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Taking it up a level: Copy-raising and cascaded tiers of morphosyntactic change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2018

Marisa Brook
Marisa Brook*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Abstract

This paper uncovers evidence for two linked levels of morphosyntactic change occurring in Canadian English. The more ordinary is a lexical replacement: with finite subordination after seem, the complementizer like has been overtaking all the alternatives (as if, as though, that, and Ø). On top of this, there is a broader syntactic change whereby the entire finite structure (now represented primarily by like) is beginning to catch on at the expense of infinitival subordination after seem. Drawing on complementary evidence from British English and several partial precedents in the historical linguistics literature, I take this correlation to mean that like has reached sufficient rates among the finite strategy to have instigated the second level of change, to the point that it has ramifications for epistemic and evidential marking with the verb seem. I propose that the best model of these trajectories is a set of increasingly large envelopes of variation, one inside the next, and argue that the envelope might itself be an entity susceptible to change over time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , July 2018 , pp. 231 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

I am indebted to Sali A. Tagliamonte, Diane Massam, J. K. Chambers, Naomi Nagy, Aaron Dinkin, Belén Méndez-Naya, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Ailís Cournane, Alexandra D'Arcy, Laurence Horn, Heather Burnett, Derek Denis, Bridget L. Jankowski, the LVC Research Group at the University of Toronto, and four anonymous reviewers for their extensive input and guidance. I also thank my audiences at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (Portland, Oregon, January 8–11, 2015), Michigan State University (October 6, 2016), New Ways of Analyzing Variation 45 (Vancouver, British Columbia, November 3–6, 2016), and the University of Victoria (September 28, 2017). Finally, I would like to thank the many research assistants who have collected, transcribed, and managed the data employed here. Any remaining errors are mine alone. Portions of this work have appeared as Brook (2016, 2017).

References

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