Chapter published in:
Category Change from a Constructional PerspectiveEdited by Kristel Van Goethem, Muriel Norde, Evie Coussé and Gudrun Vanderbauwhede
[Constructional Approaches to Language 20] 2018
► pp. 119–148
Chapter 5Why would anyone take long?
Word classes and Construction Grammar in the history of long
I review the word classes proposed for long in such idiosyncratic English usages as I won’t be/take long, all night long. Although adverb fits most of the contentious data best, sometimes the word class is underdetermined. I suggest that long exhibits adjective ~ adverb underspecification from Old and Middle English onwards and can also be a semi-grammatical, decategorialised word. We need not assume that every word in every grammatical sentence must belong to one and only one word class (Denison, 2013). At the phrasal level the distribution is less anomalous and correlates with semantic and pragmatic features. Accordingly, it is sensible to describe the history of such usages in Construction Grammar terms. Recent Danish developments make an intriguing comparison.
Keywords: category, word class, vagueness, underdetermination, Construction Grammar, Danish
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Data sources
- 1.2Prototypical adjective and adverb
- 2.The boundaries of adverb long
- 2.1Between adverb and adjective?
- 2.2Between adverb and adposition?
- 2.3Between adverb and noun?
- 3.Excursus on Danish
- 4.Theoretical prerequisites
- 4.1Vagueness
- 4.2Decategorialisation
- 4.3Word classes and Construction Grammar
- 5.A partial constructional history of temporal long
- 6.Closing remarks
-
Acknowledgements -
Notes -
Data sources and abbreviations -
Secondary works
Published online: 22 March 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.20.05den
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.20.05den
References
Data sources and abbreviations
COHA=Davies, Mark (2010– ) The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million words, 1810–2009. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/.
ECCO Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Available online at http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/.
EEBO Early English Books Online. Available online at http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home.
KorpusDK http://ordnet.dk/korpusdk/
PPCMBE=Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini, & Ariel Diertani (2010) Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English. Available online at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCMBE-RELEASE-1/index.html.
PPCME2=Kroch, Anthony, & Ann Taylor (2000) Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (2nd edition). Available online at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-3/index.html
Secondary works
Boas, H. C., & Sag, I. A.
Bresnan, J.
(1997) Mixed categories as head sharing constructions. Proceedings of the LFG97 Conference. Retrieved from http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/ms/ms.html
Brinton, L. J., & Traugott, E. C.
Bybee, J., & Moder, C. L.
Croft, W.
Denison, D.
Goldberg, A. E.
Hengeveld, K.
Hoffmann, T., & Trousdale, G.
Hopper, P. J., & Traugott, E. C.
Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G. K.
Hudson, R.
Kay, C., Roberts, J., Samuels, M., & Wotherspoon, I.
(2015) The historical thesaurus of English. Retrieved from University of Glasgow http://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/
Malouf, R. P.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J.
Randall, B.
(2005–2007) CorpusSearch 2: Designed by Beth Randall, Ann Taylor and Anthony Kroch. Retrieved from http://corpussearch.sourceforge.net/credits.html
Santorini, B.
(2010) Annotation manual for the Penn Historical Corpora and the PCEEC. Release 2. Retrieved from http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/annotation/index.html
Traugott, E. C., & Trousdale, G.
van der Wurff, W.
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Kuo, Yueh Hsin
Kuo, Yueh Hsin
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