Experimenting on the past: a case study on changing analysability in English ly-adverbs

Abstract

While it is undoubtedly true that historical data do not lend themselves well to the reproduction of experimental findings, the availability of increasingly extensive data sets has brought some experimenting within practical reach. This means that certain predictions based on a combination of synchronic observations and uniformitarian thinking are now testable. Synchronic evidence shows a negative correlation between analysability in morphologically complex words and various measures of frequency. It is therefore expected that when the frequency of morphologically complex items changes, their analysability will change along with this. If analysability decreases, this should in turn be reflected in decreasing sensitivity to priming by items with analogous composition. The latter prediction is in principle testable on diachronic data, offering a way of verifying the diachronic effect of frequency change on analysability. In this spirit, the present article examines the relation between changing frequency and priming sensitivity, as a proxy to analysability. This is done for a sample of 250 English ly-adverbs, such as roughly, blindly, publicly, etc. over the period 1950–2005, using data from the Hansard Corpus. Some of the expected relations between frequency and analysability can be shown to hold, albeit with great variation across lexical items. At the same time, much of the variation in our measure of analysability cannot be accounted for by frequency or frequency change alone.

The task of the historical linguist is to explain the differences between the past and the present; but to the extent that the past was different from the present, there is no way of knowing how different it was’ (Labov 2001a: 21).

(p. 318)

If historical disciplines are more preoccupied with this uncertainty, it is perhaps because falsification tends to be more difficult. (p. 318)

Findings like these support the idea that structure is gradient, in that some complex words are more readily decomposable into base and affix than others – a property we will refer to here as ‘analysability’. Analysability refers to the degree to which language users can recognize the individual parts of a composite whole (Langacker 1987: 448; Bybee 2010: 45). Analysability is closely related to compositionality, which refers to the degree to which the properties of a composite whole are predictable from the properties of its parts (Langacker 1987: 448; Bybee 2010: 45). Analysability is the broader term, however, in that an expression may decrease in analysability without losing compositionality, but not vice versa. In addition, while an expression’s compositionality is a function of its semantic and formal characteristics, its analysability is an underlying property that is not directly accessible to the observer. (p. 319)

Importantly, both Hay (2003) and Gonnerman et al. (2007) are able to make predictions as to which words are likely to be more analysable. Hay (2003) argues that phonotactics and the relative frequency of base and derivation play a role. For instance, government is less analysable than settlement because the derived form government is more frequent than its base govern, while the derived form settlement is less frequent than its base settle. Gonnerman et al. (2007) show that other important determinants are the degree of semantic and formal similarity between a base and the corresponding free form. For instance, lately is less compositional – and hence less analysable – than boldly because the semantic contribution of late to lately is less predictable than that of bold to boldly. (p. 320)

Gradience also crops up in historical linguistics. One challenge is presented by grammaticalization processes (Traugott & Trousdale 2010). For instance, grammaticalization is often accompanied by formal reduction. This may result in a formal continuum between the reduced form and the original full form. Krug (2000: 152), for instance, cites the forms [ˈwɒntˌtʰuː], [ˈwɒntˌtʊ], [ˈwɒntʊ], [ˈwɒntə], [ˈwɒnə], [ˈwənə], [wɒn] and [wɑ͂ ] as potential realizations of English want to. (p. 320)

Traditionally, underlying syntactic change has been seen as abrupt (e.g. Harris 2003). However, there are dissenting views. One line of reasoning links grammaticalization to structural gradience through frequency (Haspelmath 1999; Bybee 2003, 2006, 2010). Grammaticalizing forms become more frequent. This makes it more likely that they are stored autonomously. As a result, they become dissociated from their component parts. This licenses semantic and formal change, which in turn contributes to the dissociation between the whole and its parts. The gradient, then, is fundamentally one of analysability. (p. 320)

In diachrony, it is much harder to test the idea of gradually changing analysability. But there may be a way out. In a study reminiscent of the priming experiments by Gonnerman et al. (2007), Torres Cacoullos (2015) uses written historical data to show that the Spanish progressive construction, consisting of estar and a gerund, appeared to be initially primed by any other use of the verb estar, but the priming relation became weaker with time as the construction grammaticalized. Torres Cacoullos explicitly invokes ‘priming effects as a measure of (erosion of) analyzability’ (2015: 266). (p. 321)

we address changes in the degree of analysability of English ly-adverbs. These are adverbs formed from adjectives by the addition of the suffix ly, such as cheaply, categorically, specially or morally. It is expected that ly-adverbs may vary in analysability – i.e. the degree to which ly-adverbs are recognized as consisting of an adjectival base and the ly-suffix. Further, it is expected that analysability may change over time, subject to frequency changes, whether they are changes in the token frequency of an individual adverb (cf. Gordon & Alegre 1999; Bybee 2006) or in the relation between the frequency of the adverb and that of its base (see Hay 2003; Blumenthal-Dormé 2012). (p. 321)

A form whose underlying structure is less analysable will be less likely to prime or to be primed by other forms with a similar structure. We assume that priming effects hold between a prime and a target if the occurrence of the prime positively affects the likelihood of subsequent occurrence of the target. (p. 321)

Our study differs from that by Torres Cacoullos in two important ways, both having to do with the choice of case study. First, our case study should allow us better to isolate structural priming effects (Bock 1987). We can take the more abstract derivational template [Adjective + ly] as prime and see how its occurrence affects the likelihood of occurrence for any specific ly-adverb. This way, the magnitude of the observed priming effects primarily reflects a structural property of the ly-adverb in question. Second, the effect of underlying structural change can be tested on a much larger number of individual cases – in principle, any ly-adverb that occurs in more than one subperiod of the corpus. This potential for systematic replication should make findings much more reliable. We should avoid being misled by a lucky find, and we should also get some idea of the overall magnitude of the effects we are interested in. (p. 322)

There are two potentially relevant measures.

First, the more analysable a specific ly-adverb is, the more sensitive it will be to priming by other ly-adverbs. We call this relation ‘passive priming’ because the adverb in question is being structurally primed. In corpus data passive priming will translate into a tendency for the adverb to occur in the vicinity of other ly-adverbs that occurred earlier in the discourse and functioned as prime. In other words, the context immediately preceding our adverb will tend to have slightly more ly-adverbs than one would normally expect. (p. 322)

Second, it can be expected that a highly analysable ly-adverb will be more capable of structurally priming other ly-adverbs. This is ‘active priming’ because the adverb in question structurally primes other adverbs. In corpus data active priming should translate as a slightly higher than expected incidence of ly-adverbs immediately following the priming adverb. (p. 320-321)