Parallel sources, different outcomes. A corpus-based study of the 'far from X' construction in French, English and Dutch

Parallel sources, different outcomes: a corpus-based study of the ‘far from X’ construction in Dutch, English and French In language change, parallel source constructions can undergo cross-linguistically divergent devel-opments. The focus of this paper is on one such case, the development of degree modifiers from markers of physical distance. Specifically, we compare the histories of Dutch verre van, English far from and French loin de – all three consisting of an adjective/adverb and a preposition, and all three meaning ‘far from’. The first purpose of our study is to analyze to what extent the parallel source constructions have developed degree modifying uses. Data from the BNC show that English far from can be used as de-gree modifier with gerunds and adjectives (cf. De Smet 2012). (1) this competition, far from resolving the problem of security, in fact exacerbates it (BNC) (2) Nutty was far from sure, and Biddy looked doubtful. (BNC) Data from the COW corpus (Schafer & Bildhauer 2012) show that Dutch verre van has undergone constructional specialization: it acts as an adverbial downtoner in more than 87% of the cases (3), whereas its formal variant ver van is exclusively used to indicate spatial or metaphorical distance (4). Moreover, contrary to English far from, verre van can occur without a complement (5), signaling an even more advanced degree of adverbialization. (3) Nee, dit is verre van plezierig. (NLCOW 2012) ‘No, this is far from pleasant.’ (4) Iquitos ligt niet zo ver van Brazilie en dat is te merken. (NLCOW 2012) ‘Iquitos is not so far from Brazil, and that shows’. (5) Ik zeg niet dat hier alles beter is, verre van, zou ik haast zeggen. (NLCOW 2012) ‘I don’t say that everything is better here, far from (it), I would almost say.’ Contrary to Dutch, French loin de combines the spatial, metaphorical (6) and degree modifying use (7). However, syntactically loin de does not act as an adverb, but always functions as a complex prep-osition (with nominal complements), even if used with a downtoning function (7). (6) Nous voila loin de la mondialisation heureuse ! (FRCOW 2011) ‘Here we are far from happy globalization!’ (7) Or, c’est loin d’etre le cas. (FRCOW 2011) ‘But this is far from being the case.’ As a second objective, we aim to account for these synchronic differences by exploring the dia-chronic pathways taken by [[far from] [X]]YP [[ver/verre van] [X]]YP and [[loin de] [X]]PP and by examin-ing if their diachronic development into adverbial /prepositional downtoners can be seen as an in-stance of (grammatical) constructionalization (Traugott & Trousdale 2013). For this purpose, we will carry out an in-depth diachronic corpus study, based on data that we have already compiled from EEBOCorp for English, Frantext for French and the KB newspaper archive for Dutch. These diachronic data will be interpreted in terms of the parameters proposed for grammatical constructionalization by Traugott and Trousdale (2013), that is productivity, schematicity and compositionality. References De Smet, H. (2012). The course of actualization. Language 88. 601-633. Schafer, R. & F. Bildhauer. (2012). Building large corpora from the web using a new efficient tool chain. N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck et al. (Eds), Proceedings of the Eight International Confer-ence on Language Resources and Evaluation, Istanbul, 486-493. Traugott, E. C. & G. Trousdale (2013). Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Ox-ford University Press. Corpora BNC = British National Corpus: http://corpus2.byu.edu/bnc/ COW = Corpora from the Web: http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/cow/colibri/ EEBOCorp: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/handle/123456789/416330 Frantext: http://www.frantext.fr/ KB: http://kranten.kb.nl/