Abstract :
[en] This paper compares the diachronic development of stance constructions containing a negative quantifier + chance (henceforth ‘no’ chance) with that observed for stance constructions featuring ‘no’ wonder, focusing on their formal and semantic-discursive properties. While these ‘no’ + noun strings differ in semantic type of attitudinal assessment, with ‘no’ wonder expressing mirative appraisal (cf. Gentens et al. 2016) and ‘no’ chance expressing deontic, epistemic or (non-attitudinal) dynamic meaning (cf. Van linden & Brems 2017), they are similar in showing both complement constructions (1a)-(2a) and adverbial uses (1b)-(2b), as well as setting up a discourse schema expressing both speaker attitude and discourse organization: the speaker uses the structures to assess a proposition (P), and motivates this assessment by an explicit justification (J). In (2b), however, the epistemic qualifier interacts with the modal marking in P, yielding the interpretation ‘no chance Hoddle learned…’
(1) (a) It’s no wonder [Norwegians hunt whale.]P [There’s nothing else left to catch.]J (WB) (Van linden et al. 2016: 385)
(b) [And his wife was an alcoholic]P, and no wonder, [if she knew what kind of man he was.]J (WB) (Gentens et al. 2016: 126)
(2) (a) She had been weeping, he could see that, but there was no chance [that she would cry now]P [because the apartment was filled with Agency staff […].]J (WB)
(b) You would have thought [Hoddle might have learned something during his time out of the game, that he might have quietly reflected on his past errors of judgment and resolved to tread a little more warily in future.]P No chance. [Within minutes, he had committed two classic blunders and reconfirmed the old belief that […].]J (WB)
‘No’ chance adverbials also show a different use, expressing an emphatic negative response to a question or another speech act (3), a use also observed for ‘no’ way (cf. Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 849; Davidse et al. 2014). Many cases of sentence-initial ‘no’ chance, however, do not function as adverbials, but are in fact elliptical clauses, combining with a range of complements formally much more diverse than with ‘no’ wonder, like to-infinitives and of V-ing complements.
(3) Whenever Nia suggests a name I always think of some tosser I knew when I was at school and say “No chance.” (WB)
While adverbial uses of ‘no’ wonder already appeared in Late Middle English, taking over the discourse-schematic properties of their clausal counterparts (Gentens et al. 2016), chance was borrowed into the language in Early Middle English (OED), with the earliest complement constructions observed in Early Modern English only (no adverbial uses yet), all in happenstance contexts, cf. the source constructions of the stance adverbials perhaps and maybe (López-Couso & Méndez-Naya 2017).
This paper will trace the diachronic development of ‘no’ chance structures based on the Penn Historical Corpora, the Corpus of Early Modern English Texts, and the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts 3.0. Synchronic data are drawn from WordbanksOnline (WB). Its synchronic-diachronic perspective will enable us to assess the relative explanatory power of Thetical versus Sentence Grammar (Kaltenböck et al. 2011) and primary versus secondary discourse status (Boye & Harder 2012).
Corpora
WordbanksOnline Corpus https://wordbanks.harpercollins.co.uk/
PPCME2: Kroch, A. & Taylor, A. (2000). The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM, second edition, release 4.
PPCEME: Kroch, A., Santorini, B. & Delfs, L. (2004). The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM, first edition, release 3.
CEMET: De Smet, Hendrik. 2013. Spreading Patterns: Diffusional Change in the English System of Complementation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 13-15.
CLMET 3.0: Diller, H., De Smet, H., Tyrkkö, J. 2011. A European database of descriptors of English electronic texts. The European English Messenger 19, 21-35.
References
Boye, Kasper and Peter Harder. 2012. A Usage-based Theory of Grammatical Status and Grammaticalization. Language 88: 1-44.
Davidse, Kristin, An Van linden, Jacob Lesage & Lot Brems. Negation, grammaticalization and subjectification: the development of polar, modal and mirative no way-constructions, ICEHL18, 14-18 July 2014, University of Leuven.
Gentens, Caroline, Ditte Kimps, Kristin Davidse, Gilles Jacobs, An Van linden & Lot Brems. 2016. Mirativity and rhetorical structure: The development and prosody of disjunct and anaphoric adverbials with ‘no’ wonder. In Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer & Arne Lohmann (eds.), Outside the Clause. Form and function of extra-clausal constituents, 125-156 [Studies in Language Companion Series 178]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kaltenböck, Gunther, Bernd Heine, and Tania Kuteva. 2011. On Thetical Grammar. Studies in Language 35: 848-893.
López-Couso, María José & Belén Méndez-Naya. From happenstance to epistemic possibility: Corpus evidence for the adverbialization of happenstance expressions. ICAME 38, Prague, 24-28 May 2017.
OED = Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press.
Van linden, An & Brems, Lot. Talmy’s “greater modal system”: fitting in verbo-nominal constructions with chance(s). Seventh International Conference of the French Association for Cognitive Linguistics (AFLiCo 7). 31 May – 3 June 2017, University of Liège.
