84 Middle English Whilom
over which it has scope. In other words, it acquires more sentence- adverbial
or conjunctive- like qualities and wider scope. However, the next stage in the
development of whilom seems to be a semantic development from the tem-
poral adverbial, not from the correlative conjunction: Whilom comes to mod-
ify a single event with the sense ‘once, formerly.’ The meaning ‘once’ can be
understood as an implicature of the meaning ‘sometimes’ since the hearer can
infer that what happens repeatedly has happened at least once in the past. In
this meaning whilom continues to have narrow scope. The fi nal step, from the
meaning ‘once’ to the meaning ‘once upon a time,’ seems to be a direct devel-
opment from clause- internal adverb to pragmatic marker. Here it signals the
relationship of the proposition to what follows (or precedes) in the discourse.
This shift involves a metonymic shift in scope from a single event viewed in
isolation to an event viewed in its global context. The meaning of whilom shifts
from primarily referential to primarily pragmatic in nature. The form becomes
fi xed in clause- initial position, frequently external to the core syntactic struc-
ture of the clause, i.e., in the position normally assumed by discourse markers.
Figure 3.1 summarizes the development.
Apart from its slightly unusual course of development, changes in the use
of whilom to this point – from freely occurring temporal adverb to pragmatic
marker – exhibit the hallmarks of grammaticalization as seen in pragmatic
markers (see Section 1.5.1), including semantic attrition (change from a spe-
cifi c meaning ‘at times, sometimes’ to a vague past- time meaning), decategori-
alization (from noun used adverbially to adverb to pragmatic marker), fi xation
(change from free placement within the clause to restriction to sentence- initial
position), and perhaps even obligatorifi cation (understood broadly as the con-
straining of choice; i.e., whilom becomes routinized as a standard tale- opener),
but not phonological attrition, morphological coalescence , and condensation.
The development of whilom also conforms to Hopper ’s ( 1991 ) principles of
divergence (with the parallel existence of both the older (adverbial) form and
the more grammaticalized pragmatic marker, until both fall out of use), layer-
ing (with whilom replacing other, older episode introducers such as hit gelamp
þæt ‘it happened that’ [see Brinton 1996 ]), and persistence. In introducing a
fi ctional tale set in the narrative past, the pragmatic marker retains the past-
time meaning of the adverb meaning ‘formerly, once’; in addition, the fact that
adverb hwīlum
‘at times, sometimes’
adverb whilom
‘formerly, once’
correlative conjunction
whilom ... whilom
‘sometimes ... other times’pragmatic marker whilom
‘once upon a time’Figure 3.1 Development of whilom (1)