Introduction

1When adjectives grammaticalize into other parts of speech, they tend to develop either adverbial or prepositional functions. Adjectives which become adverbs typically encode degree, like very (from the French adjective vrai), pretty, bloody, real, pure or dead. Adjectives which behave more or less like prepositions include worth, like, due (to), near, next (to) and opposite.

2Conversely, the direct shift from an adjective to a complementizer is very rare from a typological perspective and is unique in the history of English. Adjectives are not mentioned as typical sources of complementizers in Heine & Kuteva [2007], who cite the noun channel, the verb channel (e.g. say in some English-derived creoles), the demonstrative channel (e.g. that) and the interrogative channel (e.g. French que).

3The emergence of the conjunction like meaning as if is usually attributed to a host-class expansion of the preposition like [López-Couso & Méndez-Naya 2012b]. However, an alternative hypothesis can relate like to the obsolete epistemic adjective like meaning ‘likely’. Although the mutation from adjective to complementizer is not well attested cross-linguistically, it becomes understandable when one considers the full construction involving the adjective. This is why the constructionalization approach devised by Traugott & Trousdale [2013] is used in this study, together with a more traditional grammaticalization framework.

4After preliminary remarks on the various uses of like and the previous studies that have addressed like_{AS IF}, I will endeavour to establish its geographical origin and its approximate date of birth. Then the adjectival hypothesis will be presented in detail and will be substantiated by a quantitative study based on the Corpus of Historical American English [1810-2009, Davies 2010-] which documents the semantic and syntactic expansion of like_{AS IF}.

1. Preliminary remarks

1.1. The various uses of like

5Like is undoubtedly one of the most polyfunctional morphemes in the English language. As is well-known, it can be a noun (e.g. You shouldn’t mess with the likes of him), a verb (e.g. I don’t like chocolate), an adjective (e.g. She replied in like manner), a preposition (e.g. She’s not like me), a discourse marker (e.g. He’s like very nice), a suffix (e.g. He’s very childlike), a component in the quotative expression be like (e.g. She was like: ‘I don’t know’) and a conjunction. In fact, there are two different types of conjunctive like: like_AS and like_{AS IF}.

(1) Like_AS: He sings just like his father did.

(2) Like_{AS IF}: He looks like he’s getting better.

6Both of the above conjunctions, which are said to stem from an erroneous use of the preposition, have been overtly stigmatized in style books for decades, as shown by Meyers [1995] and D’Arcy [2007, 2017]. Other examples of proscription against their use include Webster [1790], Raub [1897], Fowler [1908] and Curme [1931] for like_AS, and Wood [1962] and Follett [1966] for like_{AS IF}. Now, however, these two conjunctions are more or less tacitly accepted within the norms of English, as suggested by Huddleston and Pullum [2002: 1158] or Murray and Simon [2004: 243]. Yet, they remain understudied.

1.2. Previous studies

7The semantic notions encoded by like_AS and like_{AS IF} are usually called Similarity and Comparison, respectively [cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 1110-1111]. These two notions are often considered minor types of semantic relations, as suggested by their noticeable absence from some general works on clause-linking [Givón 2001; Cristofaro 2003]. This can be explained by the fact that Similarity and Comparison lie outside the domain of ‘core’ adverbial relations [Aikhenvald 2009: 381]. Passing reference is made to like_AS and like_{AS IF} in several grammars of English, such as Biber et al. [1999: 844], Leech & Svartvik [2002: 400], Huddleston & Pullum [2002: 1151-1154]. Especially interesting is Kortmann [1997], whose typology of adverbial subordinators in European languages contains a chapter on the evolution of adverbial subordinators in English [1997: 291ff.]. Other notable exceptions include Bryant [1962], who addresses the social distribution of like, and Bolinger [1986], who focuses mainly on the hypercorrective use of as (if). In addition, there are also numerous theoretical studies dealing with one type of structure in which like_{AS IF} can appear, namely copy-raising [e.g. Rogers 1971, 1973; Postal 1974; Horn 1981; Potsdam and Runner 2001; Landau 2009; Asudeh 2012; Asudeh and Toivonen 2012]. This subtype of structure involving like_{AS IF} includes a raising verb followed by a finite clause whose subject is usually coreferential with that of the main clause, as illustrated in the following example:

(3) He seems like/as if/as though he wants to leave.

9Additionally, Bender & Flickinger [1999: 11] and López-Couso & Méndez Naya [2012a: 177; 2015] demonstrate that the complementizers as if and as though originally derived from adverbial subordinators and these researchers extend this conclusion to like_{AS IF}. However, they do not actually study the emergence and evolution of like_{AS IF} per se, notably because “like is both harder to search for and more recent” [Bender & Flickinger 1999: fn. 5].

2. Date of birth and geographical origin of like_{AS IF}

10Although the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth OED) mentions a few examples of like_{AS IF} dating back to Early Modern English (s.v. like def. 6e), it seems that like_{AS IF} was seldom used before the nineteenth century. It then started to be used extensively, particularly in the South of the United States, as Simpson [1952] observes:

[T]he conjunctive like is more widely prevalent in America outside New England. Though Wentworth, in his American Dialect Dictionary, cites general usage from 1820, most of his citations are drawn from the South and West, and he specifically notes that the construction is ‘almost universal in Texas.’ Moreover, C. Alphonso Smith, southern scholar and historian, […] has supplied seven rules for writing the southern dialect, of which the first is: ‘Like does duty for as if in such a sentence as, He looks like he was sick’ Indeed, look like and feel like plus a clause are used so frequently in the South that they are considered southern idioms. [Simpson 1952: 463-464].

12The Early Modern English examples cited in the OED may not be related to the instances of like_{AS IF} that we observe today. The Early Modern period corresponds to an era of great linguistic innovation [Kortmann 1997: 302]. It is the period with the largest inventory of subordinators [Kortmann 1997: 294] but 70% of those introduced during that period were rarely used or turned out to be short-lived (compared with 20% of those created during the Middle English period) [Kortmann 1997: 301]. The Early Modern examples mentioned in the OED can therefore be considered instances of a kind of experimental use of the conjunction, which did not catch on in the language used in Britain at the time.

13There are many other cases of extension of prepositions into conjunctions which did not survive, such as:

(4a) From she was twelve yeer of age, she of hir love graunt him made. [Romaunt Rose, 1366, OED]

(4b) To remaine […] during a necessary conveniency might also be had for the repairing of her own ship. [Cloria and Narcissus, 1653, OED]

15This evidence tends to show that the Early Modern examples mentioned in the OED do not reflect a fully-fledged use of the conjunction. This conjunction did not catch on in British English and the use that can be observed today comes from the South of the United States. Since this usage undoubtedly originated in speech, there was inevitably a time lapse before it was first recorded in writing. One may therefore speculate that it emerged sometime during the eighteenth century, and started to be used in writing during the early nineteenth century. In COHA it first appeared in non-standard fictitious Southern dialogues, often associated with African American Vernacular speakers.

3. The adjectival hypothesis

16The two following sentences contain strikingly similar clauses:

(5a) Their father said something, too, and it sounded like he was angry. [Help wanted: stories, Gary Soto, 2005, COHA]

(5b) [I]t is like she was angry when she heard that thou wert fond of a poor Indian woman of Darien. [The Damsel of Darien, vol. 2, William Gilmore Simms, 1839, COHA]

17Yet, this parallel is only superficial. Sentence (5a), which dates from 2005, includes an instance of like_{AS IF}, while the use of like in sentence (5b) is of a different type, even though this is not apparent at first sight. It becomes clearer, however, if the sentence is given in full:

(5b’) If she loves my lord, it is like she was angry when she heard that thou wert fond of a poor Indian woman of Darien. [The Damsel of Darien, vol. 2, William Gilmore Simms, 1839, COHA]

18The replacement of like by as if becomes ungrammatical here, although it is possible in (5a) and in the truncated version (5b) mentioned above:

(5b’’) *If she loves my lord, it is as if she was angry when she heard that thou wert fond of a poor Indian woman of Darien.

19In this sentence, as the initial if-clause indicates, like is not a complementizer but an adjective meaning ‘likely’ (from now on like_ADJ). Indeed, the if-clause expresses a hypothesis which is followed by a potential consequence. What is at play here is a deduction based on logic; the speaker evaluates the probability of a state of affair, based on a hypothetical premise. The use of like_{AS IF} in sentence (5a), by contrast, encodes an inference based on perception, here an auditory one.

20Interestingly, in the truncated version (5b), the status and meaning of like is impossible to ascertain and only the context can help to identify the correct meaning of like. This is also the case in another example, from the Compleat Dictionary of English and Dutch by William Sewel, published in 1766:

(6) It is like he did not see it.

(7) He is not like to live long.

(8) It is not like that he should say so.

22In examples (5b’) and (6), the co-text helps to identify the precise value of like, but in many instances, such as (9), even the co-text is insufficient to enable the reader/listener to distinguish between the adjective and the complementizer:

(9) [T]hey all knew that long before the waters could be lowered so that any attempt to save them could be made, the foul air of that small chamber would have done its fatal work. […]. Even as they tried to talk, poor Boodle, saying that he was sleepy, lay down on the bare rock floor, where he was almost instantly fast asleep and breathing heavily. “‘T is like he’ll never wake again,” said one of the miners, gloomily. “Let him sleep, then; ‘t is the easiest way out of it,” responded a comrade. [Derrick Sterling: A Story of the Mines, Kirk Monroe, 1888, COHA]

23In this sentence, there is no objective element that can rule out either interpretation with certainty. In such a case, the difference in meaning between the two interpretations of like has very little communicative relevance. Is the miner saying that Boodle will probably never wake up (like_ADJ) or is he implying that Boodle has the appearance of someone who will never wake up (like_{AS IF})? These two readings, that of likely imminent death and that of an appearance of imminent death, are identical from a pragmatic perspective. The only nuance that separates them is that the use of like_ADJ emphasizes the deduction based on logic, while in the case of like_{AS IF} the logical deduction is backgrounded in favour of a notion of inference based on perception. Yet, these two types of reasoning are inseparable: in order to be able to make a logical deduction based on what one knows about the danger of toxic gases, one has to use the sensory evidence at hand: sight (i.e. the miner has fallen asleep), sound (i.e. he is breathing heavily), smell (i.e. the air is ‘foul’), etc. In short, both are evidential, as they express “the perceptual and/or epistemological basis for making a speech act”, which is Cornillie [2009]’s definition of evidentiality. In addition, both interpretations express an epistemic modality; in each case, the speaker does not fully endorse the proposition ‘he will never wake up’ but presents it as a probable event. The semantic proximity between the two versions suggests how the mutation from an epistemic adjective to an evidential complementizer was possible.

4. The constructionalization of like

4.1. The obsolescence of like_ADJ

24In the OED [s.v. like def. 8 and 9.a.], the use of the adjective like meaning ‘likely’ is illustrated by examples dating from 1380 to 1896. The adjective appeared in three micro-constructions:

(a) The attributive construction: Cloudy, a like change of weather [1757]

(b) The predicative raised construction: He was like to fail

(c) The predicative extraposed construction: It is like (that) he will fail.

25The attributive micro-construction died out earlier than the other two, undoubtedly because like could easily be confused with the other meaning of the adjective, namely ‘similar’. For instance, the phrase “a like fate” could both mean “a likely fate” and “a similar fate”. In the attributive construction like was therefore replaced by the monosemous adjective likely for reasons of isomorphism, i.e. the tendency towards biunique mapping between form and meaning. No instances of the attributive micro-construction can be found in COHA, which suggests that it had already disappeared (at least in American English) by the end of the eighteenth century.

26The raised construction survived longer but had steadily lost ground by the nineteenth century. Its demise is illustrated in the following graph, which represents the proportion of the forms {be like to; am like to; is like to; are like to} as opposed to {be likely to; am likely to; is likely to; are likely to} in COHA.

27During the nineteenth century, speakers were still sporadically confronted with the raised micro-construction, but had no longer access to the attributive micro-construction, which had already died out. As they could no longer associate the raised construction with the corresponding adjective, many speakers became unable to analyze this construction appropriately. Their hesitation was doubtless also increased by the great polyfunctionality of the word like. Consequently, some speakers reanalyzed it as a verb, as in the following example:

(10) Jest then some bilin hot steam come up into my throte that liked to blow’d my nose rite out by the roots. [Major Jones’s Sketches of Travel, William Tappan Thompson, 1848, COHA]

28Others started to treat like to as a kind of adverb, liketa, replaceable by almost:

(11) And it liketa scared him to death! [Feagin 1979]

29These two uses are avertive and mean ‘be about to do’, ‘almost do’ (cf. the French modal faillir) [Romaine & Kytö 2005]. The semantic connection with the epistemic adjective is quite clear here, as the expression is used for an event that was highly probable but did not actually happen. This (ad)verb still occurs sporadically in some non-standard varieties spoken in the South of the United States and the Appalachians.

4.2. Severance of link and reanalysis

30As the attributive construction of like_ADJ had disappeared, speakers/hearers found the two micro-constructions left (the raised and the extraposed constructions) opaque, because they were unable to relate them with the corresponding adjective. The severance of the link between the adjective and the extraposed micro-construction led to a different kind of reanalysis of like_ADJ. The following sentence, with an adjective followed by an extraposed nominal that-clause with a covert complementizer:

(12a) It’s like_ADJ [ø he’ll never wake again].

was rebracketed as follows:

(12b) It’s [like_COMP he’ll never wake again].

with like turning into an overt complementizer.

31The constructionalization, which can be formalized as [it copula Adj [ø Clause]] ↔ [probability] > [it copula [Comp Clause]] ↔ [comparison], is summarized in Figure 3.

32The constructionalization led to a change in inheritance of like. It completely ceased to be treated as an adjective and acquired conjunctive properties. By analogy with as if and as though it subsequently also became an adverbial subordinator, introducing adjuncts.

4.3. A case of primary grammaticalization

35Second, like_{AS IF} lost its former paradigmatic variability [Lehmann 1982]. Although like_ADJ can alternate with several other adjectives, such as likely, expected, probable, possible, plausible, believable, conceivable, etc., like_{AS IF} can only be replaced with a closed list of items, namely as if, as though and sometimes that or zero.

36Third, the rebracketing had an impact on the placement of a prepositional phrase encoding the experiencer. Compare for instance the two following sentences, where like is used in comparable contexts, after the copula verbs look and appear:

(13a) Looks like [to me] they need it mighty bad. [Judith of the Cumberlands, Alice McGowan, 1908, COHA]

(13b) “‘Pears [to me] like you’re mighty slow,” she said, complainingly. [A Campfire Girl’s First Council Fire, Jane L. Stewart, 1914, COHA]

37Also noticeable is an increase in token frequency, all the more so because like_ADJ was a rare adjective. It became much more frequent when it acquired conjunctive properties. Subsequently, we also observe an increase in type frequency, since like_{AS IF} was later extended to other syntactic contexts (see Section 5.2.). This increase in type frequency goes hand in hand with semantic generalization (or desemanticization). In the case of like_{AS IF}, we observe a mutation from a content-word, describing the properties of a referent as being ‘within the realm of credibility’, to a non-factual clausal connective.

(14) I dun nussed dat man an’ his baby thru’ yaller fever, ‘pears lik’ he thinks he neber can do ‘nuff for ole Aunt Savannah […]. [Thirty Years of Freedom, Katherine Davis Chapman Tilman, 1902, COHA]

39Similarly, in the novel Bad Boy at Home, the spelling lik is sporadically used for the preposition or the conjunction, but never for the verb like, as illustrated by the comparison between (15) and (16):

(15) Maria […] begun a cryin lik her hart wuld brak. [Bad Boy at Home, Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, 1885, COHA]

(16) I alwus like to help my ’mployers outer a tite place. [Bad Boy at Home, Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, 1885, COHA]

40One element which seems at first to contradict general findings on grammaticalization is that low frequency items are not good candidates for grammaticalization, and yet the adjective like meaning likely was quite rare. However, given that like is very polyfunctional and very frequent in its other uses, particularly as a preposition, the low frequency of the adjective did not prove to be a hindrance. In other words, it is probably an interplay between the syntax of the adjectival construction and the frequency of the preposition that led to the emergence of a highly productive clausal connector.

5. Semantic and syntactic extension

5.1. Semantic extension

41The conjunctions as if, as though and like are compatible with two types of meaning: the evidential/epistemic meaning and the irrealis/counterfactual meaning (see Pinson [2018] for more detail). The evidential meaning reflects an inference based on sensory stimuli, as in:

(17) He looks like he’s getting better.

while the irrealis meaning corresponds to a comparison between an actual situation and an imaginary one, as in:

(18) The moonlight makes the park hills, lakes, trees, and meadows look like they’ve been dipped deep in blue light and purple shadow [The Mayor of Central Park, Avi, 2005, COHA]

Table 1: The semantic evolution of like_{AS IF}

43As Table 1 shows, the proportion of irrealis readings has dramatically increased between the 19^th century and the early 21^st century and the difference is statistically significant (χ² test: p < 0.0001).

5.2. Syntactic extension

44The conjunction like_{AS IF} has also extended its range of syntactic uses over time. A syntactic comparison between the nineteenth-century part of COHA and a sample of occurrences from the 2000s in COHA suggests two stages, which can also help to sustain the adjectival hypothesis.

5.2.1. Anteriority of structures with impersonal subjects

45The adjectival hypothesis proposed here postulates that like_{AS IF}’s first context of appearance involves an impersonal subject:

(19) It + be/seem/appear/look… + like-clause

because the adjective from which it derives cannot be used with a referential subject together with a finite clause:

(20) *He looks like(ly) he will be sick.

Table 2: The syntactic evolution of like_{AS IF} [1]

47The decrease in the proportion of uses with an impersonal subject can be interpreted as a sign that this construction predates copy-raising.

5.2.2. Anteriority of the complementizer over the adverbial subordinator

48Today, like_{AS IF} can be used both as a complementizer, after a copula verb, as in:

(20) It looks like he will be sick.

or

(21) He looks like he will be sick.

but it can also be used as an adverbial subordinator, as in example (15), repeated here as (22):

(22) Maria […] begun a cryin lik her hart wuld brak. [Bad Boy at Home, Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, 1885, COHA]

49The adjectival hypothesis implies that the complementizer predates the adverbial subordinator, since it involves that like_{AS IF}’s context of emergence is in post-copular position.

Conclusion

51The adjective like meaning ‘likely’ was originally used in three micro-constructions: the attributive construction, the raised construction and the extraposed construction. As shown by its absence from COHA, the attributive construction disappeared before the other two, undoubtedly for reasons of isomorphism. The disappearance of the attributive use has triggered the constructionalization of the two remaining uses of the adjective. In other words, the decreasing exposure to the attributive use led to a lack of entrenchment; speakers-hearers then became unable to draw the link between epistemic adjectives and the two micro-constructions that remained. It was particularly difficult for speakers-hearers to relate the two micro-constructions to the adjective given the wide array of functions of the word like.

52In raised constructions, like gave rise to a non-standard avertive marker diversely treated as a verb or as the adverb liketa. By contrast, the extraposed construction provided the bridging context allowing for the grammaticalization of like into a complementizer. The impersonal construction was rebracketed from ‘It’s like_ADJ [ø_COMP he’ll never wake again]’ into ‘It’s [like_COMP he’ll never wake again]’. This paper substantiates this hypothesis by documenting the semantic expansion of like_{AS IF} (from epistemic to irrealis), as well as its syntactic expansion (from impersonal to copy-raising and then adverbial constructions). This suggests that it is indeed the impersonal epistemic use which predates the other ones, pointing to an adjectival origin of like_{AS IF}. The constructionalization can be formalized as follows: [it copula Adj [ø + Clause]] ↔ [probability] > [it copula [Comp + Clause]] ↔ [comparison].

53This paper thus reassesses the role of the adjective channel for the grammaticalization of complementizers, giving centre stage to a long-gone marginal adjective which turns out to have somehow survived through the use of its very popular conjunctive offspring. This study also adds to the general picture of the polygrammaticalization of the word like, which can be summarized as follows: