Abstract
According to emergent grammar and exemplar theory in cognitive linguistics, the frequency of an item affects its behaviour in terms of structural change. In this article, I illustrate how high frequency items, such as preterital modal auxiliaries and copulas in Afrikaans, resist regularising with the rest of the Afrikaans verbal system. Items with a moderately high frequency can resist change for a time, but succumb to it eventually, such as mog (“might”) and wis (“knew”). While the course of change can also be affected by other factors, such as het (“have”) and had (“had”), and dink (“think”) and gedink/dag/dog (“thought”) show, the data in diachronic Afrikaans corpora from 1911 to 2010 confirm that high frequency items resist structural change to a large extent, while low frequency items do not. This links with the cognitive representation of language and language processing, and illustrates how the use of language shapes the structure of language.
Highlights
The preterite can be described as a synthetic past tense, where the past tense is indicated through inflection on the verb, such as would as the preterite of will, or did as the preterite of do
The frequencies are low, but one deduction can be made – corpus #1 shows a preference for the present tense form of the additional modal auxiliaries when used in the present tense, but that preference does not continue as time goes by, illustrating what Conradie (1999: 28) calls “the relatively modern phenomenon of preterite agreement on concatenated modal verbs”
The use of sou to indicate the past future tense decreases in frequency in the consecutive corpora used for this study, together with a more general decline in preterite use
Summary
The preterite can be described as a synthetic past tense, where the past tense is indicated through inflection on the verb, such as would as the preterite of will, or did as the preterite of do. This is exactly what happened in Afrikaans, and there are additional developments that aided preterite loss in Afrikaans to an even greater extent These additional developments include regularisation of the Dutch verbs hebben (“have”) and zijn (“is”) to only het and is, the regularisation of the past participle to ge- (sometimes optional) + stem, and the functional extension of het to replace is as the past tense auxiliary used with mutative verbs (Conradie 1999: 22). Conradie (1999) gives only a few brief remarks on preterite use in the 20th century, reported in table 1 Other authors, such as De Villiers (1971) and Ponelis (1979), do not focus on historical developments when discussing Afrikaans preterites. The answers to these questions will be sought in the exploration of diachronic corpora of standard written Afrikaans, and the interpretation of the relevant empirical findings within the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics
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