The Demise of the Being to V Construction

Abstract

This paper revisits a construction that is rare in historical data, namely the combination of being with an infinitive, as in They being to arrive early that afternoon, all necessary preparations had been made. In early and late Modern English, the BE TO construction had a fuller paradigm than it does in Present Day English, where it is (almost) exclusively used in tensed forms. The focus in this paper is on part of the paradigm of the BE TO construction, i.e., instances with a present participle form of be. Relevant neighbouring constructions are being Ving and having to V, but the construction also needs to be discussed against the background of developments in the system of auxiliaries and future time expressions. On the basis of evidence from historical text databases and corpora, this paper provides the first detailed description of the syntactic contexts, functions and distribution of the being to V construction. In a next step, corpus data are used to discuss possible reasons (i.e., system dependency, paradigmatic attrition, competition and distributional fragmentation) for its apparent demise. The study thus contributes to the still somewhat underexplored area of syntactic loss.

The Emergence and Loss of the English Minor Complementizerstillanduntil

“…By the same token, to -infinitives are seen to rise during the time period when till -clauses disappear—that is, CLMET3.0 subperiod 1780-1850 (Table 2)—with normalized token frequencies shifting from 18.99 in the earliest subperiod of LModE (1710-1780) to 24.46 in the second (1780-1850). This implies that, from a diachronic perspective, the corpus data support the hypothesis that till/until -complements were in competition with to -infinitives; as Hundt’s (2014:171) view of competition proposes, a decrease in the frequency of a declining element—in this case, till/until -clauses—is associated with a frequency rise of competing structures—that is, to -infinitives (see section 3).…”

“…The decline of till/until, on the other hand, can also be approached and understood in terms of developments involving competition between variants and the eventual replacement of grammatical elements (e.g., Hundt & Leech 2012;Hundt 2014). It thus furthers our insights into the role of competition in processes of loss by exploring obsolescence in a lexically specific domain, allowing us to reconsider the generalizations and universals involved in it from the perspective of linguistic marginalia.…”

“…One of the language-internal factors that has been identified as contributing to processes of loss is competition, which can be defined as “a situation in which two or more competing forms exist for the same function and one is eventually selected at the expense of the other(s)” (Rudnicka 2019:84; also Hopper & Traugott 2003:172; Hundt & Leech 2012:176). According to Hundt (2014:171), two prerequisites are to be considered for competition to play a role in an observed language change process: (a) constructions in competition have to be truly equivalent, that is, they have to compete “for the same linguistic environment,” and (b) a decrease in the frequency of the declining element is associated with a frequency rise of competing structures (see also Hundt & Leech 2012:176). Two cases of competition in the history of English investigated by Hundt and Leech (2012) are the decline of which as a relativizer and of for as a conjunction, at three equidistant periods in the recent history of American and British English.…”

“…As a broader implication, the study seeks to address the central question of how and why linguistic elements are lost (section 3), a topic which has not always been brought to the fore in diachronic linguistics, especially as compared to the attention given to the emergence and spread of new elements and new categories (Hundt 2014:167; Kranich & Breban 2021:1). Competition with systemic alternatives will be proposed as one of the factors motivating the loss of till/until -complements, which are seen to decline in the face of the continued growth of to - and for.…”

A Diachronic Study of Modals and Semi-modals in Indian English Newspapers

“…Be to never occurs in its non-finite forms in the corpora. This is perhaps unsurprising since non-finite be to has been extremely restricted, if not obsolete, since the early 1800s in BrE (Hundt 2014). No tendency either way can be discerned for be able to.…”