Functions of Language - Volume 32, Issue 1, 2025

On the basis of Present-day English corpus data, this paper investigates deliberate, adaptive linguistic innovations from a constructional perspective. The concrete phenomena addressed include the XYZ construction (“Copenhagen is the Paris of Denmark”), the X be not the Y-est Z in the Q construction (“He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed”), extrasentential not (“This is nice. Not.”), X much (“racist much?”), and the because X construction (“because science”). The paper first identifies speaker extravagance and sociocognitive salience as major factors in these innovations (Haspelmath 1999; Keller 1995; Schmid & Günther 2016). A second question is how these deliberate and noticeable (salient, extravagant) innovations spread and may become routinized and conventionalized, or may even turn into abstract productive patterns. From a constructional perspective, structures may be copied verbatim, leading to an increase in token frequency. A simple increase in token frequency may already result in conventionalization and loss of salience (bleaching). But constructions may not only be copied verbatim. Language users may detect some abstract patterning, which, in turn, can then be used productively. The result would not necessarily be an increase in token, but in type frequency, resulting in snowcloning and general productivity. Arguably, this may lead to a slower loss of salience, e.g., while the abstract pattern and some individual instances become generally less salient, some new, innovative tokens may still be considered extravagant and may keep the pattern productive and noticeable. At the same time, constructions may undergo shifts in their particular constraints (e.g., for slot fillers).

This paper assesses the recent development of a particular constructional template, viz. the ‘exhaustive’ construction in English. This pattern combines a form of [all X-(e)d out] with a meaning of ‘being exhausted from excessive experiences with X’, where the X-slot is proposedly almost unlimited in its productivity, as any lexical item and word class can be coerced into it. The paper uses data from the NOW-corpus, covering the time-span of 2010-2022 (Davies 2016–), to (a) zoom in on the origins of this constructional idiom, (b) investigate its recent history as an instance of on-going change, both in terms of token frequency and of type frequency/productivity, and (c) assess the interaction of creativity, coercion, productivity, and schematicity in this development. The results indicate that the ‘exhaustive’ likely constitutes an extension of expressions of tiredness (as in all worn out), but counter to expectations, seems to have been decreasing in productivity in recent years. This may be linked to its persisting status as a creative, deliberate ad-hoc deviation from conventions rather than a conventionalising innovation.

This paper identifies just so you know and it just so happens as emerging discourse markers in American English, based on data from the Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Both discourse markers started to appear around the middle of the 20th century but differ in their discourse functions and development. Just so you know is used for cancelling implicatures, expressing emphasis, indicating topic shift or specifying a preceding utterance. (It) just so happens, on the other hand, signals an unexpected, yet relevant piece of information. In terms of their development, only just so you know has so far managed to gain a firm foothold in terms of frequency, exhibiting also a high degree of productivity in the form of a whole family of related discourse marker uses (e.g. just so you understand, just so we’re clear). Both discourse markers are identified as resulting from cooptation, but with different degrees of subsequent grammaticalization. The less successful development of (it) just so happens is attributed to the prior existence of a functional competitor, viz. as it happens, and possibly its different source construction, viz. a matrix rather than an adverbial clause.

This paper investigates the evolution of the present perfect and have to in English to assess whether these forms may be considered emerging inferentials. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses in diachrony and synchrony, it argues that the two forms may show incipient signs of the grammaticalization of inferential evidentiality. The present perfect is already fully grammaticalized in its morphology, and highly frequent. Inferential evidentiality is not part of its meaning, but a slightly rising implicature. The semi-auxiliary have to is less grammaticalized morphologically, but possesses a distinct function that is traditionally called ‘epistemic’, but is rather ‘logical inferential’. This function is still infrequent, but has been rising steadily in the past decades. Whether these changes will lead to a fully-developed evidential paradigm is unpredictable, but this study confirms that evidentiality is a necessary notion to describe English grammar and its evolution accurately.

This paper investigates the different functions of some in Present Day English. It especially focuses on whether and to what extent some functions as an indefinite article for non-count and plural nouns and as such competes with the bare marking strategy (I need to buy some milk/some cigarettes vs. I need to buy milk/cigarettes). It is shown that next to being a quantifier, some has grammaticalized into an article-like element. On the basis of a sample of direct object NPs extracted from the British National Corpus (XML Edition), we analyze singular, plural and non-count NPs functioning as syntactic objects which either occur bare or have some as a determiner. One question is how often and in which constructional environments some functions as a so-called ‘near-article’ and which other functions it fulfills (e.g. partitive or vagueness marker). The results of a multinomial logistic regression model are used to discuss which grammatical factors are correlated with the use of some as an existential marker of indefiniteness. We then investigate the potential factors predicting speakers’ choice between using some as an overt near-article or leaving the nominal bare in indefinite NPs (i.e. zero article), by means of binomial logistic regression. Theoretically, this paper contributes to the study of such mechanisms as paradigmatization, analogization and constructional competition within a usage-based, constructional model of language and its change.