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English Historical Linguistics: Change in structure and meaning
Edited by Bettelou Los, Claire Cowie, Patrick Honeybone and Graeme Trousdale
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 358] 2022
► pp. 309–344

Chapter 13
On the development of OE swā to ModE so and related changes in an atypical group of demonstratives

| FU Berlin
ORCID logo | Università di Firenze

Building on previous comparative studies and comparative reconstructions (König 2012, 2015), we trace the syntactic and semantic development of OE swā, of its adverbial counterpart swylc and of þus to Modern English so, such and thus on the basis of relevant text corpora for OE and ME. In contrast to previous studies of swā in OE (cf. Schleburg 2002) and of so in ME (Nummenmaa 1973), it is shown that swā, swelc, thus and their counterparts in ModE are not isolated particles or adverbs, but are more adequately analysed as demonstratives of manner, quality and degree. Starting from a basic exophoric (gestural) use and its typical extensions to anaphoric and cataphoric uses, these expressions develop into a wide variety of grammatical markers in ModE.

Keywords: demonstratives (of manner, quality, degree), exophoric and endophoric uses, ‘similarity’, grammaticalisation, text corpora, Germanic languages, Romance languages
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methodology
  • 3.Demonstratives of manner, quality and degree in Old English
  • 4.OE swā as a source of grammaticalisation: Some frequent patterns
  • 5.From exophoric to anaphoric
    • 5.1VP-anaphora do so
    • 5.2So as a propositional anaphor
    • 5.3So as a sentence connective
  • 6.From exophoric to cataphoric
    • 6.1Comparative constructions
    • 6.2The quotative use of swā
  • 7.The development of thus and such
    • 7.1Þus > thus
    • 7.2Swylc/swelc > such
  • 8.Summary and conclusion
  • Author queries
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.358.13kon
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