Intersubjectivity and the diachronic development of counterfactual ALMOST

Intersubjectivity and the diachronic development

of counterfactual almost

Debra Ziegeler

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3

Former studies have attributed little attention to the historical factors

surrounding the development of counterfactual meanings in almost, though

some refer to evidence of expletive negation found in proximatives

crosslinguistically. In the present study, the historical development of the

adverb will be considered in investigating more recent data from Late

Modern English, in which an overwhelming number of counterfactual uses

appear with a complement referring to undesirable events, some even

hyperbolic in nature. It is hypothesised that the presence of intersubjectivity

contributed significantly to the development of counterfactual meanings, in

focusing attention on the aversion of, rather than the proximity to, the event

described in the complement. Intersubjectivity also explains the evidence of

expletive negation in proximatives in other languages though this is not

attested in the history of English almost.

Keywords: counterfactuality, proximative adverbs, intersubjectivity,

expletive negation

1. Introduction

The semantics of the adverb almost have contributed to a continuously running

debate in the domain of formal semantics and pragmatics, as well as descriptive

2 Debra Ziegeler

and typological studies, for more than 30 years now, on whether the negative

meanings implicated by the use of the proximative expression are due to the

presence of (conversational or conventional) implicatures or entailments. Studies

such as Atlas (1984, 2005) discuss partial entailment; Anscombre and Ducrot

(1983) refer to presuppositions of negation, following on from an earlier study by

Sadock (1981) which first proclaimed the possibility of a conversational

implicature reading for such meanings; while Hitzeman (1992) returns to the

position of an entailment analysis. More recently, Horn (2002, 2011) has provided

a comprehensive summary of the main proposals, while still adhering to the

entailment analysis, and Jayez and Tovena (2009) propose an analysis based on

conventional implicature. While all of these studies have contributed significantly

to current efforts to describe the present-day semantics of almost, few of them, if

any, have attempted to apply a diachronic perspective to their arguments.

An important recent development was in the “discovery” of the use of

expletive negation in the expression of proximatives crosslinguistically (Schwenter

2002, Pons Bordería and Schwenter 2005, Amaral 2007), in languages such as

Spanish and Portuguese. Expletive negation had long been observed also in

Mandarin (e.g., Zhu 1959), but it was not at the time considered relevant to the

interpretation of the negative meanings associated with proximative adverbs.

However, the aforementioned studies used it as evidence for their claims that such

meanings in Spanish and Portuguese proximatives amounted to entailments. In the

present study, the case for expletive negation will be reopened with a survey of the

usage of almost with past tense or past participle predicates since the beginnings of

Late Modern English (1710–1925). Additional data from Present-Day English will

be used for comparison.

The present study considers the semantics of proximatives to be illustrative

of a gradual diachronic functional shift towards counterfactual uses; i.e.,

expressing prediction of alternative past outcomes, the senses akin to an adverb of

modality. Such meanings were not necessarily associated with the use of the

adverb in earlier historical periods. The aims of the present study are thus to

review in more detail the historical development of almost (briefly covered in

Ziegeler 2010 – henceforth, the 2010 study) in light of the hypotheses regarding

expletive negation in other languages, and to question the premise that expletive

negation in counterfactuals is evidence for their pragmatic status as entailments.

While it is not the specific objective of the present paper to challenge the

entailment hypothesis of almost, historical and contemporary corpus data will

The diachronic development of counterfactual almost 3

show that the use of expletive or pleonastic negation in proximatives may be

related to factors other than entailment.

The study will first briefly review previous work in which it was argued

that almost and its crosslinguistic counterparts could well be described as

conveying conversational implicatures which are conventionalising in some

environments but not in others. I will then refer to crosslinguistic data showing the

use of expletive negation to reinforce the negative meanings of proximatives, in

section 2, and discuss such data in relation to the notions of both intersubjectivity

and the “Pollyanna Hypothesis” of Boucher and Osgood (1969) in section 3. In

section 4, the historical survey of the 2010 study will be reviewed, with some

important data obtained from the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (Extended

Version) (CLMET(EV)). As well as this, more recent data from the COCA (The

Corpus of Contemporary American English), and the British National Corpus

(BNC) online corpora will be presented for comparison, illustrating a relatively

low frequency of the uses of almost with bare preterite verbal complements, and a

strong tendency for such uses, when they do appear, to express the avoidance of

unfavourable situations. In section 5, the data will be discussed within the

perspective of intersubjectivity. I will argue that, in languages employing

pleonastic negation, the polarity reversal creating counterfactuals from

proximatives is less conventionalised than in English, in which the negative

components of meaning are more focal. Furthermore, both in English and other

languages, there is evidence for the operation of intersubjective, evaluative factors,

which take into account the need to express positive rather than negative

predictions over past events, and it is such factors, rather than the reinforcement of

unasserted entailments, that may be considered as motivating the trend towards

expletive negation in counterfactual proximatives in other languages.

2. The pragmatic variability of almost

It is beyond the scope of the present article to cover the entire gamut of research

relating to the meaning of almost since Sadock (1981) first introduced the

possibility of a conversational implicature explanation for the presence of negative

meanings in its various contexts of use. The reader may be referred to studies such

as Horn (2002, 2011) for more complete summaries, but the present section will

briefly review the reasons for maintaining the argument of pragmatic implicatures

against the entailment analysis of the negative inferences surrounding almost.

4 Debra Ziegeler

Essentially, the entailment argument assumes that in all cases in which almost P is

expressed, not P is a necessary part of the meaning, as in (1), where:

(1) a. Sam almost died

is held to entail

b. Sam didn’t die.

(Horn 2011, 4). A conversational implicature analysis would allow for the

felicitous co-existence of almost P and P, as seen in (2) (from Atlas 1984):

(2) Moore almost understood ‘material object’ and he understood it.1

The distinctions between the two analyses can be made using cancelling

diagnostics, e.g., in fact P, as shown in (3), where the contradictory co-occurrence

of almost P and P would testify to the presence of an entailment. Ziegeler(2000a)

included (3) amongst a variable range of aspectual contexts to elicit spontaneous

responses from participants evaluating the examples on the contradictoriness of

their meanings:

(3) Sam is almost bald, in fact he is bald.

Only 50% of the participants questioned responded that (3) was contradictory, and

only 45% responded that all the examples used in the survey were contradictory,

suggesting that almost cannot be interpreted as conveying negation meanings in

every possible context. (Horn 2002 does not see such examples as necessarily

diagnostic of pragmatic implicatures.).2 It will be seen that almost plays a dual role

1 An anonymous reviewer refers to Sevi’s (1998) argument that there is a sequence of

events from almost understanding “material object” and understanding it, and suggests that (2) is

not, therefore, a counterexample to an entailment analysis. However, it must be taken into

consideration that the sequential meanings of and (‘and then’) are only a conversational implicature

(cf. Levinson’s (2000, 37 “conjunction buttressing”), and that logically, the two events can co-

occur without contradiction. 2 The explanation suggested in Ziegeler (2000a) is that such predicates are internally

graded, and hence scaled by their own lexical composition, while with bounded predicates, as in

(1), the punctuality of the event allows for grading using only the scale of time, and thus almost P

is not co-temporal with P itself. The interpretation of (3) requires much more discussion than space


in present-day English to function as a quantifier over (time-stable) nouns,

determiners or adjectives (where counterfactual meanings are less apparent), as

well as possessing an adverbial function quantifying (non-time-stable) events, but

that co-occurrence with the bare preterite verbal complements that give rise to the

negative readings so frequently argued to be entailments in the formal semantics

and pragmatics literature is infrequent. Atlas (1984) had argued for negative

entailments only with verbs that were aspectually telic, i.e. Achievements and

Accomplishments. It was later proposed in Ziegeler (2010) that the classification

of the negative meanings in almost was that of a semi-conventional implicature,

i.e., one that was conventional (and thus not cancellable) in some contexts but not

in others. Such a definition accounted for both the polysemous nature of the

adverb (expressing proximity as well as polarity/negation, and labelled the

Conjunctive Analysis in Horn 2002, 2011) and the fact that the negative meanings

(as in 1) were not always indefeasible (as evidenced in 3). The most

conventionalised implicatures of negation were thus found associated with

predicates referring to temporally or aspectually bounded events, while in other

contexts, the meanings of proximity were found to be more in focus.3

2.1 Inverted readings

The argument for an entailment reading of the negative inferences in almost in

English has been supported in previous studies by the observation that the negative

meanings in proximatives in other languages may be explicitly expressed in the

context through the form of an expletive negation. However, no evidence so far

has been supplied from English, and it is questionable whether the pragmatic

descriptions applied to certain forms of equivalent function across some languages

may be necessarily transferrable to others. The studies conducted by Horn (2002),

Schwenter (2002), Pons Bordería and Schwenter (2005) and Amaral (2007)

analysed the inverted readings of pleonastic negation as evidence that the negative

inferences were entailments which are “unasserted” (after Horn 2002), and

therefore could be reinforced, e.g., for Spanish (Pons Bordería and Schwenter

2005):

allows in the present study, including reference to rhetorical strengthening (as indicated by an

anonymous referee). 3 The term “conventionalized”, alludes to the possibility of conventional implicatures

having been derived diachronically, as Levinson (2000, 263–264) discusses.

6 Debra Ziegeler

(4) Por poco se mata

‘She was almost killed’

(5) Por poco no se mata

‘She was almost killed’

in which the negator, no in (5) overtly encodes the negative meanings obtaining

from the context of the proximative in (4) without the negator (there is no

difference in meaning between (4) and (5)). Schwenter (2002) also noted the

presence in Valencian Spanish of the non-negated verb with the adverb casi to

express negative as well as positive proximity.

Other cases of expletive negation were found in Mandarin (see Zhu 1959;

Li 1976; Peyraube 1979; Biq 1989; and Horn 2002), Polish (Wierzbicka 1986),

and Bulgarian (Kuteva 1998). As with the Spanish examples, it was observed in all

the examples that the event referred to in the complement of the proximative was

either unexpected or undesirable. As such, it is equally likely that the expletive

negation is used as a pragmatic device to “reassure” the addressee of the avoidance

of imminent, undesirable or unpleasant circumstances. This suggests that the

proximal components of meaning may be stronger and more salient than the polar

one (of aversion), and that there may be a greater need to explicitly contradict the

senses of proximity expressed.

3. Evaluative terms

The presence of examples of expletive negation or ambiguous polarity in

proximatives may be described in relation to the “E(valuative)-factor”, with

reference to Boucher and Osgood (1969), who discuss the general preference for

positive terms versus negatively evaluated terms in general language use. Horn

(1989[2001], 160) discusses the same preference, for example, in comparisons of

negative forms, in which whenever there is a bipolar cognitive opposition, it is the

positively evaluated member of the pair that receives negation, e.g., unhappy vs.

*unsad (as noted in Boucher and Osgood 1969, 4). Boucher and Osgood (1969)

described the phenomenon as the “Pollyanna Hypothesis” in which the symbols

E+ and E- (henceforth, E-neg) were used to refer to words that could be described

as evaluatively positive or negative, such as the adjectival oppositions of

good/bad, pretty/ugly, right/wrong, sweet/sour, and funny/sad. They found in a

number of experiments that speakers tend to use positively-evaluated words more

frequently than negative-evaluated ones, and that these tendencies illustrate that


people usually like to talk about the good things of life, rather than the bad things,

and even when negatively-evaluated words are used with frequency, the negative

evaluations of such words tend to erode over time. Thus the Pollyanna Hypothesis

coincides with what is known regarding expletive negation in proximatives in

other languages: that the only instances which can be marked by redundant

negation in such languages refer to undesirable or impossible situations, which are

ruled out for their canonical readings on the grounds of what people want to

interpret from them, rather than what is actually interpretable (we want undesirable

situations to be also impossible).4

A related point was made by Akatsuka and Strauss (2000, 231) that

counterfactual reasoning in everyday conversation, rather than articulating a

logical position on the interdependency of two propositions, underlies an

expression of the speaker’s positioning in relation to the desirability or

undesirability of an alternative proposition. Akatsuka and Strauss were

investigating mainly counterfactual conditionals, and their data were somewhat

restricted. However, the same factor was also observed in Kuteva et al. (forthc.) in

a comprehensive crosslinguistic study. They found that one of the salient meaning

components of counterfactual grams expressing avoidance of a situation is that the

situations were undesirable in the first place. Kuteva et al. (forthc.) isolate a

number of sub-features which can fall under a prototypical counter-to-fact

grammatical expression crosslinguistically, all of which are related by the sharing

of any number of a limited set of attributes. Significant amongst such attributes are

those of pastness or perfectivity, but also undesirability of the verb situation, found

in the Avertive, a grammatical category referring to an action which was on the

verge of taking place but did not (see also Kuteva 1998, 2001, Heine and Kuteva

2002). The Avertive is also found in the Southern US English proximative liketa,

discussed in Kytö and Romaine (2005), who also make reference to undesirable

situations in counterfactual expressions. In all such cases, it is hypothesised to be

the E-factor of Boucher and Osgood (1969) which motivates the expression of

aversion of unfavourable situations.

4 The tendency does not go uncontested, as Horn (1989[2001], 159–160) points out, in

cases where adjective pairs such as thick and thin leave no rhyme or reason as to the priority of

positive or negative values, and the order of examples such as marked and/or unmarked actually

reverse the values of the markedness they refer to, since unmarked members of pairs usually

precede marked ones.

8 Debra Ziegeler

3.1 Intersubjectivity and evaluation

Boucher and Osgood’s (1969) “Pollyanna Hypothesis” may be further considered

as a manifestation of intersubjectivity in the speaker’s selection of evaluative

items. Subjectivity and intersubjectivity in language have become the topic of a

great deal of recent discussion in many fields, not least because of their close

relation with the processes of grammaticalisation (observed previously, for

example, by Traugott 1989). Although much has been discussed on the topic of

subjectivity and subjectification (the latter referring to the developmental

processes of subjectivity, as noted in Traugott (2012) and Visconti (2013), much

less is known on what exactly is meant by intersubjectivity in language, and

whether it may be encoded in languages: indeed, this topic that has only recently

garnered attention in the literature.

The question then arises how to define intersubjectivity. Some accounts

explain intersubjectivity in opposition to subjectivity, e.g., in the case of Portner

(2009, cited in Narrog 2012), in which the sharing of a judgement by a community

would categorise it as objective knowledge. The same definition is adopted by

Nuyts (2012, 58), who argues for (modal) intersubjectivity as “being shared

between the assessor and a wider group of people, possibly (but not necessarily)

including the hearer” (his definition of “assessor”, as the participant responsible

for the modal evaluation, typically includes the subject). However, this would

mean that almost all human knowledge is intersubjective, so why categorise

intersubjectivity at all? He also maintains that there is no relationship between his

more general definition of intersubjectivity referring to processes in “interaction

management” (2012, 67), such as illocutionary markers, politeness devices, hedges

etc., and that of Traugott (2010) who describes intersubjectivity as the recruitment

of linguistic forms centred on the addressee. Traugott (2012) provides a more

restricted definition of intersubjectification, describing it briefly as a process of

change whereby markers are developed which encode the Speaker’s (or Writer’s)

attention to the Addressee’s cognitive stances and social identities (2012, 9). Her

(2010) definition of intersubjectivity, however, describes it as the way in which the

locutionary agent’s use of language allows for awareness of the addressee’s self-

image, “face”, attitudes and beliefs. It is Traugott’s (2010) definition that is of

most interest to the present study, and building on this definition, one could add

that the addressee’s emotive “face” is also important to the locutionary agent’s use

of language. Traugott’s definitions also claim for a diachronic dimension, in which


there is a cline from non-subjective expression to subjective to intersubjective, in

that order. The significance of her extended definition will be investigated below.

Others studies which focus almost exclusively on the topic of

intersubjectivity include Brems, Ghesquière and Van de Velde (2012), and

Ghesquière, Brems and Van de Velde (2012), the latter providing a comprehensive

overview of much of the recent research on the topic to date. The importance of

text-related meanings is discussed, and the authors maintain that certain textual

elements are important in conveying intersubjective meanings, in the sense that

they are hearer-oriented, e.g. focusing and backgrounding devices (2012, 134).

The terms “hearer-orientation” or “addressee-orientation” may be too general to

describe intersubjective meanings, though, as it goes without saying that nearly all

linguistic communication is in some way hearer-oriented (see also Traugott 2010,

3). Nevertheless, Ghesquière et al. emphasise that sign-posting devices such as

deictic terms do require a more liberal interpretation of intersubjectivity, and that

intersubjectivity can involve attitudinal and responsive sub-categories as well, the

former sub-category including social politeness hedges, and T/V pronouns of the

Romance languages, and the latter including question tags in English.

It is the attitudinal sub-category which best characterises Traugott’s

approach to intersubjectivity. Traugott (2012) exemplifies intersubjective use of

language with examples such as politeness markers, e.g. please (< ‘if it please

you’), hedging markers, such as well, and the (non)-use of taboo vocabulary. In

particular, she refers to the system of honorifics in some languages, especially

Japanese. In her (2012) paper, Traugott attempts to resolve the problem of the

encoding of (inter)subjectivity, often a problem for descriptive studies searching

for consistent form-function correspondences. She challenges the assumptions

previously held (e.g., Beeching et al. 2009) that subjective markers appear mainly

at the left periphery of the clause and intersubjective ones at the right periphery,

indicating instead that intersubjectification is marked by verbal perlocutionary

effect, i.e., uptake by the interlocutor, illustrating with the forms no doubt and

surely that they may appear at either end of the clause. Above all, Traugott (2012)

demonstrates that (inter)subjectivity is not just implicit in language use, but may

be formally encoded using specific linguistic devices.

Perhaps most important to the present study is the need to recognise the

presence of intersubjectivity in pleonastic linguistic devices which would not

normally be tolerated within the contexts in which they are used; i.e., they are an

overlay on the basic communicative needs of the discourse. In respect to

intersubjectivity as viewed in the present study, the speaker is not just orienting the

10 Debra Ziegeler

discourse towards the addressee, nor eliciting a particular perlocutionary uptake,

but engaging the evaluations of the addressee in the communicative event. Such a

process involves accommodating the addressee’s emotive response towards the

content of the utterance. The following data will illustrate the way in which such

accommodation applies to English proximatives.

4. Diachronic data

Earlier historical studies on the development of the use of almost appear in

Ziegeler (2010), in which the OED Online was accessed as well as the last Middle

English section to the end of the Early Modern English section of the Helsinki

Corpus. The objective was to investigate just how frequently the adverb co-

occurred with the environments of bare, finite verbal complements.5 According to

the OED data, the present-day form may be considered to be a univerbation (c.f.

Brinton and Traugott 2005, 48) of the earlier, Old English compound quantifier,

mæst ealle/ealle mæst ‘most(ly) all’, a nominal quantifier function which emerged

in Old English times and apparently persists well into Early Modern English. The

univerbation of the quantifier preceded its progression to adverbial functions, as

seen in the following example from the OED (Ziegeler 2010, 694):

(6) Thies giuers were almost Northmen. (1570 R. Ascham, Scholemaster II.

(Arb.) 133)

‘These givers were mostly all Northmen’

In (6) the meaning refers to the quantification of a noun (not the sense that the

entire group of men were transforming into Northmen). The original, quantifier

meaning of ‘mostly all’ is now not the only sense as the adverb extends its uses to

an increasing range of complements. The last usage of the original nominal

quantifier sense (as in 6) is cited in the study as appearing in 1658.

It is an interesting observation that the semantic consequences of

employing a proximative adverb derived originally from a modified quantifying

determiner, as in the case of almost, are such that its distribution to modify verbal

complements was seen at first to be relatively restricted historically. The Helsinki

Corpus data of 123 tokens of almost listed only 7 examples of almost co-occurring

5 The time-period was determined by the fact that no bare, preterite verbal complements

appeared in the periods before Middle English.


with a bare preterite main verb form (5.69%), in the period dating from 1420–

1710, the earliest being the following (Ziegeler 2010, 695):

(7) And I dowed the cony bytwene his eeris that almost I benamme his lyf

from hym (1420–1500 Caxton, The History of Reynard the Fox [ed.

Blake, p. 58])

‘and I struck the rabbit between his ears so that I almost took his life from

him’

In five out of the seven examples (including 7), the predicate referred to an

undesirable situation. However, even in (7), the adverb is not found adjacent to the

verb, and has scope over the entire clause. The use is certainly counterfactual in

(7), as the example continues: For he escaped ayenst my wyl, ‘for he escaped

against my will’, providing the reason for the speaker to have not killed the rabbit.

It was argued in Amaral (2007, 17) that the polar component (i.e., negative) in

almost cannot sustain causative dependent clauses, and that causal clauses can

only be sustained by the proximal component of meaning. But in its earlier uses, it

appears that the (negative) polar semantics of almost might have already had the

capacity to sustain causal dependency in the context, so long as, perhaps, the scope

of the proximative is wider, as in (7). In today’s English, it would not be possible

to say: I almost took his life from him because he escaped against my will, since

the negative meanings are not strong enough, and yet in (7), the causal clause is

appended with no problem at all.6 The use of almost initially with bare lexical verb

forms was shown in the study to appear in pre-subject position with the scope

extending over the entire proposition, i.e. at the left periphery of the clause, and

illustrating proximity to the possible truth of an entire proposition, a more textual

function, and perhaps a more subjective interpretation (see, e.g., Traugott 2012).

The adverb, however, appears to reduce its scope to become adjacent to the verbal

complement in the last example from the Early Modern English period (Ziegeler

2010, 695):

(8) and he had suffered so much in his Reputation, that he almost dispaired

to recover it. (1680 Burnet, Gilbert. Some Passages of the Life and Death

of the Right Honourable John, Earl of Rochester. p. 13)

6 The negative meanings could be weaker in (7) because the scope of almost is wider. A

more comprehensive study would be needed to determine how frequently such examples occur.

12 Debra Ziegeler

From the small amount of data found with preterite verb complements, it

would seem that counterfactual meanings were quite isolated across the 300-year

time period. The brief survey revealed that much of its present-day usage reflects

its source origins as a quantifying (pre-)determiner over noun phrases, expressing

nearly-complete quantities of entities or attributes rather than counterfactuality.

Quantification of bare, preterite predicates appeared as a later function. It is

certainly not the case that expletive negation was found in its earlier historical

development, as shown by the data in the 2010 study. It is necessary therefore to

examine later data, in which a larger number of preterite complements appear.

4.1 Almost in Late Modern English and Present-Day English

The diachronic data from the Helsinki Corpus are limited in their chronological

range to texts appearing only up until the beginning of the eighteenth century, so

we are left to explain how the adverb developed from that time until the twentieth

century and later. For this reason, a further survey was conducted of the

CLMET(EV) (The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (Extended Version)), in

order to obtain a better idea of its distributional range in more recent time periods.

The CLMET(EV) ranges over three time periods: (i) 1710–1780, (ii) 1780–1850,

and (iii) 1850–1920. Because of the large word-count in each sub-corpus (a total

of around 3 million in (i), around 5,750,000 in (ii) and approximately 6,250,000 in

(iii)), producing large numbers of tokens, the search was randomised to include

only the first 30 files and the last 15 files in each sub-corpus. The following table

illustrates the results obtained, categorising only tokens of almost co-occurring

with bare lexical preterite verb complements, except for the addition of present

perfect participles and progressive participles. The category almost includes all

complement types, verbal or otherwise.

Table 1. Numbers of tokens of almost with bare preterite verb forms or with

perfect or present participles appearing in a selection of files from CLMET(EV),

shown as proportions of the total of verbal and non-verbal complements.

Period

searched

almost +bare

preterites % + perf./pres.

parts. %

1710–1780 1752 128 7.30 20 1.14 1780–1850 2066 196 9.48 19 0.91 1850–1920 2554 126 4.93 17 0.66


From the data in Table 1, it can be seen that there is a slight decrease in the

frequency of bare preterite verbal complements in the later period, represented by

only 5.59% of the total of lexical preterite verb complements and perfect or

present participles combined. The number of perfect or present participles is

relatively insignificant, and appears to be declining according to the data surveyed,

though it is not possible to say whether the use of almost generally is increasing,

either as a pre-determiner, quantifier or an adverb, over the time periods specified,

because of differences in word-counts in the text files. However, for any of the

time periods shown, there is little evidence of the use of almost as an adverb

modifying a bare preterite, i.e., providing the most likely index for a counterfactual

reading. Thus it can be seen again that the counterfactual use (claimed as an

entailment in the literature) does not predominate at any time up to the beginning

of the twentieth century, and in fact appears to be slightly declining in the more

recent period.

The results may be compared with present-day data from the COCA

corpus. The COCA is a corpus of 450 million words, and because of its size, it is

difficult to make the same comparisons as in the CLMETEV. However, an initial

search of almost produced 145,452 tokens of almost alone. Another search of past

tense or participle collocations immediately to the right of almost, which would

have included adjectival past participles, produced 6,136 tokens; of a total of 793

different verbs, the most frequently occurring verb type was fell (255 times). A

similar comparative overview of verb types appearing with almost in the BNC

(British National Corpus, 1 million words) produced a total of 359 different verb

types ranged over 1,172 tokens (there were a total of 30,043 total tokens of

almost), and again the most frequently occurring preterite verb was fell (65 times),

indicating that there may be little dialectal difference between British and US

English where lexical preferences are concerned. The relative occurrence of

almost+V-ed to total occurrences of almost is the following:

Table 2. Frequency of tokens of almost collocating with simple past verb forms or

with past participles appearing in the COCA and BNC corpora, shown as

proportions of the total of verbal and non-verbal complements.

Corpus almost + V-ed %

COCA 145,452 6,136 4.21 BNC 30,043 1,172 3.9

It can be seen, then, from the comparisons between Table 1 and Table 2 above,

that the frequency of the use of almost with bare lexical preterite complements or

14 Debra Ziegeler

participles in the corpora from the late twentieth century (shown in the BNC) is

little different from that of the early part of the twentieth century shown in

CLMET(EV). It should also be noted that the text types are different in the

corpora: CLMET(EV) contains mainly fiction texts, while COCA and BNC

contain live spoken recordings as well as news media and numerous other more

naturalistic genres of discourse. Thus, in today’s usage, the counterfactual

functions still do not appear to feature extensively, on the basis of the raw data

sampling shown above.

4.2 Almost with E+ and E-neg predicates

However, these resultsdo not answer the question as to why English, unlike the

cases shown for Spanish, Portuguese and Mandarin, for example, did not reveal

any instances of expletive negation in its uses of almost either historically or in the

present-day examples, although such instances were searched for in the data. It

was noticeable, at the same time, that, of the cases of almost that were recorded in

the corpus data, both historical and contemporary, a large number of examples

were complemented by predicates referring to events which were either

undesirable or unimaginable, i.e., evaluatively negative contexts (E-neg), leaving

only a small number, in each survey, of predicates that could be evaluated as

positive or neutral (E+). Thus, the reasons for employing expletive negation were

still present in the data. The following data were obtained from the CLMET and

CLMETEV corpora, revealing the predominance of such contexts even without

the presence of expletive negation (the same file selection is used as for Table 1).

Table 3. Frequency of evaluatively negative contexts in the use of counterfactual

proximatives in the selected files from CLMET(EV).

Corpus almost +

preterite/participles

E-neg contexts %

CLMET 1710–1780 148 131 88.51

CLMET 1780–1850 215 177 82.32

CLMET 1850–1920 143 110 76.92

A selection of the examples found is provided below.


E-neg or evaluatively-negative examples:7

1710–1780

(9) The thoughts of leaving her almost rent his heart asunder … (CLMET:

1749 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones).

(10) Endur’d a sea that almost burst the deck. (CLMET: 1738 George Lillo,

Marina)

(11) … he almost destroyed the whole colony: and then proceeded to Mona,

with a resolution fully to complete the conquest of that island. (CLMET:

1760–61, Charlotte Lennox, The Lady’s Museum)

(12) ... My joys and hopes all overthrown, My heart-strings almost broke,

Unfit my mind for melody (CLMET: 1740 Samuel Richardson, Pamela).

1780–1850

(13) ... the real truth is, my poor mother has almost lost her senses …

(CLMETEV: 1799 Frances Burney, Cecilia)

(14) This intelligence almost paralyzed me. (CLMETEV: 1839 Thomas

Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the

Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament)

(15) He almost fell when he went to open it. (CLMET: 1843 William

Thackeray, Vanity Fair)

(16) … he leant upon Dr Lyster, and almost groaned aloud. (CLMETEV:

1799 Frances Burney, Cecilia)

(17) ... together walked to London, and there together almost perished for

want. (CLMET: 1796 Elizabeth Inchbald, Nature and Art)

1850–1920

(18) Dearest Alick, The unlucky journey to Syria almost cost me my life.

(CLMET: 1866–69 Lucie Duff Gordan, Letters from Egypt)

7 There are more E-neg or evaluatively negative examples than E+ or E-neutral shown in

this section simply because there were a much larger number available from which to select the

examples.

16 Debra Ziegeler

(19) Yet I doubted him—I almost called him cruel. (CLMETEV: 1850 Dinah

M. Craik, Olive)

(20) There were moments when he almost lost faith in his whole system of

education, ... (CLMET: 1918 Litton Strachey, Emminent Victorians)

(21) ... he struck her, and more than once almost put her in danger of her life

(CLMET: 1870 Charlotte M. Yonge, The Caged Lion)

E+ or evaluatively positive/neutral examples included:

1710–1780

(22) … every body almost worshipped you … (CLMET: 1748 Samuel

Richardson, Clarissa Harlowe, or The History of a Young Lady)

1850–1920

(23) ... Mountains, whose shaggy steeps appeared to be inaccessible, almost

surrounded it. (CLMET: 1794 Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho)

1850–1920

(24) The exquisite neatness of the room almost concealed its wretchedness.

(CLMET: 1852 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal no. 418–462)

What was also noticeable about the CLMET(EV) data was a tendency for many of

the examples appearing with negatively evaluable complements to express

somewhat hyperbolic situations, as in (9), (12), and (13–14). More examples of

such uses included: almost deprived me of being, almost froze up the blood of

Sophia, almost broken my heart, almost lost the use of all her faculties, almost cut

into my heart, almost took away my breath, almost robb’d me of my

understanding, almost drove me to despair, almost drowned me with Weeping, all

appearing in the 1710–1780 corpus; almost broke our hearts, almost exceeded

endurance, almost destroyed her, almost stopt his whizzen, almost disdained to

breathe, almost paralyzed me, almost despised myself, almost subdued the feeble

remains of her spirits, almost overcame her, almost gave him up for lost, all

appearing in the 1780–1850 files, and almost unmanned me, almost intoxicated

me, almost overwhelmed him, almost overpowered me, almost wept, almost killed

me, almost began to despair, almost fainted, almost rent the drum of my ears,

being amongst those found in the later, 1850–1925 corpus. The predominance of


such hyperbolic uses may also have contributed to the sense of non-

realityassociated with the counterfactual uses, as discussed below.

Present day data obtained from the COCA and the BNC revealed similar

trends, though, given the size of the corpora, it was difficult to quantify the total

number of tokens of E+ and E-neg preterite or perfect participle complements of

almost. For the BNC a sample of 359 verb types was retrieved using the COCA

website sources, and 26 types showed 10 or more tokens of almost + V-ed. The 26

types included:

(25) fell, ran, made, laughed, felt, forgot, died, smiled, seemed, lost, shouted,

went, wished, broke, dropped, disappeared, came, took, destroyed,

fainted, missed, said, threw, got, cried, gave

Of these 26 types, fell, forgot, died, lost, shouted, broke, dropped, destroyed,

fainted, missed, and cried, may all be said to most predictably anticipate a

negatively-evaluable predicate, and so were not searched for frequency. The 13

verbs which remained -.: ran, made, felt, seemed, went, wished, disappeared,

came, took, said, threw, got, gave- were searched for E-neg The reason they were

searched was that they do not necessarily give rise to negatively-evaluable

connotations as part of the lexical meaning, as do expressions such as almost fell,

almost destroyed, fainted, forgot, etc. With respect to the others, only (almost)

smiled and almost laughed might be considered unlikely to yield E-neg. contexts,

and so were not searched. Such factors depend largely on context, of course, but it

was interesting to investigate the contexts of a reduced sample in order to

determine how many complements of almost followed by an evaluatively-neutral

verb did in fact refer to undesirable situations. The following figures were

obtained.

Table 4. Numbers of E-neg. counterfactual complements of almost for 13 verb-

types in the BNC

Verb type Frequency E-neg.

complements

%

ran 42 12 28.5

made 38 10 26.3

felt 24 7 29.1

seemed 22 7 31.8

went 21 17 80.9

wished 17 11 64.7

18 Debra Ziegeler

disappeared 15 14 93.3

came 14 11 78.5

took 14 11 78.5

said 12 6 50.0

threw 12 10 83.3

got 11 3 27.2

gave 10 8 80.0

TOTAL 252 154 61.1

From the figures above, it can be seen that certain verbs more than others seem to

collocate frequently with almost to express approximation to undesirable situations

(almost went, for example, was frequently collocatable with adjectives such as

crazy, while almost ran used in an E-negative expression was restricted mainly to

examples like almost ran into X). Certain patterns were repeatable as quasi-idioms,

illustrating even in a small number of frequencies, that the proximative use of

almost to refer to the avoidance of unfavourable circumstances is rapidly

becoming frozen into construction-like appearances in corpora surveys. However,

the highest frequencies did not necessarily imply the most frequent uses of E-

negative contexts, and it could not be argued from the present small sample that

English is restricting its counterfactual uses in almost to contexts expressing

undesirable (or impossible) circumstances. With a total of 61.1% E-neg

complements, just over half of those that may be considered lexically ambiguous

for E-factors are found with negatively evaluable contexts. Given the comparisons

between the small, present-day sample and the slightly larger sample in

CLMET(EV), it would seem as though there is a slight decline in E-negative uses,

relative to earlier periods. However, it must be recalled that the remainder of the

verb-types which made up the collocation sample of 26 in total; i.e. 13 other types,

were already E-negative in their lexical meaning (apart from smiled and laughed).

Some of the examples of the 14 E-neg. types from the BNC are as follows:

(26) He let her go so suddenly that she almost fell. [BNC: CKD W_fict_prose:

Gower, The Shoemaker’s Daughter, 1992]

(27) Charlie almost forgot there was a food shortage. [BNC: K8T

W_fict_prose: Archer, As the Crow Flies, 1991]


(28) The uncertain foreign situation was typified in Eastern Europe where in

1920 the Poles seemed likely to extinguish the Bolshevik regime, and a

year later the Bolsheviks almost took Warsaw. BNC EW1

w_ac_humanities_arts: Ramsden, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin 1902–

1940, 1978]

(29) It tripped on a book and almost went flying, but it just succeeded in

remaining upright. [BNC H7F w_fict_prose: Banks, Walking on Glass,

1988 ]

(26) and (27) can be readily assessed as anticipating an E-neg. complement

because of the lexical semantics of the verb; (28) and (29) contain verbs which are

not inherently E-neg, but the complements are nevertheless E-neg. Some of the

examples from the E-neutral set include the following:

(30) The once ubiquitous 80-column punched card has now almost

disappeared but, even though data are commonly input via a VDU, much

of the flavour of the earlier era remains. [BNC K8Y w_misc: Alan,

Interpreting Data: A First Course in Statistics. Anderson, 1990]

5. Discussion

In the data above, it can be seen that almost appearing with preterite verbal

complements is extremely restricted in frequency compared with other uses of

almost, to less than 5% in both US data and British data for roughly the same time

period (late twentieth century). Even in the historical data from CLMET(EV) and

the Helsinki Corpus, the counterfactual usage was never predominant. From the

data so far, it is therefore necessary to explain two things: (i) why counterfactual

meaning developed from proximative meanings; (ii) the reason for the presence of

expletive negation in proximatives in other languages but not in English. We are

also reminded of Akatsuka and Strauss’s (2000) claims that counterfactual

reasoning in everyday use is employed mainly for the expression of what Kuteva

(1998) called ‘action narrowly averted’ which in the present case is often

manifested as the avoidance of evaluatively negative situations. Akatsuka and

Strauss (2000) did not vouch for this as a universal characteristic of

counterfactuals, though Kuteva et al. (forthc.) highlight it as one of the features of

the avertive counterfactual category. Kytö and Romaine (2005), in their study of

liketa in Southern States US English, also note the frequent presence of

20 Debra Ziegeler

negatively-evaluable predicates with proximatives, as mentioned earlier. The use

of expletive negation in some languages is thus hypothesised to be directly related

to the meanings of undesirability often found in the context of a proximative

expression.

Evaluatively negative situations are also one of the characteristics

identifying apprehensional counterfactuals across languages in Kuteva et al.

(forthc.) – these are categorised as the class of ‘unless’-counterfactuals that have

the least possibility of realisation. It is worth noting at the same time that volition

is one of the four grammaticalisation paths listed in Heine and Kuteva (2002) for

the grammaticalisation of proximity crosslinguistically (including would, in

English). Past proximatives derived from volition verb sources, in the development

of counterfactual functions, need to cross the boundaries of contextual plausibility

in the semantic shift which uses desire meanings to express proximity to

undesirable events. This takes place in the presence of ‘switch-contexts’ (Heine

2002), in which the original senses of volition or desire no longer make sense; e.g.,

as in Persian (Heine and Kuteva 2002, 313):

(31) mixast bemirad

want.3sg.IMPF die.3sg.SUBJ.PRES

‘He was about to die’.

which cannot mean (literally): ‘he wanted to die’. However, in the case of almost,

there are no volitional verb sources to provide the meanings of proximity, and yet

the meanings of ‘counter-to-desire’ as well as ‘counter-to-fact’ in the past tense

uses still emerge, indicating that, regardless of the lexical source of the

proximative marker, speakers are most likely to express the aversion of a goal-

directed activity when that activity was something unpleasant, or undesired. This

may seem an obvious consequence of the use of proximatives in telic events: that

once their use as approximators to a goal or terminal point is established, the

avoidance of that goal becomes most newsworthy if it is something that was

undesirable in the first place. A similar point was made in Kytö and Romaine

(2005, 25), and the newsworthiness of the averted situation is even more

accentuated in the frequent appearance of hyperbolic examples. Such a

progression also points to the pragmatic reasons for using counterfactuals, often

overlooked in the world of logic which still tends to play mainly with the

expression of implausible or impossible events or situations. The more realistic

data presented above seem to suggest that the main purpose for using a

counterfactual construction is that it often entertains the interlocutor with the


‘good news’ in the form of proximity to ‘bad news’. It is for this reason that the

role of intersubjectivity must be considered in relation to proximative

counterfactuals.

5.1 The intersubjectivity of aversion

It could be argued that almost counterfactuals are powerfully subjective in that

they refer to the beliefs, or opinions of the speaker, expressing a form of modality

- the event complemented of the proximative marker is predictive and irrealis in

most past temporal contexts8 However, it could also be argued that the speaker is

taking into account the “face” and the self-image of the addressee, in that the

proximative, as we have seen above, in the majority of cases expresses proximity

to either disaster or something unfavourable that the speaker would prefer not to

utter; i.e., an E-neg. situation. Thus, although the functions of almost in

counterfactuals are subjective in that they express the predictions of the speaker,

they are also strongly intersubjective, in that they account for the speaker’s

concern for the addressee’s emotions in focusing on the avoidance of predicted

disaster. Speakers’ reports of proximative past events are often more associated

with those of aversion than proximity, since the outcomes of past situations are

usually known, while at the same time, past proximity predicts what might have

happened otherwise. Such competing meanings were argued in Ziegeler (2000a,

2010) to be governed by the interplay of Horn’s (1984, 1989[2001]) neo-Gricean,

R-based and Q-based implicatures. R-based implicatures (involving Quantity 2

and Relevance maxims) permit prediction meanings to arise out of proximative

senses, and Q-based implicatures (involving Quantity 1 and Manner maxims) act

to cancel the prediction implicatures reversing the polarity of the prediction to

express aversion and counterfactuality instead.

In Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Bulgarian and Mandarin, in which the

presence of intersubjective meanings is often formally manifested using pleonastic

or expletive negation, the speaker is aware of the emotional impact on the

addressee of uttering a statement about closeness to misfortune, and attends to the

addressee’s emotive face by overtly explicating the negative meanings of the

proximative. Such tendencies may thus suggest cases in which the proximal

meanings are more prominent than the polar meanings, and the speaker wishes to

downtone the imminence of an unfavourable situation. In English, the polar

8 Pace Heine (1994), who described the proximative as an aspect marker.

22 Debra Ziegeler

readings often appear to be more salient than the proximative/orientational ones,

leading some researchers into believing that they are entailments, as discussed in

section 2. However, as discussed above, such cases may apply only to aspectually-

bounded predicates, and the alternations between proximal and polar readings, as

noted above, are due to the precedence of Quantity implicatures: R-based

implicatures related to proximal components of meaning, and Q-based ones to the

polar components. The order of precedence with regard to Quantity implicatures

has been discussed in previous studies, e.g., Horn (1989[2001], Ch. 3) and Panther

and Thornburg (1999, 352), but a consideration of what factors actually determine

the order still remains.

In Kytö and Romaine (2005, 27), the mechanism by which avertive

meanings of counterfactuality arise from uses of (have/be) liketa proximatives is

via invited inferences drawn from the discourse context of conditional clauses, and

but-conjuncts are shown as explicating the implicit counterfactual implicatures

(2005, 14). In Ziegeler (2000b), similar contextual influences were discussed in

relation to their metonymic integration into the apodoses of would (have)-

conditionals. In the case of almost, though, it is not obvious from the CLMET(EV)

data that such contexts played a significant role in the development of

counterfactuality in almost, as they are not particularly frequent.

With past-tense or aspectually-bounded verbal predicates, the exploitation

of Q-based implicatures suggests that if the speaker had known that P, he/she

would have uttered it, and therefore, it can be inferred that P was not the case

(restriction of the implicatures to past proximatives is justified by the fact that the

past is generally known, and therefore predictions made about the past require a

marked interpretation). The presence of hyperbole (e.g. in (9) and (12) also makes

the imminence of the event less probable, but such cases need not weaken the

intersubjectivity, since it becomes even more important for the speaker to stress

the avoidance of the worst possible situation imagineable.9

Moreover, the operation of Q-based implicatures leads to the use of almost

as a focus adverb, explicitly selecting X for the purpose of denying Y. These

functions are most conventionalised in non-gradable environments such as

bounded, punctual verb predicates, in which the negation is not so readily

cancellable. Such E-neg. contexts are those most likely to support a switch to

counterfactual meanings in the case of volition verb sources as well, as seen in

9 According to Traugott (2010, 21), intersubjectivity does not always express empathy

towards the interlocutor; some intersubjective devices in fact convey aggression.


(31) above, where the ‘desired’ event refers to something undesirable,

reinterpreted as counterfactual. Thus, it may be hypothesised that the presence of

Quantity implicatures has a great deal to do with determining the precedence of

polarity over proximity in past proximatives, but this is only the mechanism by

which polarity takes precedence. In the end, it is speakers’ intersubjective

manipulations of the adverb for more colourful and effective focusing power that

leads the way to the complete reversal in polarity so familiar to the usage of almost

with preterite verbal complements.

6. Conclusions

From the diachronic survey undertaken in the present study, it can be seen that the

counterfactual functions of the proximative marker almost are relatively restricted

both historically and in present-day usage, if the statistics of its co-occurrence with

bare lexical preterite verb forms or perfect participles may be taken as evidence.

Such findings may be accounted for by the origins of the adverb as a compound

quantifier roughly equivalent in meaning to ‘most all’ in today’s English, and not

as an adverb co-occurring with perfective verbs. While an even more detailed

survey needs to be established in order to examine the present-day data more

closely, the evidence from the Late Modern English survey is compelling, in that it

reveals an extraordinary tendency for almost, when it does appear with a lexical

preterite complement, to be used in such a way that it very frequently expresses

the aversion of undesirable situations, consistent with accounts such as Akatsuka

and Strauss (2000), Kytö and Romaine (2005), and Kuteva et al. (forthc.)

illustrating this as a characteristic of natural usage of counterfactuals. Such

findings have been hypothesised to be directly related to the role of

intersubjectivity in the present account of counterfactual proximatives.

The use of expletive negation in other languages as a means of claiming for

negative entailment analyses of proximatives (e.g., Pons Bordería and Schwenter

2005) is therefore questionable under the present account: almost is claimed to

have negative entailments, and yet there is no evidence of expletive negation in

any of the historical data surveyed above. On the contrary, it is hypothesised that

expletive negation is only required where the meanings of negation may be

weaker. Thus, English may differ in this respect, as the negation meanings are

conventionalised with aspectually-bounded, or past-tense predicates, particularly

those referring to undesirable or unfavourable situations. Expletive negation may

24 Debra Ziegeler

instead be considered as the intersubjective accommodation of the addressee’s

emotive face in expressing overtly the avoidance of an undesirable event. The

same intersubjective accommodation of the addressee’s emotive face is accounted

for without expletive negation in English, in the overwhelming statistical

tendencies for counterfactual uses to appear in contexts expressing the aversion of

negative circumstances. The entire situation with proximative meaning is,

nevertheless, still highly speculative in many ways, and much further future

research is required in order to clarify all the issues raised in the present study.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are gratefully extended to the editors of the journal, and to two anonymous

referees, for their patient assistance and for many enlightening comments and suggestions. I am

also grateful to many colleagues at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and the Université de

Perpignan Via Domitia, at which previous versions of the paper have been presented. Any

shortcomings are naturally my own.

Sources

BNC: The British National Corpus. Online version [BYU-BNC] accessed at:

http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/

COCA: The Corpus of Contemporary American English, 450 million words,

1990–present. Compiled by Mark Davies. Online version accessed at:

http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

CLMET(EV): The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (Extended Version),

compiled by Hendrik de Smet.

https://perswww.kuleuven.be/~u0044428/clmet.htm.

Helsinki Corpus: Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, Diachronic Part. Compiled by

Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilipiö, Saara

Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-

Brunberg. Available from The Oxford text Archive. ICAME International

Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English. http://icame.uib.no/.

OED: 2002. Oxford English Dictionary. 3nd

edn., online version.

(http://athens.oed.com).

http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/

http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

https://perswww.kuleuven.be/~u0044428/clmet.htm

http://athens.oed.com/


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Mis en forme : Anglais

(États-Unis)

Mis en forme : Français (France)

28 Debra Ziegeler

Ziegeler, Debra. 2000b. “The Role of Quantity Implicatures in the

Grammaticalisation of would.” Language Sciences 22: 27–61.

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Response to Recent Challenges.” Journal of Pragmatics 42: 681–704.

Author’s address

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3

Institut du Monde Anglophone

5, rue de l’Ecole de Médicine

75006 Paris

[email protected]

About the author

Debra Ziegeler has been continuously returning to the study of proximatives and

counterfactual modality ever since her PhD at Monash University, 1997, published in

2000 as Hypothetical Modality. Grammaticalisation in an L2 Dialect (Benjamins). Her

later book, Interfaces with English Aspect. Diachronic and Empirical Studies (2006,

Benjamins) includes a study on proximatives in English and Chinese. She has also

published research in the fields of grammaticalisation, metonymy and cognitive

linguistics, constructions, and Gricean pragmatics. For further information, see

https://univ-paris3.academia.edu/DebraZiegeler

Mis en forme : Français (France)

Mis en forme : Anglais (États-Unis)

Mis en forme : Anglais (États-Unis)

mailto:[email protected]

https://univ-paris3.academia.edu/DebraZiegeler

Documents

Intersubjectivity and the diachronic development of counterfactual ALMOST