The Grammatical Evolution of Concessive Prepositions despite and in spite of

Abstract

Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 8-3, 317-336. This paper aims to illustrate the grammaticalization of concessive prepositions, despite and in spite of resorting to diverse change mechanisms. The major mechanisms invoked here are analogy and reanalysis for morphosyntactic changes and metonymy, metaphor, inference, generalization, and subjectification for semantic changes. Additional discussions on distributional characteristics are designed to support the develop- mental paths of morphosyntactic and semantic changes of the concessive prepositions. The corpus-based observations also raise some issues of the parallel reduction hypothesis. Grammaticalization provides us with a panchronic perspective in analyzing the evolution of the two prepositions under consideration where multifarious factors and mechanisms interact.