Friday, September 19, 2014

The functional creep of "all"

Despite yesterday's post about their failure to consider the idea that all is a determinative, Buchstaller and Traugott (B&T) present a good deal of interesting data on the functional creep of the universal determinative all. These are nicely summarized in their Table 2 (p. 365).


Table 2.          Distributional expansion of Advall with respect to syntactic context types
Period
Cop__
__Adj
__Part
__Adv
__PP
__NP
__Quote
__V
OE
X (be)
X
X
X




ME
X (be)
X
X
X
X



EModE
X
X
X
X
X
X


ModE
X
X
X
X
X
X


PDE
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X

The various columns here are as follows (using examples from B&T):
Cop__ (after a copula)
& hie wœron ealle gefylled flurh flagife flœs Halgan Gastes
and they were all filled through that gift of-that Holy Ghost
(note here the ge- prefix on fylled, which suggests a complete meaning, the present-day fiilled up.)

__Adj (before an adjective)
fla andwyrde Iudas, swa swa he eall cene wœs 
then answered Judas,     as    he all bold was

__Part (before a participle)
seo wurDfulle byrgen flœs De him eallum fluhte eall bifigende wœs
that worshipful tomb, as    to-them all  appeared, all  rocking    was


__Adv (before an adverb)
Al priuely behinde his bak
all secretly behind his back

__PP (before a preposition phrase)
Se kyng ... lai flœre eall ofer Pentecostewuce
The king ...lay there all through Pentecost week

__NP (before a noun phrase)
one of the liveliest, merriest girls in the world, was, on a sudden, become all gloom and melancholy.

__Quot (introducing a quotation)
And he’s all ‘Hook me up with free food’.

_Verb (before a tensed verb)
and the guywas scared and he all jumped and snatched his news article
Now the question is whether other determinatives such as both or each are all creepy like this.

References
Buchstaller, I., & Traugott, E. C. (2006). The lady was al demonyak: historical aspects of Adverb all. English Language and Linguistics, 10(2), 345–370. doi:10.1017/S136067430600195X


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