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Abstract:

In recent years, a series of publications has emerged showing that population increase by immigration of especially adult second-language learners has a deep impact on the structure of the grammar of a language (Kusters 2003; Lupyan & Dale 2010; Trudgill 2011; Bentz & Winter 2013, among others). This line of research characteristically looks at languages from different families and regions, to arrive at a typologically informed view. What is less commonly done, is inquiring into analyticization in the grammar of one particular language, and investigating whether this can be explained by demographic changes, though for large West European languages such as German, English and French, there are a number of studies hinting at the effect of demography (Milroy & Milroy 1985, Weerman 2006, Lodge 2004; Carroll et al. 2012: 165; Carlier et al. 2012: 292; Breitbarth 2014; Van de Velde & Lamiroy forthc.). Still, it appears that, on average, the more those papers deal with morphosyntax (as opposed to phonology), the less hard demographic evidence they bring to bear. Our contribution deals with the poster-child of grammaticalization studies, be going to in English. We link the semantic and syntactic changes that occurred in Early Modern English to the demography of London, the hotbed of the linguistic innovation in this new analytic future. Data are extracted from EEBO, zooming in on prolific writers of the 17th century who mostly publish in London. Using regression analysis and variability-based neighbor clustering (Gries & Hilpert 2008), we observe a relation between the rate of innovation in be going to and the demographic shocks in London. When there is a high population turnover, spurred by immigration, the morphosyntactic change is sped up.