Please (re)read the document entitled "Probing historical corpora" passed out with various other materials on Sept. 25th, where the Helsinki Corpus and other historical corpora are briefly described, and some issues for historical corpus linguistics are raised.
The Lampeter Corpus covers a limited time-span (essentially 1640-1740), and is limited to institutional, professional (largely legal) language. By contrast, the Helsinki corpus covers 650-1710; of this, the Early Modern English (EMdE) period is the only one relevant for the be going to study. The EMdE years covered are 1500-1710, and the genres exemplified are very varied.
The exercise is to access the Helsinki Corpus, get all the examples of going to, and test the following hypotheses (discussed on Oct 9th):
a) future be going to is derived from be going to + Verb, not from go (contra formulations like GO > FUTURE (e.g., Talmy Givón, On Understanding Grammar, NY: Academic Press, 1979),
b) most early examples are ambiguous between motion constructions and future constructions,
c) the future developed as a result of the conventionalizing of implicatures/inferences about futurity arising in the context of purposive constructions (i.e. by metonymic association), rather than by metaphorical mapping of spatial concepts onto temporal ones.
To do this:
1) Search for all examples of going to in the Helsinki corpus (there are 27)
2) Arrange them according to date, starting with the earliest
3) Identify those examples that clearly implicate futurity (about half of them); what are their characteristics?
4) Identify those examples that are ambiguous between motion with a purpose and futurity, and think about exactly how the ambiguity arises; is there a difference depending on the amount of context investigated?
5) Using the Helsinki Corpus examples and those from the Lampeter Corpus (as presented in the handout for Oct 9th), make a brief statement about the development of the future be going to construction in the EMdE period. What further changes must have occurred for Modern English examples to have developed like It's going to rain, It's gonna rain?
For class:
Make a handout listing all examples involving going to which might be or clearly are examples of the future, with enough context to enable discussion of 4). Present the date you have collected, summarizing/identifying:
--syntactic/semantic characteristics of examples with future be going to,
--ambiguous examples
--the development of future be going to over the EMdE period, as illustrated by Helsinki and Lampeter
--changes that must have occurred after the EMdE period
Add comments on issues that strike you as interesting/worthy of comment, even if they don't come directly under the points above.
To avoid duplication of effort, I suggest each person separately be responsible for getting date and context for three or four examples. Having pooled the data to compile the handout, think about the analysis together. Then divide up the presentation among yourselves.
How to collect the data:
The Helsinki Corpus is in the ICAME date base, which you can access through the CSLI Corpora Help Page.
Type: grep -n 'going to' ce*
The general pattern of 'grep' is:
Helsinki Corpus files start with "ce" (EMdE), "cm" (Middle English) and "co" (Old English). You will get only "ce" files. Each file corresponds to a document. At the beginning of each file you will find the document name, the edition used, the period (1500-1570, 1570-1640, 1640-1710), and toward the end of this bibliographical info, the exact date of composition or publication, if known. The actual text of the document starts right after the bibliographic document header.
To obtain information about dates and to get more context, type: emacs filename
To obtain enough context to determine whether the citation exemplifies futurity, only motion, or is ambiguous, while in emacs type: control-S going to
If you have questions about how to access the corpus, contact Florian Jaeger ( tiflo@stanford.edu ). Florian will be available for a short introduction to the AFS system that hosts the CSLI corpora and show you how to access them from the corpus computer. Also he will show you other available software to access the HELSINKI corpus. If you have questions about the assignment, contact either Florian or Elizabeth ( traugott@csli.stanford.edu or traugott@stanford.edu).
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Last modified: May 1, 2003 |