Grammaticalisation and information structure: two perspectives on diachronic changes of notwithstanding in written American English

Abstract

This article traces processes of change affecting the concessive adpositionnotwithstandingin written American English from the early nineteenth century to the present. Data from theCorpus of Historical American Englishshow that, first, there is a dramatic decline in the frequency ofnotwithstanding. Second, whilenotwithstandingas a conjunction or conjunct becomes nearly obsolete, its use as an adposition increases in relative frequency. These two developments are interpreted as specialisation in ongoing grammaticalisation, whereby the range of formal alternatives is reduced within the domain of concessive adpositions more generally and among uses ofnotwithstandingin particular. Third, the postposition becomes the most frequent syntactic variant in the twentieth century. The strengthening of the postposition coincides with two tendencies: (i) the respective phrases are placed in non-final sentence position, and (ii) the noun phrase complements in such constructions are extremely short. In consequence, NP complements ofnotwithstandingare maximally de-accentuated, being very short and far removed from the focus position. Structuring information in this way is not an option for other concessive connectives, and it is argued to be one of the factors resulting in the strengthening of postpositionalnotwithstandingin late modern and present-day American English.