López Couso, María JoséBlanco García, Cristina2023-05-112023http://hdl.handle.net/10347/30530This 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.engAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacionalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ephemeralconditional and concessiveadverbial subordinationcorpus studylinguistic variationMaterias::Investigación::57 Lingüística::5702 Lingüística diacrónica::570201 Lingüística históricaMaterias::Investigación::57 Lingüística::5704 Teoría lingüísticadoctoral thesisopen access