Ephemerality in adverbial subordinators: A corpus-based study of causal, conditional and concessive conjunctions in Middle and Modern English

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation explores, from a corpus-based perspective, the history of ephemeral subordinators from the domains of causal, conditional and concessive adverbial relations in Middle and Modern English. Kortmann (1997: 301) denominates ‘ephemeral subordinators’ those that were added to the inventory of adverbial connectives in Late Middle English, or more commonly, Early Modern English, but did not have a lasting effect and died out eventually. The data analysed is retrieved from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English. This diachronic study considers both structural (e.g. position of the sub-clause in the sentence) and external factors (e.g. text-type) and offers a comparison of the ephemeral connectives with the prototypical subordinators for each of the selected categories of adverbial relations.