RT Conference Proceedings
T1 By way of vs. by means of: on the Expression of Instrumentality in Middle English and Early Modern English
A1 Romero-Barranco, Jesús
K1 Inglés - Historia
AB Grammaticalization is defined as “a process whereby a lexical item, with full referentialmeaning, develops grammatical meaning” (Fischer and Rosenbach 2000: 2; see alsoHopper 1991; Diewald and Wischer 2002). According to Rissanen, grammaticalizationmay occur both with native and borrowed items at any stage of the History of English,being developed from one single lexical item or a group of words (2000: 152). This is thecase of by way of and by means of that, according to the OED, were first attested in Englishat the beginning of the fifteenth century. Their prepositional function is the result of aprocess of grammaticalization undergone by way and mean, which evolved from noun topreposition in these contexts. Once established in the language, they coexisted until theend of the seventeenth century, the moment when by way of was progressively obliteratedas a result of the on-going difffusion of by means of in these environments.Therefore, the present paper has been conceived with the following objectives: 1)to assess the grammaticalization process by which nouns such as way and mean developedprepositional functions for the expression of instrumentality; 2) to analyse the use anddistribution of by way of and by means of in the History of English; 3) to investigate thedistribution of these competing forms in terms of gender and social class. The source ofevidence comes from the Helsinki Corpus of English, the Corpus of Early EnglishCorrespondence and the Old Bailey Corpus.
YR 2016
FD 2016-04-21
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10630/11232
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10630/11232
LA eng
NO Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech.
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 19 ene 2026