What Is It For If It's Before Me?: Subjectification and Grammaticalization of English For and Before

What Is It For If It's Before Me?: Subjectification and Grammaticalization of English For and Before

  Subjectification has been among those concepts frequently resorted to in grammaticalization scholarship since the concept was first formulated by Traugott (1982) as a semantic change mechanism. English prepositions for and before, both derived from a common Germanic root fora "front", are exemplars par excellence of exhibiting contrastive properties as a result of differential application of subjectification. In modern English, for is primarily used to designate advantageous/beneficial relationship between the figure and the background, whereas before is primarily specialized for the designation of spatial or, more productively, temporal anteriority. In the case of for, the semantic extension pattern can be represented as [frontal location > temporal anteriority > representation > cause/reason > support/benefit > purpose > destination > advantage/disadvantage]. Diverse semantic change mechanisms operate over this long progression of semantic change, often involving attribution of speaker"s stance about the event, i.e. subjectification. Since the emergence of a new sense resulting from conventionalization of pragmatic inferences does not necessarily render the previous senses obsolete, diverse meanings may occur at any synchronic state, thus accounting for the notorious polysemy phenomenon for grammatical forms such as for. As for before, it is largely used to show the "earlier in time" relations or the "in front of" relations between the two referenced entities. However, it also exhibits, albeit weakly as compared with for, a level of subjectified semantic change that may be diagrammatically represented as [frontal location > temporal anteriority > potentiality > superiority > preference].