|
|
Article: Recycling inversion: the case of initial adverbs and negators in Early Modern English.
- Article from:
- Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies
- Article date:
- January 1, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Adam Mickiewicz University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
1. Introduction
This paper is an empirical footnote to the discussion launched by Roger Lass (1990) of exaptation as a special kind of process of language change. Lass (1990: 80) adopts the term from evolutionary biology to refer to "the opportunistic co-optation of a feature whose origin is unrelated or only marginally related to its later use". He is careful to point out that the term should be understood as a metaphor and not reified as a literal transfer in ontological terms. One way to clarify, but no doubt also to complicate, the issue is to examine some potential candidates for exaptive changes in more detail.
I shall discuss certain cases of ...