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Part of
Late Modern English: Novel encounters
Edited by Merja Kytö and Erik Smitterberg
[Studies in Language Companion Series 214] 2020
► pp. 271–293

A far from simple matter revisited

The ongoing grammaticalization of far from

| University of British Columbia
| Seijo University
In Present-day English far from belongs to a class of constructions (close to, near to, next to) which have undergone grammaticalization and/or constructionalization. The present corpus-based, diachronic study shows that the development of far from appears to be a clear case of grammaticalization, with quite significant changes in the Late Modern English period, including the extension of the downtoner to attributive contexts and the development of the emphasizer function. More importantly, the claim that “a well-known trajectory” (Méndez-Naya 2008a: 215) is from degree adjunct to degree modifier is not borne out in this case. What we see here is a change from degree modifier to degree adjunct, a change consistent with Athanasiadou’s (2007) argument for an increase in subjectivity from degree modifier to emphasizer.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Far from in Present-day English
    • 2.1Adverbial far + from X
    • 2.2Downtoner/degree modifier: Far from
    • 2.3Pragmatic marker: Far from it/that
    • 2.4Synchronic analysis
  • 3.Historical development of far from
    • 3.1The development of degree adverbs
    • 3.2History of far from
    • 3.3Timeline
    • 3.4Proposed development
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 18 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.214.12bri
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CEN = The Corpus of English Novels. Compiled by Hendrik De Smet. See <[URL]>
CLMET3.0 = The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, Version 3.0 (CLMET3.0). Created by Hendrik De Smet, Hans-Jürgen Diller & Jukka Tyrkkö. See <[URL]>
COCA = The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 560 Million Words, 1990 – present. 2008–. Compiled by Mark Davies. Available online at <[URL]>
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Herda, Damian
2023.  From space to time and beyond: A corpus inquiry into the grammaticalization patterns of a / one step away from . Studia Neophilologica 95:3 ► pp. 376 ff. DOI logo
Brinton, Laurel J.
2021. “He loved his father but next to adored his mother”:Nigh(ly),Near, andNext(To) as Downtoners. Journal of English Linguistics 49:1 ► pp. 39 ff. DOI logo

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