"In order that" -- a data driven study of symptoms and causes of obsolescence
This work addresses the problem of understanding language change for linguists, but it is incremental as it applies an existing data-driven methodology to a specific case.
The paper tackles the problem of grammatical obsolescence by empirically studying the decline in frequency of the purpose subordinator 'in order that' starting from the early 20th century, attributing this decline significantly to higher-order processes such as socio-cultural changes and the rise of to-infinitives.
The paper is an empirical case study of grammatical obsolescence in progress. The main studied variable is the purpose subordinator in order that, which is shown to be steadily decreasing in the frequency of use starting from the beginning of the twentieth century. This work applies a data-driven approach for the investigation and description of obsolescence, recently developed by the Rudnicka (2019). The methodology combines philological analysis with statistical methods used on data acquired from mega-corpora. Moving from the description of possible symptoms of obsolescence to different causes for it, the paper aims at presenting a comprehensive account of the studied phenomenon. Interestingly, a very significant role in the decline of in order that can be ascribed to the so-called higher-order processes, understood as processes influencing the constructional level from above. Two kinds of higher-order processes are shown to play an important role, namely i) an externally-motivated higher-order process exemplified by the drastic socio-cultural changes of the 19th and 20th centuries; ii) an internally-motivated higher-order processes instantiated by the rise of the to-infinitive (rise of infinite clauses).