Paths and degrees of constructionalization. A corpus-based study of the 'far from X' construction in Dutch and French

Van Goethem, Kristel [UCL] Vanderbauwhede, Gudrun [Université de Mons]

As described in detail by De Smet (2012), the English complex preposition far from, denoting physical or metaphorical distance, has developed into an adverbial downtoner, used to lower the force of the lexical element in its scope (Quirk et al. 1985: 601). As a downtoner, far from has extended its host-classes: it not only combines with nominal elements (N, NP, gerunds), but also with verbs other than gerunds (1) and with adjectives (2): (1) he had far from made up his mind what to say in this. (1884, COHA) (in De Smet 2012: 611) (2) our merchant service … contained a far from insignificant proportion of foreigners (1899–1902, CLMETEV) (in De Smet 2012 : 611) As such, the downtoner use of far from can be described as a semi-schematic construction, meaning ‘not X at all’. (3) [[far from]Adv [X]i]XP ↔ ‘not SEMi at all’ The first purpose of our study consists in analyzing to which degree the Dutch and French counterparts of English far from, ver/verre van and loin de respectively, have also developed this downtoner use. As a pilot synchronic corpus study, we have analyzed for both languages 300 tokens from the COW corpus (Schäfer & Bildhauer 2012). This study suggests that Dutch verre van has undergone constructional specialization: it acts as an adverbial downtoner in more than 87% of the cases (4), whereas its formal variant ver van is exclusively used to indicate spatial or metaphorical distance (5). Moreover, contrary to English far from, verre van can occur without a complement (6), signaling an even more advanced degree of adverbialization. (4) Nee, dit is verre van plezierig. (NLCOW 2012) ‘No, this is far from pleasant.’ (5) Iquitos ligt niet zo ver van Brazilië en dat is te merken. (NLCOW 2012) ‘Iquitos is not so far from Brazil, and that shows’. (6) Ik zeg niet dat hier alles beter is, verre van, zou ik haast zeggen. (NLCOW 2012) ‘I don’t say that everything is better here, far from (it), I would almost say.’ Contrary to Dutch, French loin de combines the spatial, metaphorical (7) and downtoner use (8). However, syntactically loin de does not act as an adverb, but always functions as a complex preposition (with nominal complements), even if used as a downtoner (8). (7) Nous voilà loin de la mondialisation heureuse ! (FRCOW 2011) ‘Here we are far from happy globalization!’ (8) Or, c’est loin d’être le cas. (FRCOW 2011) ‘But this is far from being the case.’ As a second objective, we aim to account for these synchronic differences by exploring the diachronic pathways taken by [[ver/verre van] [X]] and [[loin de] [X]] and by examining if their diachronic development into adverbial /prepositional downtoners can be seen as an instance of (grammatical) constructionalization (Traugott & Trousdale 2013). For this purpose, we will carry out an in-depth diachronic corpus study, based on data that we have already compiled from Frantext for French and the KB newspaper archive for Dutch. These diachronic data will be interpreted in terms of the parameters proposed for grammatical constructionalization by Traugott and Trousdale (2013), that is productivity, schematicity and compositionality. References De Smet, H. (2012). The course of actualization. Language 88. 601-633. Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech & J. Svartik (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. Schäfer, R. & F. Bildhauer. (2012). Building large corpora from the web using a new efficient tool chain. N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck et al. (Eds), Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Istanbul, 486-493. Traugott, E. C. & G. Trousdale (2013). Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corpora COW = Corpora from the Web: http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/cow/colibri/ Frantext: http://www.frantext.fr/ KB: http://kranten.kb.nl/