion to the effect that the longer variants of past participles (e.g. knitted, burned, bereaved) tend to be interpreted as referring iconically to processes with a temporal extension, while the shorter variants (e.g. knit, burnt, bereft) tend to be

l

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338

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

Notes interpreted as referring to the results of completed actions (cf. also Quirk 1970). In this case at least, the need to separate stressed syllables in attributive structures seems to prevail. The results of the chi-square test for the individual subperiods are: 115013 1500: n.a.; 1518-1700: n.a.; 1701-1780: X2 = 51.32, df= 1, P = 7.86'102 2 (***); 1781-1903: X = 5.13, df= 1, P = 0.024 (*); 1960-1993: X = 0.51, df= 1, P = 0.48 (n.s.). The differences between other attributive uses and single unmodified attributive uses as measured by the chi-square test are highly significant from the 2 eighteenth century onwards: 1150-1500: n.a.; 1518-1700: n.a.; 1701-1780: X 2 = 21.36, df = 1, P = 3.82'10-6 (***); 1781-1903: X = 44.22, df = 1, P = 2.94'10- 11 (***); 1960-1993: X2 = 41.38, df= 1, P = 1.25'10- 10 (***). Fijn van Draat is sometimes too rigid in the application of the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. According to him (1912a: 38), in combination with disyllabic modifiers like dimly in our example (36c), the equally disyllabic form lighted is expected, so as to create a perfectly alternating rhythm. This prediction is, however, not borne out by the data: the distribution of lit and lighted does not vary noticeably with the number of syllables of the premodifier. Since the search expressions employed in this analysis included an initial wildcard in order to retrieve all prefixed forms and compounds spelled in one word, the search yielded a number of forms that had to be discounted. For instance, all occurrences of highlighted were eliminated since its counterpart *highlit does not exist (apart from one or two idiosyncratic occurrences; cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 113). Participial forms of light in the sense of 'descend, dismount, fall' and of alight in the same sense were also excluded since they derive from a different verb stem (see OED 2 1994: S.v. light (v. I)). Contrary to Quirk et al.'s claim (1985: 113), however, the verb alight also forms an irregular past participle alit. The two early ME examples are: (i) ... pe sixte is pat elizabet was liht ofpe holie gost pe was on pe child pe hie mide hiede. (Trinity Homilies; HC ME I) (ii) & heom mid mycele arwuronesse heald Foroan oe purh heom all middaneart sceal wuroan onliht. (History ofthe Holy Rood-Tree; HC ME I) The unidentified reservoir does not seem to have been the past tense uses, which were excluded from the data under consideration. The evolution of the past tense forms has taken the same path as that of non-attributive uses of the past participle: the disyllabic variants accounted for 90 percent of the occurrences in the period from 1518-1700, 89 percent from 1701-1780, 64 percent from 1781-1903 and 3 percent from 1960-1993. The differences between single unmodified attributive uses and non-attributive uses as measured by the chi-square test are: 1150-1500: n.a.; 1518-1700: X2 = 3.53, df = 1,1' = 0.060 (n.a.); 1701-1780: = 4.77, df = 1, P = 0.029 (*); 1781-1903: X = 101.42, df= 1, P = 7.44·10- 4 (***); 1960-1993: X2 = 378.79, df= 1, P = 2.27'10-84 (***).

t

Notes

339

39. The differences between other attributive uses and the two other categories are very highly significant in the nineteenth century, but in the late twentieth century, non-attributive uses have almost caught up. The results of the chi-square test are: 1781-1903: X2 = 378.09, df= 1, P = 3.24'10-84 (***); 1960-1993: X2 = 389.67, df= 1, P = 9.76'10-87 (***). Those for other attributive structures compared to non-attributive uses are: 1781-1903: X2 = 257.95, df = 1, P = 5.74'10-58 (***); 1960-1993: l = 6.03, df= 1, P = 0.014 (*). 40. For the weak verbs knit and light and their -ed-suffix, the original situation is not as clear. 41. Paradis works with the London Lund Corpus of spoken present-day British English, which is prosodically annotated, and can use the location of the intonational nucleus to help her determine the contextually appropriate meaning of quite. Nevertheless, she fmds no general rule and concludes that the meaning of quite is particularly unstable (cf. Paradis 1997: 18, 154). 42. The chi-square test is not applicable to the first subsection and insignificant for the second, but reaches high levels of significance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: 1518-1700: X2 = 5.58, df = 1, P = 0.018 (n.a.); 17011780: X2 = 0.79, df= 1, P = 0.37 (n.s.); 1781-1903: X2 = 40.83, df= 1, p = 1.66'10- 10 (***); 1960-1993: = 18.50, df= 1, p = 1.70'10-5 (***). 43. If Bolinger (1972: 139-145) is right in hypothesizing that the non-canonical attributive structures listed under (37) are equally due to the avoidance of stress clashes, then these cases provide further exceptions to Minkova's generalization. 44. The results of the chi-square test for the three subperiods in which a comparison of the totals is possible are: 1518-1700: (n.a.); 1701-1780: X2 = 9.93, df= 1, P = 0.0016 (**); 1781-1903: X2 = 2.76, df= 1, P = 0.096 (n.s.). 45. For the twentieth century, written-to-be-spoken data that are parallel to the imaginative prose section of the BNC are unfortunately unavailable. See, however, the results displayed further down in figure 15 for spoken PDE. 46. The results of the chi-square test for the difference between the totals for the third and fourth subperiod are: X2 = 30.38, df= 1, P = 3.56'10-8 (***). 47. The differences between all three text types are highly significant, as is testified by the following chi-square results: spoken British English vs. British fictional prose: X2 = 37.46, df= 1, P = 9.31'10- 10 (***); British fictional prose vs. British newspapers: l = 28.33, df = 1, P = 1.02'10-7 (***); ~oken British English vs. British newspapers: X2 = 201.54, df= 1, P = 9.65,10 6 (***). 48. The results ofthe chi-square test are: = 33.39, df= 1, P = 7.56'10-9 (***). 49. The results of the chi-square test applied to the differences within each text type are: spoken language: = 3.47, df= 1, P = 0.062 (n.s.); fictional prose: X2 = 18.50, df= 1, P = 1.710'10-5 (***); newspapers: X2 = 291.25, df= 1, P = 2.66·1O--{j5 (***). 50. A similar study that was, however, based on a different corpus and made use of a considerably less refmed methodology is published in Schlilter (2002a: 198-201).

l

l

l

340

Notes

51. To name just a few prominent examples, Abraham (1950), Malkiel (1959), Huber (1974), Gustafsson (1976), Cooper and Ross (1975), Landsberg (1994), and Benor and Levy (to appear) can be mentioned here. 52. For a discussion of the role of constraints in the conventionalization (freezing) of the ordering of binomials, see Benor and Levy (to appear). 53. Behaghel (1909: 139) writes: "So bildet sich unbewuBt in den Sprachen ein eigenartiges rhythmisches Gefiihl, die Neigung, vom kiirzeren zum Hingeren Glied iiberzugehen; so entwickelt sich das, was ich, urn einen ganz knappen Ausdruck zu gewinnen, als das Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder bezeichnen mochte." ('Thus, languages develop a particular unconscious rhythmic intuition, the preference to proceed from shorter to longer constituents, which I will concisely refer to as the Law of the Increasing Constituents. ') 54. The chi-square test gives the following results: X2 = 53.28, df = 1, P = 2.89'10- 13 (***). 55. Only among the attributive uses, all pairs involving yellow and redpremodifying the noun card(s) were excluded. 56. In connection with adverbs like too, overly and crazily used as degree modifiers, yet another stress pattern suggests itself: not can be relatively destressed in favour of an ironic stress on the adverb. Thus, the stress clash is circumvented in a different way, for which the presence of the intervening adverb is, however, quite as crucial. Compare the stress marks in (i). (i) Don Hutchison allowed Mark Schwarzer, the not overly flustered Australian goalkeeper, to block his effortfrom eight yards, ... (The Guardian 2000) 57. The difference between initially and noninitially stressed adjectives is very highly significant: X2 = 975.02, df= 1, P = 4.84'10-214 (***). 58. This refmed set of examples accounts for the discrepancies between the data published in Schliiter (2003: 98) and those displayed in figure 18. 59. The chi-square test yields no significant results for the contrast between initially and noninitially stressed adjectives: X2 = 0.24, df= 1, P = 0.62 (n.s.). 60. The difference between the data for noninitially stressed adjectives in figure 17 and figure 18 is statistically highly significant: X2 = 18.01, df = 1, P = 2.20'10-5 (***). 61. The results of the chi-square test are: X2 = 0.46, df= 1, P = 0.50 (n.s.). 62. The figures in brackets give the absolute number of complex attributive structures of the type concerned.

Chapter 5 1.

It is true that even in combination with away, go in all probability loses some of its stress on account of the stronger stress on the second syllable of the particle. The limited defmition of prosodic overshadowing employed here is thus still a simplification with regard to the complex prosodic structure of a sen-

Notes

341

tence, but this reduction is methodologically necessary. For further discussion, see section 5.3.3. 2. Note that a few marginal instances of certainly and obviously, both of which are considered by Swan (1988: 43, 53) to be modal adverbs and thus incompatible with not-negation, are found in combination with not. However, these occurrences are restricted to truly marginal cases such as (i) and (ii), where the adverbs are used contrastively. In the United States the death rate has been falling over the past year (i) or two probably, but not certainly, because ofthe widespread use of the PSA test to aid early diagnosis. (The Times 2000) (ii) Obviously he has changed the orchestra. Not so obviously, he has changed us, the audience ... (The Guardian 1998) 3. For the possible surface positions of evaluative sentence adverbs and the use of punctuation, see Swan (1988: 34-35). 4. Since 17 instances of initially stressed sentence adverbs are an insufficient basis for the application of the chi-square test, statistical significance cannot be established. However, the results of the calculation look extremely convincing: X2 = 774.00, df= I, P = 2.42'10- 170 (n.a.). 5. This tallies well with the fmdings in Schlliter (2003: 99), which revealed 11 initially stressed sentence adverbs, none of them without a modifier. 6. To retrieve a representative sample of sentence adverbs, words suffixed in -ly were searched that were preceded by either a full stop or a comma and followed by a comma. Examples (i) to (iv) illustrate the hits obtained from this search. (i) Sadly, Paul Gascoigne cannot say the same. (The Daily Mail 1999) (ii) Williams got the job of 'Eclipse Planning Co-ordinator', ominously, on April 1. (The Daily Mail 1998) (iii) Unfortunately, there arefew signs ofthis actually happening. (The Daily Telegraph 1998) (iv) Surprisingly, Norton doesn't hold a grudge. (The Times 2000) 7. The chi-square test yields the following insignificant difference: X2 = 0.47, df = 1, P = 0.49 (n.s.). 8. Compared to the noninitially stressed attributive adjectives negated by not, 40 percent of which have intervening adverbs, the noninitially stressed sentence adverbs negated by not have a significantly lower frequency of intervening adverbs: X2 = 1174.01, df= 1, P = 2.72'10-257 (***). In the case of attributes negated by never, the number of noninitially stressed adjectives is insufficient for the application of the chi-square test. However, the frequency of intervening buffers reaches 18 percent, which differs markedly from the 2 percent obtained for negated sentence adverbs. 9. Nevalainen and Rissanen (2002: 378-379) interpret this lasting variability as a phenomenon of layering, insofar as earlier suffixless forms constitute an older, irregular layer in an otherwise regular -ly-paradigm. 10. As an exception to this rule, Nevalainen (1997: 170) names, among others, the adverb scarce, which can occur suffixless in expressions like can scarce be answered. More instances of this kind will be investigated in section 5.3.3.

342

Notes

11. Further items that were discarded from the analysis are compounds of the type quick-eyed, quick-sighted, quick-tempered and quick-witted, which invariably involve the unmarked form quick. 12. The results of the chi-square test for the difference between the totals for the fIrst and second subperiods run to l = 80.74, df = 1, P = 2.59'10- 19 (***), those for the second and third subperiods to l = 57.93, df = 1, P = 2.71'10- 14 (***), and those for the third and fourth subperiods to X: = 209.05, df= 1, P = 2.21'10--47 (***). 13. It is possible that one of the exceptions should properly be eliminated: if unmarked quick in example (i) represents an attribute coordinated with warm, it does not belong to the adverbial category. (i) I took itfor our little Annie's voice (for she could call any robin), and gathering quick warm comfort, sprang up the steep way towards the starlight. (Richard Doddridge Blackmore: Loma Doone, 1869; NCF) 14. For the difference between examples preceding a stressed syllable and examples preceding a punctuation mark, the chi-square test is inapplicable to the fIrst and second subperiods due to the insubstantial divergence in the fIrst and the insufficient data in the second subperiod. For the two later subperiods, it however yields signifIcant results: 1518-1700: X2 = 0.96, df = 1, P = 0.33 (n.a.); 1701-1780: X2 = 3.03, df= 1, P = 0.08 (n.a.); 1781-1903: X2 = 23.21, df = 1, P = 1.45·1O--{) (***); 1960-1993: X2 = 6.59, df= 1, P = 0.010 (**). For the difference between examples preceding a stressed syllable and examples preceding an unstressed syllable, the chi-square test yields signifIcant results for the two middle subperiods, while the discrepancies are too weak in the earliest and latest sUbperiods: 1518-1700: l = 2.48, df = 1, p = 0.12 (n.s.); 17011780: X2 = 18.57, df= 1, P = 1.64'10-5 (***); 1781-1903: X2 = 27.90, df= 1, P = 1.27-10-7 (***); 1960-1993: X2 = 2.95, df= 1, p = 0.09 (n.s.). 15. The difference is signifIcant for the eighteenth century and even for the late twentieth century (due to high example numbers), though the contrast is reversed here and the difference of no more than 3 percent between the two contexts is linguistically inconclusive: 1518-1700: X2 = 2.11, df = 1, P = 0.15 (n.s.); 1701-1780: X2 = 21.08, df= 1, P = 4.4HO--{) (***); 1781-1903: X2 = 1.92, df= 1, P = 0.17 (n.s.); 1960-1993: l = 12.61, df= 1, P = 0.00038 (***). 16. The tendency to stress prepositions in certain unstressed surroundings in the focus position of a prosodic phrase, referred to above, can be seen as another manifestation of this tendency. 17. The same aversion against too insubstantial elements occurring at the end of a sentence is already noted by Havers (1931: 179). Quantitative support for this tendency has also been found in unpublished work carried out by Giinter Rohdenburg and myself within the Paderbom research project Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English. 18. This categorization refers exclusively to the formal presence or absence of the adverbial marker -ly. Thus, combinations like quick and well, where the second is a suppletive form without -ly, are counted as pairs of unmarked adverbs, whereas combinations like hard and quickly, where the fIrst is a common suffixless adverb, are counted as mixed pairs.

Notes

343

19. The tendency to give a parallel form to elements having a parallel meaning is a converse effect to the so-called Horror .!Equi Principle (to be introduced in section 5.4.4), which disfavours (near-)identical forms in the case of nonparallel meanings. 20. While the chi-square test is not applicable to the fIrst two corpus sections, it yields signifIcant contrasts for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: 17821903: X2 = 14.33, df= 1, P = 0.00015 (***); 1960-1993: X2 = 5.40, df= I, P = 0.020 (*). 21. Compounds involving slow or slowly combined with a present or past participle (e.g. slow(ly)-moving, slow-burning, slow-cooked, slow-wilted, slowlypassing, slowly-ebbing) were not included in the following count. 22. The chi-square test is not applicable to the two earlier corpus subsections, in which the sample size of unmarked adverbs is too small, and there are no signifIcant differences in the quota of adverbial marking between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 23. The difference is not yet signifIcant in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century = 1.24, df= I, P = corpus, but in every later corpus section: 1518-1700: 0.27 (n.s.); 1705-1780: X2 = 27.85, df= I, P = 1.31'10- (***); 1782-1903: X2 = 336.88, df = 1, P = 3.06'10-75 (***); 1960-1993: X2 = 40.66, df = 1, P = 1.81'10- 10 (***). 24. Though the differences between instances preceding stressed syllables and those preceding unstressed syllables or punctuation marks appear bigger in the fIrst two corpus sections than in the later two, they become signifIcant only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for which there are enough examples in the former category. For the comparison between stressed and unstressed following contexts, the chi-square test yields: 1782-1903: X2 = 16.20, df = 1, p = 5.71'10-5 (***); 1960-1993: X2 = 8.54, df= 1, p = 0.0034 (***). For the comparison between stressed following contexts and punctuation marks, it yields: 2 1782-1903: X = 12.91, df= 1, P = 0.00033 (***); 1960-1993: X2 = 15.10, df = 1, P = 0.0001O-{j (***). 25. The difference is signifIcant only in the eighteenth- and twentieth-century data: 2 1705-1780: X = 14.70, df= 1, P = 0.00013 (***); 1960-1993: X2 = 5.51, df= 1, P = 0.019 (*). 26. The results of the chi-square test are: 1782-1903: = 9.93, df= 1, P = 0.0016 (**); 1960-1993: X2 = 40.36, df= 1, P = 2.12'10- 1 (***). 27. The differences between the three rhythmic categories within the domain of non-coordinated uses are signifIcant in two out of three cases: before stressed vs. unstressed syllables: X2 = 4.51, df= 1, P = 0.033 (n.a.); before stressed syllables vs. punctuation marks: X2 = 12.59, df= 1, p = 0.00039 (***); before unstressed syllables vs. punctuation marks: X2 = 9.84, df= 1, p = 0.0017 (**). 28. The results of the chi-square test for this comparison are, however, insignifIcant: X2 = 2.35, df= 1, P = 0.12 (n.s.). 29. Though the results of the chi-square test look very convincing, the test is not properly applicable because the number of coordinated instances is slightly too low: non-coordinated vs. coordinated uses before unstressed syllables: X2 =

-l

l

344

30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

Notes 26.10, df= 1, P = 3.25'10-7 (n.a.); non-coordinated vs. coordinated uses before 5 punctuation marks: X2 = 19.30, df= 1, P = 1.12'10- (n.a.). The role played by the occurrence at the end of a prosodic unit seems to have the opposite effect as in the case of quick(ly). While we have been able to explain the greater appropriateness of unmarked slow under the end-focus, it remains unclear why slow is more frequent in the end-focus position than before unstressed syllables. The modal auxiliaries employed in this search strategy were: can, could, shall, should, may, might, will, would, must, dare, dared, dares, need, needed, needs. The chi-square test yields the following results: X2 = 65.61, df = 1, P = 9.15'10- 16 (***). The difference between prosodically overshadowed and initially stressed verbs seems statistically significant; however, the frequency of scarce in these contexts is too low, so that the conditions for the chi-square test are not met: X2 = 8.24, df = 1, P = 0.0041 (n.a.). For the difference between accentually overshadowed and noninitially stressed verbs, the chi-square test is applicable but slightly exceeds the 5-percent error probability allowed for statistical significance: X2 = 3.37, df= 1, P = 0.066 (n.s.). The results of the chi-square test are: l = 548.07, df = 1, P = 3.31'10- 121 (***). The resulting values of the chi-square test are: X2 = 10.44, df= 1, P = 0.0012 (**). But see the studies of the variable marking of infinitives dependent on make and bid in Rohdenburg and Schliiter (2000: 480--488) and Schliiter (2002b: 266-269), which represent earlier versions of the analyses presented in sections 5.4.2 and 5.4.3. A further simplification consists in the lack of differentiation between the simple infmitive marker to and its bimorphemic altemant for to, which very occasionally crops up in the EEPF data; cf. example (i). (i) Great dyligence made the christen men/or to assayl the citye. (Anon.: Ualentyne and Orson, 1565?; EEPF) The results of the chi-square test applied to the difference between noninitially stressed and overshadowed infmitives are: l = 5.60, df= 1, P = 0.018 (*). For the difference between noninitially and initially stressed infinitives, the test yields: X2 = 9.49, df = 1, P = 0.0021 (**). The difference between initially stressed and overshadowed infmitives is, however, insignificant: X2 = 0.19, df = 1, P = 0.66 (n.s.). The fact that the coverage of the EEPF corpus begins as early as 1518, and that of the EPD corpus only in 1540 does not play as great a role as one might suppose. Of the 211 works included in the EEPF corpus, only 4 are dated earlier than 1540; the coverage becomes clearly more dense in the second half of the sixteenth century. For initially stressed infmitives in the EEPF corpus, the results of the chisquare test are l = 5.18, df= 1, P = 0.023 (*). For the EPD corpus, they narrowly fail to reach a sufficient confidence level because the number of exam-

Notes

41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53. 54.

345

pIes in the EPD data is too low for the statistical test: X2 = 3.16, df= I, P = 0.075 (n.s.). For prosodically overshadowed infinitives in the EEPF corpus, the chi-square test yields: X2 = 0.15, df= I, P = 0.70 (n.s.). For noninitially stressed infinitives in the EEPF corpus, we obtain: X2 = 0.042, df = I, P = 0.84 (n.s.). The test is not applicable to the corresponding EPD data. The differences are too slight and based on too few examples to pass the chisquare test. A possible explanation would be the requirement of an unstressed upbeat to precede the first stressed syllable in a syntactic and prosodic sub-unit of a sentence. For a detailed discussion of the upbeat phenomenon, see Schliiter (in preparation a). For a collection of references, see Rohdenburg (1996: 162). The corpus is larger and the rhythmic distinctions made are finer than in Schltiter (2002b: 266-269), which involved only non-dramatic works and did not distinguish prosodically overshadowed infmitives as an extra class. The following forms of be were included: am, are, art, is, be, bee, beeing(e), beeyng(e), being(e), beying(e), been(e), ben, was, wast, wer, were, wert. The difference between initially and noninitially stressed contexts is very highly significant both for the first and second chronological co~us sections: 1518-1700: X2 = 21.35, df= 1, p = 6.82'10-6 (***); 1701-1780: X = 16.30, df = 1, P = 5.42'10-5 (***). The study basically employed the same search strategy as in the case of passive make, Le. the set offorms of the auxiliary be given in note 46 above were used, this time immediately followed by one of the participial variants bid, bidd, bidde, byd, bydd, bydde, bid'n, bidden, biddin, biden, bydden, byden, byddyn. Notice that these statements refer exclusively to the results obtained by means of the search described in note 48. They are therefore not based on a systematic investigation of the morphology of the past participle of bid. The chi-square test is not applicable to these results since the numbers of examples per category are far too low. It is true that Denison (1998: 168-169) discusses dare under the heading "Central modals", but this classification is clearly motivated by the author's historical approach. In a paper on gradience in linguistic variation and change (2001: 124), he stresses the fact that membership of individual verbs in the class of modals has for a long time varied along a cline from prototypical to marginal, and dare is just one example of this variability. Characterizations of the verb dare as a blend are to be found in Duffley (1992: 1), Quirk et al. (1985: 138), Nehls (1988: 185), Nagle (1989: 100), Warner (1993: 27, 42), Beths (1999: 1095) and Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 110). The more ancient form dareth is inappropriate for our study since its inflection tended to be syllabic while it remained in use (cf. Dobson 1968: 884). The chi-square test yields the following results: 1701-1780: l = 12.46, df = I, p = 0.00041 (***); 1781-1903: l = 36.08, df= 1, P = 1.90'10-9 (***).

346

Notes

55. The particle on introducing direct or indirect pronominal objects in East Anglian dialects presumably derives from the preposition oj(cf. Trudgill 1978: 16), which is frequent in this function after -ing-forms with a nominal character. = 75.27, df = 1, P = 56. The difference is statistically highly significant: 4.10.10- 18 (***). 57. While the changes between the first and third chronological sections are not statistically significant, the chi-square test yields significant results for all three categories in the transition from the nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries: = 143.31, df= 2, p = 7.60.10-32 (***). 58. Examples (39a-b) by the way also illustrate the fact that, in contrast to the aprefix, prepositions are free to accompany -ing-forms beginning with a vowel. Nevertheless, in the corpus there happens to be no instance of a vowel-initial, initially stressed -ing-form which is preceded by a preposition. 59. An earlier version of this analysis based on non-dramatic prose only has been published in Schlliter (2002b: 269-274). 60. The results of the chi-square test for the individual subperiods are: 15181700: X2 = 18.17, df= 1, P = 2.02.10-5 (***); 1701-1780: X2 = 3.18, df= 1, P = 0.074 (n.s.); 1781-1903: X2 = 11.30, df= 1, P = 0.00077 (***); 1960-1993: X2 = 12.13, df= 1, p = 0.00050 (***). 61. The form setting may be eschewed in this context on account of a strong avoidance effect provoked by contiguous -ing-forms (cf. in particular Bolinger 1979). This so-called horror cequi effect has been introduced in section 5.4.4. 62. The results of the chi-square test applied to the rhythmic contrasts within the syntactic categories are: pronominal objects: X2 = 13.58, df = 1, P = 0.00023 (***); full NP objects: X2 = 15.15, df= 1, P = 9.90.10-5 (***); objects + insertions: X2 = 5.59, df= 1, P = 0.018 (*). 63. The OED Online (s.v. masquerade (v.» indicates that at least in present-day American English the location of the primary and secondary stresses in this verb may be reversed. The same may have been the case in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century British English. 64. The chi-square test yields: X2 = 1.45, df= 1, P = 0.23 (n.s.). 65. The fall in a-prefixing is very highly significant as measured by the chi-square test: = 190.13, df= 1, P = 2.98·10-43 (***). 2 66. The rise is highly significant: X = 9.27, df= 1, P = 0.0023 (**). 67. Again, the decline of both the particle and the prefix is very highly significant: = 31.04, df = 1, P = 2.53.10-8 (***); a-: X2 = 167.42, df = 1, P = out: 2.71.10-38 (***). 68. All the frequency changes between the individual subreriods are statistically very highly significant: 1518-1700 vs. 1701-1780: X = 28.02, df = 1, P = 1.20.10-7 (***); 1701-1780 vs. 1781-1903: X2 = 26.07, df= 1, P = 3.29.10-7 (***); 1781-1903 vs. 1960-1993: X2 = 239.55, df= 1, P = 4.92.10-54 (***).

"I:

"I:

l

l

Notes

347

Chapter 6 The principle originally refers to prosodic elements (tones). McCarthy (1986: 208) extends the principle to segments, which is the sense in which Boersma (1998: 415) and Frisch (2004: 356) also use it. The tenn obligatory contour refers to the prohibition against level (contour-less) sequences of equal elements (cf. McCarthy 1986: 208). 2. See Minkova (2000b: 514-528) for an interesting application of the interplay between faithfulness and well-fonnedness constraints to syllable structure in the history of English. 3. For summaries of these approaches as well as examplary applications, see Nagy and Reynolds (1995: 152), Hinskens, van Hout, and Wetzels (1997: 8), Sherrard (1997: 78), Kager (1999: 40~06), Anttila (2002: 215-235), Slade (2003: 352), Benor and Levy (to appear). 4. It is as yet unclear whether constraint re-ranking happens between or also within generations of speakers (cf. BennUdez-Otero and Hogg 2003). The matter is, however, neither relevant for the present discussion, nor do our empirical data favour one or the other account. 5. The figure is reprinted slightly altered with kind pennission from John Benjamins Publishing Company (Amsterdam/Philadelphia) [www.benjamins.com]. 6. It has been argued that inhibitory neurons are necessary to avoid a breakdown of the entire system. The brain receives only excitatory inputs from external sources, but no inhibition. The absence of inhibitory mechanisms (as may be the case in special conditions such as epilepsy and under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs) would lead to full-scale oscillation due to cortex-internal feedback (cf. Crick and Asanuma 1986: 362). 7. More evidence for the role played by neuron assemblies comes from PulvermUller (2002: 22-23). This author however gives a larger figure for the size of associations of neurons (which he calls "functional webs"): accordingly, populations of 100,000 to 1,000,000 neurons may fonn a single functional unit. For these functional webs, Pulvennliller (2002: 30) likewise claims refractory phases or other fatigue effects that reduce the activity level of the web. 8. Some examples are provided by Levelt (1989: 352), Lamb (1999: 64), Menn and MacWhinney (1984: 532), Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999: 3--4); cf. furthennore McClelland and Rumelhart (1981: 380), Rume1hart and McClelland (1982) and McClelland (1987: 7). 9. Keidel (1992: 347-348) fmds indication in the activation patterns of certain neurons that leads him to conclude that they function as "detector cells" for individual phonemes. This is a singularly direct piece of evidence of the isomorphism of the model with actual neural functions. It would be most intriguing if this finding could be replicated or extended to other linguistic units. 10. A related issue is the question of whether each type of feature, segment, syllable, etc. is represented only once or several times under different superordinate structures (cf. Berg 1988: 132-135). Berg concludes that ideally each unit is represented only once (for details of the argument, see there). The opposite assumption is, however, also conceivable thanks to the overabundance of neu1.

348

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

Notes rons, groups of neurons and interconnections in the brain (cf. Lamb 1999: 253). See Rumelhart, Hinton, and McClelland (1986: 47), McClelland (1987: 6), Lamb (1999: 61-63, 375), Pulvermuller (2002: 111-112), all of which draw attention to this point. For further clarification, see Pulvermuller (2002: 111112); for neurobiological support, see Muller (1996: 628). This co-activation of all units that resemble the target by the way accounts for the type of slips of the tongue known as substitution errors (cf. Berg 1988). A possible effect of this either-or type of decision-making is known from the way hearers recognize phonemes: even intermediate realizations are interpreted categorically (e.g. as either aspirated or not; either voiced or not). Similarly, the accentuation of boundaries between dark and light areas in vision testifies to a general cognitive strategy tending to enhance existing contrasts (cf. Lamb 1999: 219, 326). The use of inhibitory connections in a neural network model is to some degree still a matter of debate. For instance, the model implemented by Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999: 6) does without inhibitory connections. However, there is no lack ofneurolinguistic and neuroanatomical evidence in favour of inhibitory connections within layers (cf. Lamb 1999: 219,326). Part of the fmdings described by McCalla (1980: 2-3, 12-13) can be interpreted as additional evidence. On the one hand, he fmds that in consonant clusters, sequences of similar consonants are subject to avoidance strategies or diachronic loss, which can be interpreted as an effect of the requirement for sufficient contrast between adjacent elements. On the other, he also states that sequences of consonant clusters that are very different from each other are also avoided. This effect can rather be ascribed to articulatory inertia. For explicit treatments of very diverse aspects of prosody, see Berg and AbdEI-Jawad (1996: 316), Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999: 20), Jackendoff (2000: 15), Warren (1999: 182) and Berg (2005). None ofthese studies however addresses exactly the same problems as the present one; they will thus not be discussed in any detail. A comparable claim is made by Lamb (1999: 271), who proposes a very general type of nodes which he calls "phonological category nodes". Accordingly, there is one node possessing links to all vowels and another one possessing links to all consonants. Lamb gives for their raison d'etre the fact that all vowels and consonants share category-specific articulatory and acoustic properties. A functional motivation for the hypothesized category specificity is suggested by Fowler (1977: 105, 149-150): consonant and vowel articulations implicate the activation of different neuromuscular systems which are subject to their own alternating activation and relaxation phases. A fundamentally different account of the emergence of rhythmic structure in a spreading activation model comes from Lamb (1999: 249-250). His account relies on a timer that he assumes to be part of the network. This functions as a pacemaker, sending out pulses at regular intervals. Hypothetically, Lamb (1999: 297) relates this timer to thalomo-cortical rhythms that are known to exist in the brain (cf. also Lehiste 1970: 155; Fraisse 1974: 22). This account

Notes

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

349

however runs into certain explanatory problems. For instance, the timer would have to adapt to different speaking rates and to different types of language (syllable-, stress- or mora-timed; cf. Lamb 1999: 253). For a fairly elaborate theory of sequence management, which will, however, not be discussed here, see MacKay (1987; cf. also Berg 1998: 20; 2002: 42). Parallel processing plays a major role in all of the following discussions using neural networks: McClelland and Rumelhart (1981: 377-378), Dell and Reich (1981: 627), Rumelhart and McClelland (1982), Rumelhart, Hinton, and McClelland (1986: 59), Bock (1982: 35,41), Menn and MacWhinney (1984: 532), McClelland (1987: 4), Dell and O'Seaghdha (1994: 412), Berg (1988: 207; 1998: 121), Levelt (1989: 354), Lamb (1999: 125, 348), lackendoff (2000: 14-16), Blumstein and Milberg (2000: 169). While linguistically necessary for reasons that will become clear in the following sections, the division into a planning stage and an execution stage is neurologically problematic. Actual neurons do not, to the best of current knowledge, allow the entire subsystem relevant to a planned utterance to become primed, since they do not propagate mere priming. Their reaction is a yes-or-no response: either, their threshold is crossed, as a result of which they become active and send action potentials, or their priming remains below the threshold, and nothing more happens. A possible way of accommodating a difference between a planning phase and an execution phase would be a modulation of the frequency of action potentials. In this case the difference between the two phases would, however, not be categorical, but only gradual. A similar process has been assumed to be in effect in paradigmatic substitutions (cf. Berg 1988: 205; 2002: 42) and in certain syntactic adjustments (cf. MacKay 1987: 19-20). The well-known and widespread tendency to assimilate adjacent sounds is difficult to reconcile with this preference for dissimilar adjacent elements: distinctive features of phonemes show a tendency to persist over more than one phoneme. MacKay (1986: 183; 1987: 154) surmises that the recovery cycle does not apply to distinctive features, which do not seem to undergo selfinhibition. This may be related to the fact that they do not partake of the usual bidirectional connections that other nodes have: they are situated at the bottom layer and receive no bottom-up activation from even lower units. Therefore, the raison d'etre of self-inhibition does not apply. Another reason for the assimilatory persistence of phonological features is the tendency of the articulatory organs to inertia, which is in conflict with the neurophysiologically inspired tendency towards alternation. For a fundamentally different account of assimilatory and dissimilatory sound changes and their functional explanation in speaker-listener interaction, see Ohala (1990; 1992). Worser is of course not a perfectly regular comparative formation of the adjective bad. However, there is a gradual difference of regularity ranging from completely irregular worse to completely regular badder, with worser occupying an intermediate position. Similar fmdings are known from the literature on syntactic persistence (cf. Bock 1986; Pickering et al. 2000): the activation of a particular syntactic

350

Notes

structure (e.g. a passive) can facilitate the re-activation of the same structure. Bock (1986: 356) relates this finding to a "quasi-neurological energizing, excitation, or threshold reduction that persists over time, increasing the probability that the activated or strengthened information will influence subsequent cognitive processes." 25. For a differing view, cf. Kroch's (1989: 200) "constant rate hypothesis", critically assessed in Schluter (2001: 205-206).

Chapter 7 1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

Another mitigating factor would be the phonetic length of the first of the two clashing syllables (cf. Bolinger 1965a: 135; Hayes 1984: 72). Further suggestions to this effect can be found in Bolinger (1975: 559, 603; 1981: 31), Martin (1972: 496), Rohdenburg (1976: 198-199; 1986: 92-94), Fowler (1977: 19-20) and Quirk et al. (1985: 1356-1357). In the German original, of which the above defmition is a rough gloss, Brugmann's (1909: 146-147) formulation runs: "Sind nun innerhalb einer simultan aufgefaBten und sich herandrangenden, aber noch nicht ganz klar geordneten Artikulationsmasse zwei Artikulationen oder Artikulationsgruppen, die die namliche Bewegung der Sprachwerkzeuge erfordem ... , und wird die Wirksamkeit des horror aequi nicht durch andre Faktoren paralysiert, so wird der zweimaligen Anfiihrung der intendierten Artikulation auf irgendeine Weise a u s g e w i c hen." For some references in the field, see Bolinger (1975: 131,214; 1979: 42), DressIer (1977: 44), Menn and MacWhinney (1984: 529), Denison (1985), Plag (1998: 201, 215) and Tang (2000: 33). For a delimitation ofthe tasks performed in these two areas, see, for instance, Muller (2003: 74). Some evidence for the existence of corresponding structures in the brain comes from the double dissociation between the routes that the authors discover in aphasics (cf. Caplan et al. 1999: 1514-1515).

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Index

All references are to page numbers. Bold-printed numbers refer to definitions and/or key passages. a-adjectives 65,66, 79-85, 143-

American English 97, 105, 106,

145,149,242,248,286,287, 308,316,336 ablaut 86 accent 21, 133, 151, 179, 180, 183, 185,323 accessibility, see retrievability action potential 262-265,267,349 active voice 188, 189-197, 198203,206,209,230-232,235, 249,251,255,256,297,310, 313,349

109-110,122,124,148,162, 184-185,251,297,313,320, 329,346 aphasia 52 archaism 69,79,97,101-102,178, 183,197,221,231,256,294,312 articulatory effort 22, 32, 243, 273, 276,295 ashamed 65,66,79-85,89,144, 242,286 attributive uses 16, 36, 39,40, 59, 60-149, 150-153, 154-159, 164, 165,203,229-236,242,247, 248,249,255,281,286,287, 294,298,308,310,311,315,316 complex attributive uses 66, 72, 75,89,90,92,94,95,97,98, 100,102,104,108,109, Ill, 143-146 autonomy 3,7,128,143,318,322, 331 auxiliaries 39,40,61,69, 152, 154, 178,185,200,228,235,300, 322,334,344,345 marginal modals 189,206-209, 229,308 modals 61, 178, 206-209, 254, 341,344 auxiliarization, see

adjectives colour 66, 124-129, 143, 144,

146,148,149,242,248,286, 287,308,310,316,323 extreme/absolutive 114-117 gradable/scalar 114-117, 129, 137 adverbial uses 75,166, 178, 183, 184,311 adverbs downtoners 114, 132 evaluative 155-158 intensifiers 112, 116, 130, 132,

135,160,162 modal 155,341 post-verbal position 161, 164,

167,170,171,172,175,176 pre-verbal position 161, 163,

164,229 speech act adverbials 155 subject disjuncts 155-158

grammaticalization

aware 65,66,79-85,144,242,286 axon 262-263 axon hillock 263

Index basic beat level 61 Beat Addition 29, 165,306,308,

314,322 Beat Deletion 29,151,179,260,

286,308,314 Beat Insertion, see Beat Addition bidirectionality 270, 276, 278-285,

318,349 binomials 124-129, 325, 340 biuniqueness, see 'one meaningone form' principle

blue 124-129 Broca region 326 broke(n) 86,92-97,101,104,109,

110,147, 149,247,249,251, 256,286,294,297,301,310, 311,313,337 brown 124-129 buffers 36,37,39,40,66,72,77,

95, 108, 109, 111, 119, 120, 135142,156-159,188,189, 192, 194,196,198,200,201,203, 205,208,217-221,223-229, 230,231,236,286,287,294, 304,309,310,314,316,336,341 candidate outputs 239-241,248,

249,253,294-295,298,299,318 category recognizer nodes 293 cell body 261-263 cell membrane 262-264, 277 chi-square test 57-58 Chomskyan linguistics, see formal grammar comparatives double 67-79,253,335 competence 5-9, 244, 299 competition between constraints 8, 9, 16, Ill,

146,148,163,204,209,235, 272,300,310-311 between grammars 252

385

between grammatical variants 8,

67, 71, 87, 97, 106, 116, 123, 161,164,215,253,281-283, 294,321 in a neural network 259, 269270,279-283,288,292-300, 303,318-319 competitor 67,106, 164,269,270, 279,283,288,294,296,303,318 Complexity Principle 192-193, 197-198,202,221,231,293, 296,312 Compound Stress Rule 82, 92, 314 compounds 30,65,82, 84, 85, 91, 94,98-100,102-104,106,110, 136,162,223,314,338,342 connectionism, see spreading activation model constraint conflicts 1,8, 11,27,32,42,69,

80,125,230,239-244,248, 250,289,294,295,298-300, 317,319,349 conjunction 248 faithfulness 241-243,249,253, 254,347 floating 253 NO-CLASH 240-241, 242, 243, 254,256 No-LAPSE 240-241, 243 ranking 239-245,247-252,253255,257,317,318 re-ranking 254-256, 347 synergies 177, 198, 202, 230, 291 ties 252 variable ordering 252 violation 9,28,68, 137, 162, 203,210,239-245,246-248, 252-253,257,274,293,299, 317,322,331 well-formedness 238,241,243, 246,253,254,347

386

Index

content words 61,62,90, 143, 151,

165,233,314,334 contrastive stress 30, 234 coordinations 66,89,99, 124-129, 143-144, 146, 148, 149, 162, 168-171,172-178,187,189, 191,195,198,200,205,208, 230,323,342,343 cortical columns 266, 325 dendrites 261-264 depolarization 262-263 descriptive adequacy 12, 16,85,

236,248,253,258,285,302, 306,320 determinism vs. indeterminism 9,

246,247-249,251,253,297, 298,317-318 dialect, see external factors, variety directive verbs 189-206,231,308 Distance Principle 187,192-193,

197,230,255 dominant paradigm structure 67 dramatic prose 13,44,45,70-72,

74,78,94,98,108,120,123124,148,194-197,212-213, 297,313,337,339 drunk(en) 86-87,88-92,95, 101, 104, 109, IlO-1Il, 145-146, 149,242,247,249,255-256, 273-276,281-283,286,287, 294,295,298,301,309,310,336 dummy material 80, 135, 142,241, 287,316 Early Modem English 2, 13,27,36,

37,38,44,46,48,60,67,68,69, 86,91,94, 100, 103, 108, Ill, 112,144,163,171,177,186, 189,190,193,194, 196, 197, 198,202,203,206,209,212, 215,217,222,226,227,301, 311,322,335,337

economy of processing 56, 296, 318 efficiency of processing 101, 296,

318 elision 75 error probability 58 excitation 259, 262-264, 266, 269,

270-271,274,280,284,298, 306,347,350 execution stage 279,283,289,303, 349 explanatory adequacy 12,244,251, 258,302,306 external factors 6, 7, 8, 22, 23, 25, 35,39,48,88,244,251,252253,256,295,297,312-313,347 gender 6,49,252,328 mode 13,45,48,50,51,71,77, 94,95,98, 119, 123-124, 148, 196,213,297,314,339 sociolinguistic factors 8,48, 69, 77 style 6,8, 13,27,43,46,49, 70, 74,77,78,95,96,121,122, 123-124, 136, 138, 141-142, 146,148,154,177,183,216, 231,236,242,251,252,256, 280,297,302,318,319,320 text type 43,45,46,47,48,60, 94,98,120, 121, 122, 123, 124,148,178,196,212,214, 256,313,320,333,339 variety 13,27,43,47,48,69, 101, 105, 110, 124, 148, 154, 196,210,213,215,252,254, 255,256,257,297,312,313, 320,346 extra-grammatical factors, see external factors extra-systemic factors, see external factors feedback 278-285,286,288,289,

290,293,295,318,347

Index

feedforward 278-285, 289, 290, 318 figurative uses 97,99, 107, 161 fmal prominence, see sentence accent focus position, see sentence accent foot 12,20-21,25, 34 fonnal grammar 3-7,38, 128,243, 258,277,285,302,316,319 frequency 6,8,11,14,48,49,57, 62,63,64,70,72,91,94, 100, 104, 105, 109, 119, 121, 123, 125,133,138, 141, 144, 145, 146,159,161,162,166,167, 170,172,174,175,177,183, 185,190,212,214,223,226, 227,228,229,231,244,251, 253,256,264,292,294,295, 297,299,305,312,313,319, 329,330,341,344,346 function words 27,61,64,75,90, 143,151,152,165,166,170, 276,314,334 functional overlap 162,215,216 functionalism 6,7-9, 16,22,32,35, 37,41,42,53,65,69, 148, 153, 173,187,235,243,244,250, 254,257,259,265,271,272, 277,292,298,299,301,306, 307,311,317,318,319,321, 324,325,331,347,348,349 garden path effect 54 gender, see external factors generative grammar, see fonnal grammar genre, see external factors gerunds, see verbal nouns go (a-)Ving construction 222-229, 231,236,294 grammatical fixation 48, 88, 95, 100,104, Ill, 14~ 148,255 grammaticalization 206

387

green 124-129

haplology, see Horror /Equi Principle hemispheres of the brain 326 hiatus 38,211,232,293,312 Horror /Equi Principle 222, 231, 292,293,302,303,312,324, 343,346 hyperexcitability 263 hyperpolarization 262,263,277 iamb 20,21,24,41,323,332 lambiclTrochaic Law 24 Iambic Reversal, see Stress Shift Rule iconicity 48, 172, 174, 178, 187, 230,255,293,296,312,338 constructional 68, 148 incrementality of processing 161, 278,289 infmitives 105, 140, 152, 154, 182, 185-209,221,230,231-232, 235,242,247,249,255,256, 286,287,301,308,309,310, 313,316,321,322,344,345 infonnational explosion 146 -ing-fonns 140,152,154,209-229, 232,236,242,247,248,251, 256,286,287,293,297,301, 308,309,310,313,321,322,346 inhibition 22, 259, 262-266, 270, 271-285,292,298,300,305, 325,347,348,349 inner speech 54 interactions between constraints 8,9, 12,65, 69, 124, 143, 146, 154,223, 229-232,238,239,241,245, 248,254,292,298,306,312, 318,324,325

388

Index

between modules 3,4, 11, 17,54,

55,130,236,259,260,270, 273,298,323,331 in neural networks 276-291,303, 318,319 interactive activation model, see spreading activation model interface 2,3,4,53,241,259 intonational nucleus 165,168,173,

339 intonational phrase 233,322 irregularization 108 isochrony 22, 24-28, 31, 33 isomorphism, see 'one meaningone form' principle juncture, see pause

knit(ted) 86, 101-104, 110, Ill,

147,148,247,249,256,286, 297,301,310,313,337 knitten 101 language acquisition 8, 9, 26, 32,

33,246,253,266-267,299,304 language perception 5,6, 7, 14,22, 23,30,32,33,34,53, 187,210, 237,241,244,246,258,259, 265,267,270,272,276,277, 278,279,284,294,302,307, 315,326 language processing 3, 7, 8, 14, 15, 32,33,34,51,53,54,123,148, 161, 163, 169, 186, 192, 196, 197,198,201,218,221,230, 242,247,256,257-306,307, 308,311,312,317,318,319, 320,321,323,326,327,328,349 language production 3,5,6, 7, 8, 14,23,26,32,33,50,51,55, 125,237,241,254,257-306, 307,315,319,325,328,332

language storage 5, 14,34,53, 125,

148,295,296,307 Late Modem English 13,46,48,60,

69,103, Ill, 144, 189, 190, 197, 207,212,226,227,337 Law of the Increasing Constituents

126-127,148,255,293,296, 303,312,323,325,340 leamability 246,247,250,253 lexical choices 287, 315, 321 lexical morphology 14,40 lexical specifications 4, 26, 131, 149,154,184,231 lexical stress 21,40,61,179,188, 197,201,232,332 lit/lighted 86,105-110, Ill, 147, 247,249,255,256,286,287, 297,309,310,338 light, see lit/lighted literal uses 97, 161 lWen 101,105 loanwords 40,62,131,335 lookahead 278-279,283,289,293,

328 main verbs 39, 54, 154, 178, 180,

182,183,185,206-209,234, 235, 254, 300, 313 manipulative verbs, see directive verbs meaning, see semantics characterizing 80, 147 temporary 80,97, 129, 147 metre 20,21,28,39,47,60,61,62,

226,279,289,332 metrical grids 18-19,20,22,29-31,

61,71-72,81,181,233,234, 314,331 metrical stress theory 12, 17, 18 metrical phonology, see metrical stress theory metrical trees 18, 331

Index Middle English 2, 13,27,37,38,

44,46,60,64,86,88,90,91,92, 93,97,98,99,101,102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 143, 160, 161,166, 177, 185, 186, 188, 189, 198,203,209,222,301, 311,322,335,336,337,338 modal verbs, see auxiliaries, modals mode, see external factors models of writing dependence 51 independence 51 interdependence 51,52 modularity 3,4, 7, 11, 12, 17, 85,

124,128,129,131,143,149, 168,236,237,238,245,257, 259,285,288,291,292,298, 301,308,317,318,319,320, 322,323,324,326 mora-timing 304, 332, 349 most-primed-wins principle 269, 279 myelin sheath 264

389

nodes 259,265-266,267-285,288,

292-299,303-306,318,319, 325,348,349 non-dramatic prose 13, 70, 72, 78, 94,98,108,117,119,144,148, 163,194, 195, 196, 197,200, 203,208,212,214,297,337, 345,346 nonstandard usage 13,69, 74, 77, 79,93,96,97, 118, 162,21~ 213,226,295 normative grammar, see standardization not(negator) 61,129-142,157,

160,178,230,236,287 Nuclear Stress Rule 81-82, 83 object constancy 296 Obligatory Contour Principle 240,

243,324,347 Old English 44,60,67, 87, 88, 92,

98, 103, 160, 161, 186, 188, 198, 209,322 'one meaning - one form' principle

Natural Linguistics 7,250-251 naturalness 68,250,300-301 nerve cells, see neurons neural networks 4, 237-306, 318,

320,324,325,348,349 neural network model, see spreading activation model neurolinguistics 4, 11, 16,33,258,

266,271,302,303,320,325, 327,348 neurological plausibility 258, 302, 306 neurons 258,259,260-265,266, 271,277,278,306,318,347, 348,349 neurotransmitters 263-264 never (negator) 138-142

68-69,94,104,147,241,292, 296,312 operational plausibility 258 Optimality Theory 4, 7, 11, 16, 238-257,277,285,291,292, 297,302,316,317,318,320 evaluator 239,240,244,245, 249,253 FunctionalOT 243,317 generator 239,240,245 harmonic serialism 245 Harmony Theory 248 out (particle) 224-229,230,231, 287,346 output filters 4, 143,238 output orientation 239,243,257, 316

390

Index

Paradox Historical 46 Observer's 49 Parallel Distributed Processing, see spreading activation model parallelism 79,169,174,177-178,

187,192-193,197,230,293, 296,312 particle verbs 40,95, 144, 180 particles 40,54,95, 144, 166, 180, 223,287,340,346 part-whole relationships 272-274, 277,303,318,325 passive voice 87,89,98, 108, 140, 187-189,197-206,209,215, 221,225,231,232,235,249, 255,256,287,310,345,350 past participles 38,66,86-112, 143-149,203,247,281,282, 286,294,297,308,321,322, 337,338,343,345 pause 17,28,35,64,72,75,150, 152,153,164,167,170,173, 233,282,315,324,336 perceptual confusion 32,243 perceptual salience 125-126 performance 5-9,41,244,299,327 phonetic features 52,267,269,272276,285,305,315 phonology-free syntax 4 phonotactics 48, 312, 325, 333 pink 124-129 planning stage 279,283, 289, 303,

349 polysyllabic shortening 28 post-inhibitory rebound 263,265,

271,272,274,277,281,283, 293,296,306,325 postnominal uses 64,66, 75, 79, 83, 89 pragmatics 8,17,124, 126, 128, 333

'predicative-only' adjectives 66,

79-85, 145 predicative uses 64-66, 75, 79-85,

88-90,95-97,99,101,109,116, 136-138,145,147,160,180, 186,294 prefixes a-

37,152,154,209-229,230232,236,248,249,251,256, 286,287,293,294,297,301, 308-311,313,316,321,322, 346

ge-/y-/i- 37 negative 129-142, 154-160 premodification 30, 64, 65, 66, 80-

85,89,91,94,99, 104, 106, 110, 112,121,126,135,141,142, 143,144,158,183,242,286,315 prepositions 37,61, 152, 165-166, 180,185,187-188,209,212221,224,228,229,230,232, 236,287,314,342,346 prescriptivism 48,69, 70, 77, 79, 94,97,98,100,106,108,129, 162,173,185,227,335 priming 266,269,271,279,280, 303,349 Principle of Rhythmic Alternation defmition 17-20 scope 11,17,51,232,233-236,

290,315,316,321,325,327, 328,333,336,343 probabilistic conceptions 5, 8, 248, 253,255,257,281,294,296, 298,305,306,317,318,319 productivity 86,91,104,109, Ill, 131,136,155,162,184,209, 228,260 pronouns 61, 157 demonstrative 87 interrogative 37 personal 37,54,165,189,217221

Index

possessive 36, 54 reflexive 37,218-221 relative 37 resumptive 69 prosody defmition 17 prosodic boundary 152, 153, 164, 171,180,233-234,315,324 prosodic overshadowing 151, 153, 180-182, 183-185, 190-197, 199-202,204-205,208,216, 224,228,232,235,276,304305,314,340 prosodic phonology, see metrical stress theory prosodic phrase 152,165, 178, 179, 233,234,315,322,342 psychological plausibility 246 punctuation 75, 152, 164, 166, 167, 171,172,173,175,176,235, 324,341 quantification 2,5,6,11,15,23,36, 38,40,41,58,67,85,128,134, 135,141,152-153,162,176, 182, 193, 197,211,222-224, 228,247,250,253,266-272, 287,288,291,305,314,315, 316,317,319 addnive 248-250,253,257,259, 263-266,279,280,281,282, 285,290,317-318 quick(/y) 62, 153, 161,163-171, 172-174,177-178,184,229, 230,232,235,242,249,286, 301, 310, 342, 344 quae 48,65,66,112-124,133,143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 158, 159, 160, 196,242,247, 248,251,256,286,287,291, 297,301,308,310,313,316, 320,339

391

maximizer 114-116, 119, 121123, 144 moderator 114-116, 118, 121123, 144, 146 radical parallelism 245 recovery cycle 262-265, 272-273, 293,305,349 red 124-129,147,156,340 redundancy 66,67-79,86,103, 129, 147, 148, 149,253,295, 300,308,310,311,316,335 refractory phase 263,266,271-277, 283,293,296,305,319,347 register, see external factors regularization 67--69, 100, 103, 106, 108,164,185,204,292,295 repeated morph constraint, see Horror /Equi Principle resting potential 262 retrievability 125-126, 285, 323, 327 rhythm defmition 28 satellite neurons 272,277,305 scarce(/y) 154,178-185,190,197,

199,201,229,231,232,234, 235,286,301,304,309,310, 341,344 segmental phonology 17,276,324326 selectional restrictions, see lexical specifications semantic split 96 semantics 4, 8, 17,21,26,27, 34, 38,48,52,53,54,79,80,85,96, 97,99,113-124,124-129,129143,146-149,153,155-159, 161,162,163,168, 169, 172, 178,183,185-189, 193, 196, 197,206,209,210,213,214, 221,222,225,228,229-236,

392

Index

237,239,241,242,245,247, 248,255,257,265,267,273, 285-290,296,302,309,311, 312,315-318,324-326,333 bleaching 38,209,224,230 sentence accent 19, 175,323 sentence adverbs 116, 152, 153, 154-160,229,230,234,236, 242,286,287,308,310,316,341 sentence prosody 12, 61, 179, 183, 232,256,323,327 sequence management 283-284, 349 serialism 3, 7, 11,239,245,277279 set (a-)Ving construction 211,212222,224-226,229,231,247, 248,251,256,286,310,313,346 silent beats 233-234 slips of the pen 52 of the tongue 33,52,348 slow(ly) 153, 161, 162,171-178, 184,229,230,232,235,242, 286,289,301,310,343,344 sociolinguistic factors, see external factors speaking 50-54,252,290-291,327, 349 speaking rate 17,234,315,349 spreading activation model 4, 7, 11, 16,238,257-306,318-320,324, 349 standardization 13,42,68,69, 73, 77, 79, 86, 147, 148, 152, 166, 173, 186,223, 231,256,295, 298,311 statistical significance 43, 56-59, 66,91,92,101,103,108,119, 121,123, 124, 143, 148, 149, 166,167,174,176,177,183, 184,191,193,201,205,218, 235,265,268,271,336,337,

338,339,340,341,342,343, 344,345,346 stigmatization 96, 162, 177,215, 217,227,231,312 style, see external factors stress definition 21-22 duration 17,21-22,23,173-174, 233,308,315,325 loudness 17, 21-22, 24 pitch 17,21-22,24,174 primary 17, 61, 63, 130, 133, 153,156,159,179,199,314, 329,332,334 secondary 17,19,27,137,151, 223,311,332,346 stress clash defmition 19 stress lapse defmition 20 Stress Retraction, see Stress Shift Rule Stress Shift Rule 29-31,50,82,83, 92,95, 100, 101, 111,233,260, 279,286,290,302,308,309, 311,314 stress timing 24-28, 31, 42, 60, 304, 308,331 stressed syllable defmition 61, 151 strict dominance hierarchy 240, 246, 247,248,250,252,253,257, 292,317 struck/stricken 86,97-101, 104, 109, 110, 111, 145, 147, 149, 247,249,251,286,294,297, 298,301,309,310 subvocalization, see inner speech suffixes dental 86, 101 -e 38-39, 160, 161, 167, 174, 177,230,231,235,249,309, 316,333

Index -ed 37,41,65,66,86-87,101110, 103,336,339 -en 33,36,41,65,66,86-88,88-101, 111,203,294,301 -er 65,67-79,253,295,297, 300 -lich(e) 161 -ly 153,156,160-185,230,231, 235,249,297,309,316,341, 342 summation, see quantification, additive superlatives double 68 syllable structure 25, 256, 292, 322,

347 syllable timing 24-28,31,304,332 synapse 259,260-264,266 system congruity 48,67-68, 79,

147-148,203,312,335 system-defming structural properties

67 systemic layers 260,269,278,281,

393

unidirectionality 277-279, 309 uniform encoding, see 'one meaning - one form' principle Universal Grammar 8, 239, 242-

244,292,317 universality 8,9,10,12,15,18,22-

24,27,31,34,35,67,125-126, 238,239-246,249,251,252, 256,257,277,292,301,302, 304,307,309,311,313,317, 318,324,328 soft universals 239, 316 unstressed fmal -e 38-39, 160 unstressed syllable definition 61, 151 upbeat 193,232,256,321,345 U-turn development 94, 120 variety, see external factors verbal nouns 209-210 verse 20,21,36,38,39,47,51,55,

60,62, 162, 188,332,335

285,289,290 terminal button 262-263 text type, see external factors Thirteen-Men Rule, see Stress Shift Rule threshold level 263,266,271,272,

275,280,281,296,300,305, 349,350 to (infmitive marker) 154, 185-209, 221,230,231,232,235,249, 286,297,298,301,308,316,344 to (preposition) 214-218, 224, 225, 230,231,232 trochee 20-21,24,41,62

Wernicke region 326 word formation, see lexical morphology worselworser 66,67-79,90, 147-

149,241,247,251,253,286, 295,297,301,310,316,335, 336,350 writing 22, 47,50-55,289-291, 319,321,327 'written-to-be-spoken' language, see dramatic prose yellow 124-129,144,147,340