There is no language on earth that did not undergo several major or minor changes in the course of time. The English language of course, is no exception and has changed both in grammatical and lexical fields. In modern days, it is taken for granted that people use certain words or phrases to end a conversation, which as a matter of fact, is not a new phenomenon to be observed. It would as much have been considered impolite back then as it is today, not to follow this path. One word that even young learners of English have integrated in their language use of today is the word goodbye. Even though many prefer to use the shortened form bye, the longer goodbye is still very common. But what many English speakers do not know is the fact that, in earlier times goodbye was associated with a religious blessing, which is a shortened form of a former farewell, called God be with you and was used in many texts in the time of the Early Modern English period.
Table of Contents
Figures
1. Introduction
2. Language Change and Lexicalization
3. Methodology
4. The Development of Goodbye
5. Goodbye and Construction Grammar
6. Conclusion
7. References
Figures
1. The distribution of God be with you and God be with thee from the 1470s until the 1690s
2. The distribution of God be with y* from the 1470s until the
3. The distribution of God *b* from the 1470s until the 1690s
4. The distribution of Good day from the 1470s until the 1690s
5. The distribution of Good *b* from the 1470s until the 1690s
1. Introduction
There is no language on earth that did not undergo several major or minor changes in the course of time. The English language of course, is no exception and has changed both in grammatical and lexical fields. In modern days, it is taken for granted that people use certain words or phrases to end a conversation, which as a matter of fact, is not a new phenomenon to be observed. It would as much have been considered impolite back then as it is today, not to follow this path. One word that even young learners of English have integrated in their language use of today is the word goodbye. Even though many prefer to use the shortened form bye, the longer goodbye is still very common. But what many English speakers do not know is the fact that, in earlier times goodbye was associated with a religious blessing, which is a shortened form of a former farewell, called God be with you and was used in many texts in the time of the Early Modern English period (OED 2014).
The aim of this paper is to investigate the lexical development of goodbye as we know it today and to exemplify the different stages of the word’s change, beginning from the 15th until the 17th century. For that reason, I have analysed the occurrence of earlier forms of goodbye by means of the EEBO (Early English Books Online) in the BYU Corpora. Furthermore, to examine the word’s etymology, I have consulted its entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. Other works that I used are Arnovick’s “Diachronic Pragmatics”, Brinton’s and Traugott’s “Lexicalization and Language Change” and Brinton’s and Arnovick’s “The English Language-A Linguistic History”. Before we come to the actual investigation, it will be necessary to have a look at language change, especially the one caused by Lexicalization. This short introduction will be done in the first part of the main body. Henceforth, there will be an explanation of the word’s etymology, followed by an investigation of what might have caused the word goodbye to undergo this development. Finally, I will refer the subject of this paper to the topic we have dealt with in class, namely “Construction Grammar”.
2. Language Change and Lexicalization
Language change is an unavoidable phenomenon that linguists have tried to investigate over the last centuries (cf. Arnovick & Brinton 2006: 56). There can be inter alia changes in sound, phonology, syntax or lexis. Yet, the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield claimed that the causes of language change are unknown and that many reasons have been weighed up (cf. 1950: 386, in Arnovick & Brinton 2006: 56). As Arnovick and Brinton (2006: 56) outline, there are either “unmotivated, random and fortuitous changes, [which are] non-functional and purely stylistic [or those that are] functionally motivated, serving the expressive needs of speakers”. Lexicalization can be considered as a type of language change that is rather functionally motivated.
When it comes to defining Lexicalization, linguists have defined the process in slightly different ways. For instance, Lipka claims it as “the phenomenon that a complex lexeme once coined tends to become a single complete lexical unit, a simplex lexeme” (cited in Brinton & Traugott 2005: 95). Brinton and Traugott (2005: 32) state that it “is the process by which new items that are considered “lexical” […] come into being”. According to them (2005: 32), it can either be “an ordinary process of word formation, [a] process of separation resulting in an increase in autonomy [or] a process of fusion resulting in a decrease in compositionality”. Concerning the latter point, Brinton and Traugott (2005: 47) argue that there is “no change in meaning but in expression”. On the contrary, the historical perspective on lexicalization as fusion describes this phenomenon as a process in which a form developed “from a more complex to a simpler sequence” (Brinton & Traugott 2005: 47). Thus, the meaning may change as well.
In fact, there are three different kinds of fusion, namely “fusion of phrasal, syntagmatic constructions, […] fusion that involves word formation and phonological developments” (Brinton & Traugott 2005: 48). Although it is worth it to explain all of them, I am only going to focus on the first kind, because the development of goodbye falls into this category.
One of the most common outlines of lexicalization is the “Unification” of a syntactic phrase or construction into a single word (Brinton & Traugott 2005: 48). Some examples of unification follow (cf. Brinton & Traugott 2005: 49):
(1) each < OE a-gelic “ever-like” (OED 2014)
(2) handicap < hand in the cap (OED 2014)
(3) hobnob < hab nab < OE hab ne-hab “have not-have” (OED 2014)
Furthermore, there is another type of fusion, in which a “whole utterance is transformed into a more or less complex word expressing a contiguous concept” (Blank 2001: 1602, 1604, in Brinton & Traugott 2005: 49). The development of the English God be with you to goodbye is a classic example of this fusion (cf. Brinton & Traugott 2005: 50). It is suggested that this type of lexicalization might be the “most typical” one (Brinton and Traugott 2005: 50). Some linguists see it as both a process of conversion and fusion (cf. Brinton and Traugott 2005: 50).
3. Methodology
In order to examine the development of today’s goodbye, I have consulted a corpus of English texts, the BYU Corpora electronic database. In doing so, I used the “Early English Books Online” corpus (EEBO), which is a collection of written texts created by the Text Creation Partnership and contains 755 million words in 25,368 texts from the 1470s until the 1690s. The fact that only standardized language can be found in the corpus might be a downside because the phrases God be with you and goodbye have obviously been used by the English-speaking community both in written and spoken language.
First, I checked the frequency and the meaning of the two phrases in its full form: God be with you/God be with thee and goodbye. Second, I went on to examine the frequency of God*b* and Good*b* and lastly, I had a close look at the distribution of the greeting good day as well, which might have influenced the development from God be with you to goodbye.
4. The Development of Goodbye
Within the corpus , God be with you first appears in a 1477 printed work by Geoffrey Chaucer, which was published at around 1400 (EEBO). On this occasion, the phrase functioned as a blessing:
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