Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Collocations in Law Texts in Late Middle English: Some Evidence Concerning Adverbs Ending in -lī

2011; Routledge; Volume: 83; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00393274.2011.570033

1651-2308

Luis Iglesias-Rábade,

Linguistics and language evolution

Abstract The numerous large-scale research projects in progress focusing on the phraseology of modern languages evince the scholarly fascination for word-combinations because of their acknowledged relevance in both theoretical and applied linguistics. The reasons why some words tend to associate with others in a given order and at a given time in the history of a language are still a matter of conjecture. However, it is generally assumed that, whatever the circumstances of mental organisation turn out to be for speakers to associate some words, word-combinations must have ultimately developed in a cultural framework and been more dependent on lingo-cultural domains than on a statistical probability of co-occurrence. Acknowledgement This research has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, grant number HUM2005-00562/FILO and by La Dirección Xeral de I + D da Consellería de Innovación e Industria da Xunta de Galicia, grant number PGIDIT06PXIC204032PN. These grants are hereby gratefully acknowledged. Notes 1 See Cowie 1998 Cowie, A. P, ed. 1998. Phraseology, Oxford: Clarendon Press. [Google Scholar]: 1–8. 2 The major approaches of phraseology are summarised by Granger and Paquot (2008 Granger, S. and Paquot, M. 2008. "Disentangling the phraseological web". In Phraseology. An Interdisciplinary Perspective, Edited by: Granger, S. and Meunier, F. 27–50. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 3 This statistical approach is also proposed by Clear who considers collocations as a "recurrent co-occurrence of words" (1993: 277); Smadja, as a "recurrent combination of words that co-occur more often than expected" (1993: 143); Benson, as an "arbitrary and recurrent word combination" (1990: 23); Kjellmer, as "a sequence of words that occurs more than once in identical form" (1987: 133). 4 The formation, the development and the semantic aspects of English adverbs, and particularly those ending in -lī, have beeen studied by many scholars. I will only mention here Swan (1984 Swan, T. 1984. Sentence Adverbials en English, Oslo: Novus. [Google Scholar], 1988 Swan, T. 1988. The development of sentence adverbs in English. Studia Linguistica, 42(1): 1–17. [Google Scholar]), Kjellmer (1984 Kjellmer, G. 1984. Why great: greatly but not big: *bigly? On the formation of English adverbs in -ly. Studia Linguistica, 38(1): 1–19. [Google Scholar]), Guimier (1985 Guimier, C. 1985. "On the origin of the suffix -ly". In Historical Semantics, Historical Word-Formation (Trends in Linguistics 29), Edited by: Fisiak, J. 155–170. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [Google Scholar]), McIntosh (1991 McIntosh, A. 1991. Old English adjectives with derivative -lic partners: Some semantic problems. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 92: 297–310. [Google Scholar]), Donner (1991 Donner, M. 1991. Adverb form in Middle English. English Studies, 72: 1–11. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), Nevalainen (1991 Nevalainen, T. 1991. BUT, ONLY, JUST. Focusing Adverbial Change in Modern English 1500–1900 (Mémoires de la Societé Néophilologique 51), Helsinki: Societé Néophilologique. [Google Scholar], 1994a Nevalainen, T. 1994a. "Aspects of adverbial change in Early Modern English". In Studies in Early Modern English, Edited by: Kastovsky, D. 243–259. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [Google Scholar], 1994b Nevalainen, T. 1994b. "Diachronic issues in English adverb derivation". In Creating and Using English Language Corpora, Edited by: Fries, U., Tottie, G. and Schneider, P. 139–147. Amsterdam: Rodopi. [Google Scholar], 1997 Nevalainen, T. 1997. "The processes of adverb derivation in Late Middle and Early Modern English". In Gammaticalization at Work, Edited by: Rissanen, M., Kytö, M. and Heikkonen, K. 145–189. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [Google Scholar], 2008 Nevalainen, T. 2008. Social variation in intensifier use: Constraint on -ly adverbialization?. English Language and Linguistics, 12(2): 289–315. [Google Scholar]), Pounder (2001 Pounder, A. 2001. Adverb-marking in German and English: System and standardization. Diachronica, 18(2): 301–358. [Google Scholar]) and Killie (2007 Killie, K. 2007. On the development and use of appearance/attribute adverbs in English. Diachronica, 24(2): 327–372. [Google Scholar]). 5 LC texts include four subcorpora: a) English Gylds. The Original Ordinances of more than 100 early English Gylds … from 14th & 15th; b) An Anthology of Chancery English; c) Lincoln Diocese Documents, 1450–1544; d) Fifty earliest English Wills in the Court of Probate. 6 For this purpose, The Humanities Text Initiative, a unit of the University of Michigan's Digital Library Production Service, has offered me online access to full text resources of the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. 7 Saliency is assessed by taking into account the frequency of one lexeme in a text in comparison with its occurrences in another text or in the main corpus.