Grammatical change in the noun phrase: the influence of written language use

TLDR

Grammatical change has largely been studied in conversational interaction, yet academic writing’s informational prose relies heavily on nominal structures, creating a distinct discourse style. The study argues that grammatical innovation can arise from written discourse and proposes to trace its historical development. The authors analyze two grammatical features—nominal premodifiers and nominal postmodifiers—over four centuries in a corpus of academic research writing, comparing them to fiction, newspaper reportage, and conversation. Earlier periods showed limited use of these features, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they became more frequent and productive, expanding functions and lexical associations mainly in informational written discourse.

Abstract

Many discussions of grammatical change have focused on grammatical innovation in the discourse contexts of conversational interaction. We argue here that it is also possible for grammatical innovation to emerge out of the communicative demands of written discourse. In particular, the distinctive communicative characteristics of academic writing (informational prose) have led to the development of a discourse style that relies heavily on nominal structures, with extensive phrasal modification and a relative absence of verbs. By tracking the historical development of this discourse style, we can also observe the development of particular grammatical functions that are emerging in writing. We focus here on two grammatical features – nouns as nominal premodifiers and prepositional phrases as nominal postmodifiers – analyzing their historical development over the last four centuries in a corpus of academic research writing (compared to other registers such as fiction, newspaper reportage and conversation). Our analysis shows that these grammatical features were quite restricted in function and variability in earlier historical periods of English. However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they became much more frequent and productive, accompanied by major extensions in their functions, variants, and range of lexical associations. These extensions were restricted primarily to informational written discourse, illustrating ways in which new grammatical functions emerge in writing rather than speech.