Journal of English Linguistics

This research considers the importance of pragmatic motivation in the diffusion of grammaticalized forms, focusing upon the changes in meaning of the construction be+supposed to and the ambiguity that emerges when multiple interpretations become available. The passive form of the main verb to suppose develops into a grammaticalized semimodal construction with deontic and epistemic senses. This work examines the ways that the ambiguity that develops when the pregrammaticalized and the grammaticalized forms coexist can itself propel the change: assisting in the initial spread of the grammaticalized usage and then suppressing the older pregrammaticalized form. Using the British National Corpus, the Chadwyck-Healey Database of Nineteenth-Century Fiction, and the ARCHER corpus, I find that the influences of genre and frequency can create pragmatic conditions which encourage the diffusion of grammaticalized forms between text types.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a new type of adverb, viewpoint adverbs formed with the suffix -wise, appeared in English. This article traces the diffusion and development of viewpoint -wise adverbs using American and British newspaper corpora, the spoken component of the British National Corpus, and the Longman Spoken American Corpus. It is shown that the adverbs are at least twice as frequent in the spoken corpora as in the written, that they are increasing in both American and British English, and that the originally American adverb type is now more frequent in British English. Its spread seems to be motivated by both functional and social factors. In newspapers, a high proportion occurs in represented speech, and the major domains are sports, art and entertainment, and “living.” It has extended its range of bases from nouns to noun phrases and, to some extent, generalized to adjectives and adverbs.

The evolutionary model of New Englishes offered by Schneider posits a uniform pattern of five diachronic phases that are assumed to underlie the processes inherent in the emergence of all New Englishes worldwide. The present article applies this evolutionary model to Indian English and argues on the basis of linguistic and sociolinguistic evidence that present-day Indian English is best viewed as a phase 4 variety, marked by endonormative stabilization, in which, however, some features of phase 3 (i.e., nativization) coexist. It is suggested that the situation in which Indian English finds itself today could be seen as a stable, productive steady state in the evolutionary process in which there is an equilibrium between conflicting forces of progression and conservativism. This steady state in the diachronic development is linked to the synchronic view of present-day Indian English as a semiautonomous variety, which is characterized by three major determinants: common core, interference, and autonomy.