On the history of ephemeral conditional subordinators: Evidence from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English

Abstract

This article discusses the history of a selection of ephemeral adverbial subordinators (Kortmann 1997, 301), i.e., those that mainly originated in the Early Modern English period (16^th -17^th centuries) but whose subordinating function, however, either became obsolete rather quickly or was subject to further restrictions beyond this period. This phenomenon was particularly frequent in the CCC relations, these are: causality, conditionality and concessivity. The present article analyses a selected number ephemeral conditional subordinators and compares them with the prototypical conditional subordinator if. The methodology is corpus-based, and I examine the data in the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English. The examples discussed reveal that ephemeral conditional subordinators are scarce and serve as a clear illustration of the concept of ephemerality in the realm of adverbial subordinators.