Jukka Suomela

This article focuses on the poster child of grammaticalization, begoing to V. First expressing ‘motion with intention’, in Early Modern English the construction came to signify ‘motionless intention’. The grammaticalization process continued in Late Modern English with subjectification, so that ‘intention’ was gradually replaced by ‘prediction’. We study the process from Late Modern to Present-Day English in the 200-million-word fiction section of the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 1810–2009, for which we have gender metadata on the authors. We focus on the productivity of the construction by comparing type frequencies, i.e., the number of different verbs following begoing to. Our research questions are how the grammaticalization is reflected in the productivity of the construction, and whether the social factor of gender played a role in the process. We study the internal factors of mental verbs, inanimate subjects and passive voice; to this end, we use robust statistical methods to compare type frequencies and proportions of types over time. We also investigate the semantics of the verb types by drawing on techniques from distributional semantics. Our wider aim is to enrich the cognitively oriented theory of Construction Grammar with insights from historical sociolinguistics.

This paper explores the reception of classical works in Early Modern Britain during the hand press era, between the 1470s and 1790s. It investigates canon formation, knowledge transmission, and the integration of digital archives in quantitative book history. The study quantitatively maps changing perceptions of the classical canon across time, offering a panoramic view of 'shifting canons'. The analysis is based on three data archives: the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), Early English Books Online (EEBO), and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). We conclude that we can observe a “canonization” of the set of classical authors printed in Early Modern England, which is reflected in a significant loss of diversity in publications, despite a general increase of the publication of classical works. Preferences also shift, with ancient Greek authors of the early centuries gaining significantly more space in the 18th century. This finding however is balanced by the observation that the circulation of Ancient Greek editions in the original language does not increase during this time. This multidimensional approach contributes to a comprehensive understanding of the reception of Classics in Early Modern Britain, shedding light on cultural and intellectual transformations.