Abstract This study extends a paradigm-based framework for lexical conventionalization to multiword expressions (MWEs) in diachronic scientific English using the Royal Society Corpus (1665–1996). Building on prior work that quantified paradigmatic variability, the set of contextually available lexical alternatives, via distributional entropy, we model MWEs as single lexical units in distributional vector spaces to examine their role in long-term language standardization. Our aim is to verify whether MWEs undergo the same conventionalization process as the one previously observed for most word classes. Our results confirm that the overall decline in paradigmatic variability, indicating increasing conventionalization, continues through the 20th century. Different MWE classes follow distinct trajectories: compounds and phrasal verbs show substantial conventionalization in the 18th–19th and 19th–20th centuries, converging with or dropping below the variability of single nouns and verbs. In contrast, fixed expressions and academic formulas become conventionalized early and remain stably low thereafter. Flat expressions remain more variable, patterning with general nouns. These findings demonstrate that MWEs play an active role in the register-specific development of scientific English, with different types contributing differently to the reduction of paradigmatic choice.
Abstract The degree modifier practically , meaning ‘almost, nearly’ and functioning as a “approximator downtoner” (Quirk et al. 1985) or “approximator” in the “totality modifer class” (Paradis 2008), arises in Late Modern English, developing from an adverb of manner or respect meaning ‘in a practical manner, in practice, in reality’ in Early Modern English. This paper explores the historical development of practically. Modifying predicative and appositive adjectives and prepositional and adverbial phrases and occurring in noun and determiner phrases, practically comes to serve as a degree adverb. Modifying verbs and participles, it comes to function as a degree adjunct, often with negative implicature and emphasizer rather than degree function. Corpus findings point to the appearance of approximator uses of practically in all syntactic contexts in a confined period from 1830–1863 (cf. Núñez-Pertejo 2023). In ambiguous or “bridging” contexts, the manner meaning ‘in practice, in effect’ can be reinterpreted as ‘most often the case’ and hence as falling short of the expected level, thus giving rise to the approximator meaning ‘almost, nearly’. The change from a lexical adverb to a degree modifier is a process of grammaticalization, involving decategorialization (functional shift), host-class expansion, syntactic context expansion, desemanticization, semantic-pragmatic change, and subjectification. The later appearance of the degree modifier practically with bare verbs argues for a trajectory from degree adverb to degree adjunct rather than the reverse. With lexical adjectives, the approximator is grammaticalized first in predicative position and only later in attributive position, most likely because the predicative position is most similar to the “locus for reanalysis”, namely be/have + past participle (De Smet 2012). Finally, the negative implicature of the degree adjunct practically most likely develops because of the preponderance of verbs with negative semantic prosody, where ‘almost P’ is reinterpreted as ‘not (quite) P’, motivated by subjectification (Ziegeler 2015; 2016).
