Meaning and function words
Our words: pas as in pas moi; go
Our words: pas as in pas moi; go
Are all words "meaningful"?
eh, duh, do, as in do you know?
Grammaticalization
go
I'm going to Buffalo go+ing meaningful verb + intention or process
I'm going to go to Buffalo go+ing + inf + go intention/futurity + dir + verb
I'm gonna go to Buffalo same, with reduction of go+ing + inf
*I'm gonna to Buffalo * signals not accepted utterance
The verb "go" has slid from meaning "To move, travel, journey . . ." (OED) to singalling intention to marking future time in a process called grammaticalization. (We'll talk about tense in our how words behave sessions, unless you want to start now.)
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
Function words, traffic signals as compared to the "vehicle" lexical words that have "meanings," come from lexical words that have lost their meaning.
What about the word "it" in the sentence "It is raining." What's raining? "It" is a pronoun, a general shorthand word for a lexical item that context identifies. But in this sentence it loses even that function—the word is there only because English requires a subject. It's a filler, like the first "do" in the sentence "What do you do for a living?"—a meaningless marker that only English and Celtic languages use (there is a minor dialect in northern Italy that uses the device as well).
An example from French. Did you deflate Pierre's bicycle tire?
pas moi not me
BUT here, from Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language is an account of why pas got added to the original French negative marker ne, and an account of the same process in English:
This mere shrug of syllable, however, was not deemed emphatic enough to convey the full extent of Gallic unenthusiasm, so various novel and imaginative intensifiers began to be added, to make sure that a ‘no’ was really taken for a ‘no’. Pas, which meant ‘step’, was just one of them, and was used in expressions like ‘I’m not going a step’. But there were many others to play with, such as point ‘dot’, gote ‘drop’, amende ‘almond’, areste ‘fish-bone’, eschalope ‘pea-pod’ or mie ‘crumb’.
One can imagine how purists in the twelfth century would have frowned upon phrases like ‘he won’t love me a crumb’ or ‘I don’t care one pea-pod’ as unnecessarily flamboyant and debasing exaggerations. But even if they did, their censure had little effect, and these gaudy intensifiers became more common. By the sixteenth century, pas and point had displaced most of the other variants, and had become so frequent that they lost much of their original force. In the end, they came to be seen as a necessary part of saying a simple ‘no’.
But English has the same process at work:
[T]he English negative marker ‘not’ is the result of exactly the same process. The original negation marker in English was ne, as in French. The modern word ‘not’ started out as a full-bodied ne-a-wiht ‘not-ever-thing’, or in other words ‘nothing-whatsoever’. This phrase was added to the simple ‘no’, in order to create an emphatic ‘no way’, ‘not a jot’ type of ‘no’. By the tenth century, ne-a-wiht had already contracted to just nawiht, but it still retained its former meaning, so that a phrase like ic ne seo nawiht still meant ‘I not see nothing whatsoever’. Later on, however, as this emphatic type of ‘no’ started being used more and more often, attrition set in. In form, nawiht was reduced to nawt, and alongside this erosion of sounds, there was also an inflationary weakening of meaning.
By the thirteenth century, a manual for female recluses called the Ancrene Wisse (‘Guide for Anchoresses’) already uses the formerly emphatic combination ne … nawt in nearly half of all ‘no’ statements, thus showing that ne … nawt was no longer as emphatic as it had once been. And later on, the ne … nawt combination became even more common, so that I ne see nawt lost all pretence of emphasis, and came to mean just ‘I don’t see’. Together with this attrition in meaning, the form nawt (sometimes also spelt nowt or nought) was eroded further to not, and to cap it all, the original negation marker ne started being dropped from the pair, to leave only I see not. ‘Not’ is thus a prime example of both material and social decline. It started as a paunchy ne-a-wiht ‘nothing whatsoever’, a word rich in length and weighty in meaning, but its form was reduced to not (or even just n’t), and its meaning eroded to the plainest of no’s.
Here we see one form of language change--the related processes of emphatic uplift and erosion, to use terms drawn from geology. Lots more about this in a couple of weeks.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
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Tense vs time; what tense is "I go to Albany next week"? If tense is a morphological device to mark time, what are the English tenses? What are the future markers in English?
[Y]ou can say “I’m gonna study history” but not “I’m gonna the shops.” In the first sentence, all “I’m going to”/“I’m gonna” tells you is that the action (study history) is something you intend to do. In the second one, the same verb isn’t simply a marker of intention, it indicates movement. You can’t therefore swap it for another tense (“I will study history” vs. “I will the shops”). “Will,” the standard future tense in English, has its own history of grammaticalization. It once indicated desire and intention. “I will” meant “I want.” In closely related German, “I want” is in fact Ich will. We can still detect this original English meaning in phrases such as “If you will” (if you want/desire).
Shariatmadari, David. Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language.
As you would expect, ‘going to’ originally meant ‘walking’ or ‘travelling’ somewhere: ‘going to London’, ‘going to the market’,and the like. The phrase ‘going to do something’ seems to have made its entrance only in the fifteenth century. One of the earliest examples is found in an appeal sent to parliament in 1439
Deutscher, Guy. The Unfolding of Language.
While we mark future by standalone words, in many languages future time is marked by a morpheme attached to a word, a morphological tense. As we'll discuss next week, English could be said to have only two tenses, past and non-past. (to get really fancy, real and irreal.) while English uses have, the word of possession, and did. the past form of the word of action as markers for past time, as in he has purchased it, French uses the word of possession as a marker for future time (perhaps reflecting the related sense of obligation that goes with possession, as in they have to vote next month):
je aimerai (I will love) / j'ai (I have)
But what is the passé compsée form?
j'ai aime
Lexical words can have their meaning leached out of them when used as grammaical markers. The movement in this case is from the sense possess (past tense in French) to obliged to (future tense) to just marking the time of each action. In English have can mark completion in perfect aspect (more about aspect soon) and mark obligation:
he has eaten
he has to go
On to our next question—"How do they behave?"