María José López-Couso is Associate Professor in English Linguistics at the University of Santiago de Compostela and a member of the Research Unit Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization. Her main research areas are morpho-syntactic and pragmatic change, grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification processes in the history of English. She has published extensively on these and other topics in various collective volumes by international publishers and in leading linguistics journals (among others, English Language and Linguistics, Language Sciences, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Folia Linguistica, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, and Journal of English Linguistics). She has also co-edited several volumes in the fields of historical linguistics, grammaticalization studies, and corpus linguistics, and contributed to the Mouton handbooks Historical Pragmatics (2010) and English Historical Linguistics (2011), as well as to the Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics (2016).

She has considerable experience in PhD supervision, journal editing, and university management (she was Dean of the Faculty of Philology in the period 2012-2020 and is currently Vice-Chancellor for Academic Degrees and International Recruitment). Between 2009 and 2017, she was also a member of the Executive Board of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), and in July 2021 she was elected Vice-President for Research of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE).

For further information, see https://www.usc-vlcg.es/MXLC.htm

ABSTRACT

ON THE RELATION BETWEEN ONTOGENY AND DIACHRONY: EXPLORING PARALLEL DEVELOPMENTAL PATHWAYS THROUGH CORPUS DATA

Remarkable similarities have been identified in developmental pathways between first language acquisition and historical change in various domains, including the development of the present perfect construction, the emergence of epistemic modal meanings out of deontic ones, and the directional change in the going to-pattern from motion to future meaning (López-Couso 2017).

In this talk I first introduce some attested cases of sequential isomorphism between L1 acquisition and historical change, both from English and from other languages, and discuss whether similar or different principles are involved in such acquisitional and diachronic developmental routes. Then I explore the potential of corpus material to account for such parallels, using data from both historical and L1 acquisition corpora. The focus here is on two case studies of shared grammaticalization pathways from different stages in the history of English: existential there and the ‘emerging modal’ want to/wanna.

In the first of these case studies, I examine the developmental relation between deictic there and existential there in texts from the Old and Middle English sections of the Helsinki Corpus and argue that the grammaticalization of existential there in the history of English followed a similar pathway to that identified by Johnson (2001) for Child English: existential there derives from locative there, via overlap (bridging) contexts, where there performs both a deictic and an existence-informing function (López-Couso 2011).

In my second case study I consider whether the ontogeny and the diachrony of want to/wanna also follow parallel developmental routes. Along the lines suggested by Schmidtke-Bode (2009) for going to/gonna, I compare Krug’s (2000) account of the history of want to/wanna with the acquisition of this emerging modal by English-speaking children, using longitudinal data from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) (MacWhinney 2000). The results show that the developmental patterns in Child English are consistent with the diachronic facts: the full form want to is acquired earlier than the reduced form wanna, via an intermediate stage with the variant wan(t) (ta), which represents the beginnings of the process of erosion of want to.

References

Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. 1991. Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki. Compiled by Matti Rissanen (Project leader), Merja Kytö (Project secretary); Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpiö (Old English); Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen (Middle English); Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (Early Modern English).

Johnson, Christopher R. 2001. Constructional grounding: On the relation between deictic and existential there-constructions in acquisition. In Alan Cienki, Barbara J. Luka & Michael B. Smith (eds.), Conceptual and Discourse Factors in Linguistic Structure, 123-136. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Krug, Manfred. 2000. Emerging English Modals: A Corpus-based Study of Grammaticalization. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

López-Couso, María José. 2011. Developmental parallels in diachronic and ontogenetic grammaticalization: Existential there as a test case. Folia Linguistica 45 (1): 81-102.

López-Couso, María José. 2017. Transferring insights from child language acquisition to diachronic change (and vice versa). In Marianne Hundt, Sandra Mollin & Simone E. Pfenninger (eds.), The Changing English Language: Psycholinguistic Perspectives, 332-347. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Schmidtke-Bode, Karsten. 2009. Going to-V and gonna-V in child language: A quantitative approach to constructional development. Cognitive Linguistics 20 (3): 509-538.