The development of non-deontic be bound to in a radically usage-based diachronic construction grammar perspective

Abstract

Even when both use and cognition are incorporated in its theorizing about grammatical change, research in the budding discipline of diachronic construction grammar which explicitly subscribes to a "usage-based" approach does not always distinguish between abstraction from the observed usage of a linguistic community and individual linguistic knowledge. Given that language change starts with innovations by individuals and that experientially constructed knowledge is necessarily diverse, such a distinction crucially needs to be made to arrive at a realistic usage-based account of grammatical change. This paper first assesses the extent to which the conflicting models of Elizabeth Traugott and Olga Fischer succeed in teasing apart internal and external systems, concluding that while the former's reanalysis model results from an external semasiological perspective, the latter's analogy model is more radically usagebased in that it does not inherently entangle intra-and extra-individual knowledge. By way of an illustration of a radically usage-based approach, the second part of the paper proposes an onomasiological account of how the pattern be bound to came to be used as a non-deontic/epistemic necessity marker, offering an alternative to viewing it as a development from the historically prior deontic be bound to construction.

The decline of the Deontic nci construction in Late Modern English

“…This justifies positing a DEONTIC NCI construction, not just for present-day English speakers but also for historical, post-13 th -century, speakers of the language. As pointed out already in Section 1, Noël (2017) established, on the basis of the occurrence of quotations exemplifying the [BE Ven to INF] pattern in OED entries whose definitions contained one or more of the obligative verbs bind, compel, constrain, force, oblige, forbid and prohibit, that a deontic NCI schema started developing in the 14 th century and considerably expanded until the 18 th century, after which fewer new verbs were entered into the pattern than in previous centuries. Disney's (2016) comparison of late 17 th , late 18 th and late 20 th -century corpus frequency data confirm that the schema must have seen a height in productivity in the 18 th century and that it subsequently contracted again.…”

“…one that does not take for granted, but carefully considers, the cognitive relevance of usage/corpus data and which looks for cognitively adequate explanations for constructional change. The paper thus continues the reflection on a radically usage-based diachronic construction grammar that was started in Noël (2016Noël ( , 2017Noël ( , 2019, by taking it from thoughts on grammatical constructionalization, i.e. from how new grammar comes about, to consideration of the disappearance of grammatical constructions.…”

“…of how new grammar comes into being, it entails a methodology which is open to considering homonymy in favour of polysemy and to looking for onomasiological explanations as an alternative to semasiological ones. This was illustrated in Noël (2017) with an account of how the form be bound to, which suffered from attrition as a deontic construction, came to be used as a non-deontic/epistemic necessity marker, not as a result of a grammaticalization/reanalysis of the deontic construction, but because there already was a deverbal adjective bound which was very close in meaning to sure and certain and had been used in similar syntactic contexts, which came to include the pattern [BE + ADJ + to + INF] when be sure to and be certain to were becoming more frequent and consequently were likely to serve as a model.…”

“…Diachronic construction grammarians who explicitly take a 'usage-based' approach may, I would contend, be held to be making such a cognitive commitment, given that this approach implies a conception of language in which "[s]ubstantial importance is given to the actual use of the linguistic system and a speaker's knowledge of this use" (Langacker 1987: 494;my italics). However, in previous work (Noël 2016(Noël , 2017, I have argued there to be a gradation in the cognitive adequacy of models of morphosyntactic change that make reference to knowledge. Comparing two avowedly usage-based models, an overtly constructionist one (Traugott and Trousdale 2013) and the other one constructionist in spirit at least (Fischer 2007), I contended that the former model is the least cognitively adequate one because of its failure to disentangle individual linguistic knowledge and a conventionalized system which is referred to as 'community knowledge' but which cannot have a cognitive ontological status.…”

“…Previous research suggests that the frequency of instantiation and the productivity of the schema has declined in the past couple of centuries, after roughly five centuries of growth. Noël (2017), a study on be bound to, which instantiates the deontic schema in one of its uses, looked for the earliest occurrences of similar micro-constructions 3 in the OED quotation database and found that, after the first such constructions had cropped up in the 13 th century, a schema started developing in the 14 th century and considerably expanded until the 18 th century, both with micro-constructions that have survived to this day (e.g. 15C be required to, 16C be forced to,…”