Chapter 5 - Three Case Studies: Cake, Beast, and Hell

Summary

The three case studies presented in this chapter demonstrate that the six of-binominals introduced in Chapters 3 and 4 form a grammaticalization path, starting at the N+PP and ending, in most cases, at the BI (cake is the exception). The chapter begins with a discussion about the differences between grammaticalization and lexicalization, since both processes are plausible in this case. Then, looking at the first nouns beast, cake and hell (an animate, inanimate, and abstract first noun respectively) and using a range of historical corpora, this chapter presents a qualitative diachronic analysis that looks at first attestations of and discusses the use of these first nouns in the six of-binominal constructions presented in Chapters 3 and 4. Ultimately this chapter substantiates the claim that first nouns progress from the N+PP to the head-classifier, in some cases pseudo-partitive, then the EBNP, the EM, and the BI. Furthermore, it argues that the process demonstrated is indeed grammaticalization rather than lexicalization.