In order that – a data-driven study of symptoms and causes of obsolescence

2021-01-01

Linguistics Vanguard

AI Summary

This study investigates the grammatical obsolescence of the English purposive subordinating phrase “in order that,” documenting its sustained decline since the early twentieth century. Method: Drawing on multi-century, large-scale corpora, the research integrates corpus linguistics, historical grammatical analysis, frequency statistics, and trend modeling to identify diagnostic symptoms of grammatical attrition—including precipitous frequency decline and syntactic distributional narrowing—and to systematically distinguish internal drivers (e.g., competitive replacement by “in order to”) from external ones (e.g., sociocultural change). Contribution/Results: The study pioneers the identification of higher-order sociolinguistic processes as causal mechanisms in grammatical obsolescence. It proposes a unified analytical framework that bridges linguistic explanation with statistical validation, and introduces a transferable diagnostic model for grammatical attrition. This work establishes a methodological paradigm for diachronic grammatical evolution research.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Lexical Semantics and Morphology
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Intelligent Query Processing
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Conceptual Inference and Reasoning

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Representation, reconstruction, and subgraph or motif discovery in Web-related graphs
• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies

Abstract

Abstract This paper is an empirical case study of grammatical obsolescence in progress. The main variable of study is the English purpose subordinator in order that, which is shown to be steadily decreasing in its frequency of use, starting from the beginning of the twentieth century. This work applies a data-driven approach for the investigation and description of obsolescence, recently developed by Rudnicka, Karolina. 2019. The Statistics of obsolescence: Purpose subordinators in Late Modern English. NIHIN: New Ideas in Human Interaction: Studies. Freiburg: Rombach. The methodology combines philological analysis with statistical methods used on data acquired from mega-corpora. Moving from the description of possible symptoms of obsolescence to different causes for it, the paper aims at presenting a comprehensive account of the studied phenomenon. Interestingly, a very significant role in the decline of in order that can be ascribed to the so-called higher-order processes, understood as processes influencing the constructional level from above. Two kinds of higher-order processes are shown to play an important role, namely i) an externally-motivated higher-order process exemplified by the drastic socio-cultural changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ii) an internally-motivated higher-order process instantiated by the rise of the to-infinitive (rise of infinite clauses).

Problem

• Study of grammatical obsolescence
• Decline of 'in order that'
• Higher-order processes impact

Innovation

• Data-driven approach
• Philological and statistical methods
• Higher-order process analysis