Diachronic shift in two modal evaluative adjective types: A comparison between the highly successful -able and the quasi-dormant -some suffixation patterns
Résumé
This paper deals with modality expressed by adjectives, on the lexis cline of the lexico-grammatical continuum. We focus our attention on the contrasting life cycles of deverbal-able adjectives and -some adjectives in English such as jokesome/jokable, winsome/winnable, fearsome “that should be feared’ (Smith 2020). We assume -some and -able adjectives belong to a constructional network of adjectives denoting modal categories to varying degrees (obligation, possibility, necessity) and capable of expressing dynamic, deontic or epistemic meanings (Van Linden 2012). Assuming that language is a complex adaptive system where multiple processes affect change in combinatoric manner, the question remains of how the expression of adjectival modality distributes within the network. We use a corpus-based distributional analysis to trace the compared usage of several adjective pairs in EHBC (the English Historical Book Collection) and COHA (the Corpus of Historical American). The aim is to identify if changes in usage may have led to different conventionalisations between Vsome and Vable adjectives.