C Análisis del discurso docente:

With the aim of this chapter in mind, namely to trace the evolution of the“fail to”and“not fail to”constructions with a special emphasis on the development of intersubjective readings, I will briefly introduce the theoretical concepts at issue here.

First, I go along with Goldberg’s (2006: 3) definition of constructions as

“conventionalized pairings of form and function”. Constructions may vary in size from individual words to phrases of varying length (Goldberg 2006: 5). They may occur at various levels of abstraction (see, for instance, the micro-, meso- and macro-level distinguished by Traugott 2007 and Traugott 2008) and, correspondingly, contain one or more open slots. The construction mentioned at the outset of this paper, [NPfail to-INFINITIVE], contains at least two slots that are not lexically specified (with the fail to slot possibly constituting a third open slot, as it offers the choice between fail to and not fail to). Then again, the construction [I will/shall not fail toV] contains four slots that are lexically specified, one slot that offers the user a choice between two lexemes, and just one, the infinitive, that is open. This constructionfits the definition of“phraseo- logism”adopted by Gries (2008: 5):“the co-occurrence of a form or lemma of a lexical item and any other kind of linguistic element”.

Second, any discussion of the emergence in a language of new lexemes or constructions, or new uses/senses of existing items, is bound to tacitly or explicitly assume a theoretical stance about the point at which the new item or sense may be said to have become established in the language in question. This point must necessarily come later than the point at which it is established in the internal grammar of some speakers of the language. I will not address the question here of how many speakers it takes before a construction is to be considered part of the language (rather than being merely idiolectal), but I will touch on this issue in Section 7.

The process by which a linguistic item becomes established in the grammar of an individual speaker is called “entrenchment” by Langacker, according to whom:

Every use of a structure has a positive impact on its degree of entrenchment, whereas extended periods of disuse have a negative impact. With repeated use, a novel structure becomes progressively entrenched, to the point of becoming a unit; moreover, units are variably entrenched depending on the frequency of their occurrence (driven, for example, is more entrenched thanthriven). (Langacker 1987: 59)

I will refer to entrenchment in Section 7, when discussing whether the intersub- jective constructions discussed in Sections 5 and 6 may be said to have under- gone intersubjectification in the sense of Traugott (2010). By intersubjectification 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

(Unicode 9 19/11/16 18:02) WDG-New (155mm230mm) DGMetaSerifScience (OpenType) pp. 167–196 1758 van Olmen_06_Egan (p. 169)

is meant the process whereby intersubjective senses of a construction become entrenched in the grammar of a cross-section of the speakers of a language.

Afinal issue relates to the notion of“grammaticalization”, whose relevance for the development of“fail to”is taken up in Section 8. According to Trousdale (2010: 58), “the grammaticalization of constructions requires changes at both the form and meaning poles, a view consistent with standard work on gramma- ticalization (see e.g. Hopper & Traugott 2003)”. In the present study, a question that must be addressed deals with the sort of changes at the form pole we might expect to see if“fail to”is grammaticalizing. Since“the process of grammatical- ization is a process whereby linguistic items gain grammatical function while reducing their lexical-descriptive function”(Diewald 2010: 18), we should see a change whereby“fail to”displays an increase in functional as opposed to lexical content. There remains the question of how it can be determined whether such an increase in functional load has actually taken place. According to Boye and Harder (2009), the assumption of functional category status by a full lexical item is a change in which“lexical elements go from being used to convey primary information to being used predominantly to encode secondary information. . . . Grammaticalization resides basically in the coding of secondary information status”(Boye and Harder 2009: 32). I operationalize this definition of Boye and Harder’s in Section 8 in considering the possible grammaticalization of“fail to”.

3 Corpora

A wide selection of corpora was examined, as it was necessary tofind evidence of non-subjective, subjective and intersubjective uses of the“fail to”construc- tions (in this respect, for instance, the intersubjective senses required including sources containing dialogue, either face-to-face or epistolary).

To begin with the historical corpora, evidence for Middle English was pro- vided by theHelsinki Corpus, Chaucer’s complete works and Gower’sConfessio Amantis.2 _{For Early Modern English, the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts}

(Helsinki) was again used, as were theCorpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler(CEECS), theLampeter Corpusand the complete works of Shakespeare. Thefirst (shorter) version of the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts(CLMET) and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) provided data for the Late Modern period.

2 In the case of Chaucer, the actual text searched was the one in Project Gutenberg with modernized spelling. The tokens returned were checked against the Riverside Chaucer.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

For Present-day English, a number of recent or contemporary corpora were examined. These included six corpora available on the ICAME CD-Rom, LOB and FLOB for British English, Brown and Frown for American English and the ACE and Wellington corpora for Australian and New Zealand English, respectively. Recourse was also had to the much larger British National Corpus (BNC), from which a random sample of one thousand tokens of the lexeme fail was downloaded. This sample included 729 tokens of the constructions with the

to-infinitive. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), like its historical sister corpus, was mostly consulted for tokens conveying the intersub- jective senses. Finally, in order to get an impression of how the constructions were being used in the twenty-first century, I conducted a search of the internet usingWebCorp.

Except for COCA, COHA and WebCorp, all corpora were searched, using WordSmith, for fail in its various forms and spelling variants, followed by to

within a context search horizon of five words to the right. COCA and COHA were mainly searched, using their custom-built search engine, for tokens of the intersubjective senses, using search queries such asI will not fail to.Because of the limited number of returns per query provided by the custom-builtWebCorp

search engine, when using it I searched separately for all forms offailfollowed either directly or after one or two wild cards byto. I also usedWebCorpto search for tokens of failed, followed by up to five wildcards and then did, so and

neither, in order to obtain tokens relevant to the discussion of grammaticaliza- tion in Section 8.