Diachronic Developments of the Concessive Though-Fronting Construction in American English: A Corpus-Based Perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines diachronic development patterns of the concessive though-fronting construction in American English, using corpus data. The findings of this study, on the one hand, show that the fronted expression has been dominantly an AdjP with a subject predicative complement function and a rather negative connotation, and that the major licensing verbs are linking verbs, which is in line with the previous observations in literature on its contemporary uses. However, the findings also show that the construction has undergone some interesting diachronic changes regarding the increasing dominance of AdjP as the syntactic category of the fronted expression, more diverse grammatical functions of the fronted expression than noted in previous literature, the change of the most preferred position of the concessive though-fronting clause, the strong preference for the singular countable bare NP without a/an, and the uses of the copula as the licensing verb. Furthermore, the attested data provide some examples that weaken the movement-based analysis. The findings, therefore, indicate that it is worth investigating its diachronic properties about expressions that occur in the pre-though position, the salient position of the concessive though-fronting clause, licensing verbs, and the relationship between the pre-though expression and its putative gap in detail.