3.5 Conclusion 95word class. Adjectives and nouns share the same distributional property, the
ability to premodify nouns, and “in that position the distinction between them
is partially neutralised” (2001: 131). The noun acquires more and more of the
properties of an adjective but has not gone to “full adjectivehood.” This change
is neither abrupt nor continuous but involves a series of intermediate steps.
Denison concludes, “To insist on a unique category, in my opinion, would be to
practise an artifi cial pseudo- rigour imposed by certain linguistic theories and
not by the facts of the language” (2010: 114).^26 Furthermore, “dual constitu-
ency or dual inheritance, and noncentral or overlapping categorisations, might
turn out to be ... an indispensable part of diachronic linguistic description”
(2010: 123).
This explanation for the development of adjectival uses of whilom is appeal-
ing, as it sheds light on its only “partial conversion” to adjectival status, and
it validates the indeterminate uses shown in (12). Likewise, as is well known,
the adjectival and adverbial classes were less well defi ned in Early Modern
English than in Modern English.
3.5 Conclusion
The development of whilom parallels to a certain extent the grammaticalization
of the “paradigm example” of while. However, although while follows a uni-
lineal path from noun (in an adverbial construction) to adverb to conjunction
to pragmatic marker, the path of whilom is a branching one, in which the con-
junctive use and the pragmatic- marker use develop independently from the
adverbial use (see Figure 3.3 ). In other respects, these developments are char-
acteristic of grammaticalization. However, whilom also acquires an additional
function, assuming the premodifying position of an adjective, as shown in (13).
This change is uncharacteristic of grammaticalization in exhibiting a shift to a
more major part of speech and semantic narrowing:
(13) George C. Wallace, 51, Governor- elect of Alabama and Dixie’s whilom presiden-
tial candidate; (1971/ 01/ 18 TIME)
This chapter has explored whether this development represents a counterexam-
ple to the unidirectionality hypothesis as it apparently shows a change from a
more grammatical (adverb) to less grammatical (adjective) category. However,
“categorialization” of whilom is incomplete since it does not inherit the other
morphosyntactic characteristics of adjectives (i.e., the ability to be used
26 Representing an essentially formalist position, Newmeyer ( 1998 : 247, 290) argues against the
possibility of categorial gradience on the synchronic level. Though he admits that diachroni-
cally certain aspects of categorial change may be gradual, he points out that not every step has
“categorial signifi cance,” i.e., results in a change in categorial status.