76
Middle English Whilom
3.2 Traugott’s Account of While
In a series of articles, Elizabeth Traugott has cited while as a “paradigm
example” of grammaticalization.^2 The PDE conjunction while originates in
Old English as a full noun hw ī l ‘a space/ period of time,’ which carries prop-
ositional meaning. While still exists as a noun in Present- Day English, though
generally in collocations such as a short while (ago) or in prepositional phrases
such as {for , after , in} a while. In Old English hw ī l occurs in the adverbial
collocation þa hw ī le þe ‘at the time that’ ( þa = accusative distal demonstra-
tive, hw ī le = accusative singular of hwīl , þe = relative particle); the phrase
serves to denote a temporal event viewed as part of a durative situation. In
late Old English the phrase is reduced to wh ī le (that) , and in Middle English it
acquires “textual” meaning as a temporal connective with the sense ‘during’;
it expresses a cohesive time relation between events and clauses, profi ling not
only specifi c time but also discourse structure. In the early seventeenth century,
it becomes an interpersonal conjunction with a concessive sense ‘although.’
In this last function while “construes a world that has no reference in the
described situation, but only in the speaker’s world of belief about coherence
among propositions” (Traugott 1988 : 407).
In Traugott’s evolving view of the grammaticalization process, the develop-
ment of while from noun > adverb(ial phrase) > conjunction is said to exemplify
the shift from propositional to (textual) to interpersonal meaning (1982) and
to follow two principles or “tendencies” of semantic change (1988; Traugott
and König 1991 : 208– 209): (a) from meanings based in the external situation
to meanings based in the textual or metalinguistic situation, which accounts
for the change from ‘at the time that’ to ‘during’; and (b) to meanings that are
increasingly situated in the speaker’s subjective belief state, which accounts
for the change from ‘during’ to ‘although.’ Moreover, the textual meaning and,
even more clearly, the interpersonal meaning represent a strengthening of the
speaker’s pragmatic viewpoint via the conventionalization of context- induced
inferences (1988). Namely, the concessive, adversative meaning derives from
“semanticization” of a conversational inference of surprise concerning the over-
lap in time or relations between event and ground (1995b: 41).^3 In sum, Traugott
sees a shift from reference to a relatively concrete state of affairs to expression
of the speaker’s assessment of the relevance of simultaneity to an assessment
of contrast or unexpected relations (1995b: 42), as summarized in Table (3.1 ).
2 See Traugott ( 1982 : 254, 1988 : 407, 1989 : 31, 33, 35, 1995b : 39– 42); also Traugott and König
( 1991 : 200– 201); Hopper and Traugott ( 2003 : 90– 92).
3 Traugott ( 1995b : 40; also Traugott and König 1991 : 201; Hopper and Traugott 2003a : 91) notes
that a different, perhaps more immediate, inference from temporal frame of reference is
grounds for a situation, that is, the ‘because’ sense. While the causal sense is dominant in late
fourteenth- century English, it never became conventionalized in English as it did in the German
cognate weil.