94
Middle English Whilom
“marginal” (see also Marchand 1969 : 359ff.).^24 The relatively rare conversion
of a minor (closed, grammatical) class to a major (open, lexical) class – as in
the conversion of an adverb to a verb (e.g., up > to up ) – has been seen as lexi-
calization , or degrammaticalization (see, e.g., Ramat 1992 , 2001 ; Newmeyer
1998 ). However, since conversion is instantaneous and does not involve a
loss of semantic compositionality, it is not seen as conversion by Brinton and
Traugott ( 2005 : 37– 40, 97); moreover, as Himmelmann notes, conversions do
not share any other obvious similarities with the prototypical instances of lexi-
calization,” i.e., univerbation, fossilization, loss of productivity, and transpar-
ency (2004: 30).
What of the shift we see here from adjective > adverb? Can this be seen as
a case of conversion, albeit of a rare type? Quirk et al. ( 1985 : 1562), in dis-
cussing the shift from noun to adjective, require that for such a conversion to
have occurred, it must be possible for the form to be used predicatively and
there must be infl ectional (and derivational) evidence of the word’s status as
an adjective. If a suspected conversion fails these tests, they argue, it should
be accounted for in syntactic terms. As we saw above, the shift of whilom
from adverb to adjective seems incomplete; adjectival whilom cannot be used
predicatively nor can it take infl ectional or derivational adjectival affi xes. The
answer here must thus be “no”; this is not a case of conversion, or at least it is
only a case of “partial conversion.”
3.4.2.4 Gradience. An alternative account,^25 adopted in more cogni-
tive and usage- based approaches, might be in terms of what Aarts (2004) calls
“intersective gradience,” that is, soft boundaries between word classes. For
example, Denison ( 2001 , 2010 : 110– 114) describes indeterminacy between
nouns and adjectives, that is, nouns used as adjectives, e.g., a fun party , or
adjectives used as nouns, e.g., an elastic. He abandons the view that each word
in a grammatical sentence needs to be assigned to one and only one category,
but argues instead that a word can be “equivocal” or “underdetermined” in
24 The shift from adjective to noun is seen by Marchand ( 1969 : 361) and Quirk et al.
( 1985 : 1560) as ellipsis, not conversion, e.g., a bitter (ale), a daily (paper), a facial (opera-
tion), a spectacular (television program). The opposite direction, from noun > adjective, is
also seen as very rare (Marchand 1969 : 361; Huddleston and Pullum 2002 : 1643; cf., however,
Denison 2001 : 126– 131, 2010 : 106– 114).
25 Another, less plausible, explanation is in terms of “exaptation ” (Lass 1990 ), a process whereby
“junk” (morphological material which has lost its function) is redeployed for another gram-
matical use. The adverbial use of whilom is virtually extinct by the Modern English period,
when the adjectival use of whilom begins to become common. However, the fact that there is no
discontinuity in the development – the rise of adjectival whilom predates the loss of adverbial
whilom , and there is a direct semantic relationship between the two forms – militates against
an exaptation explanation.