The Department of the History of English invites everybody to an open talk by Dr. Karolina Rudnicka (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) on The Statistics of Obsolescence: Purpose Subordinators in Late Modern English
Date: May 14, 2019
Time: 4.45 p.m.
Venue: C Martineum
"I will present the results of my recently finished PhD project focused on the phenomenon of grammatical obsolescence - a notion covering cases in which a productive grammatical construction starts to display a decrease in frequency, possibly coinciding with restrictions in functional range. Ultimately, this decrease in frequency will lead to the total loss of the construction, or to its survival in the form of fossilised residues.
Contrary to processes of emergence and innovation, the topic of grammatical obsolescence has remained under-researched. One of the aims of my study was to redress this imbalance, by providing a comprehensive theoretical discussion of grammatical obsolescence, followed by an empirical test case.
The variable selected for this case study is purpose subordination in English from ca. 1800 to the present, in particular the variants in order that, in order to, in order for * to, so as to and lest. Methodologically, the study combines philological analysis with a range statistical approaches, applied to data obtained from large machine-readable corpora."
BYOT