Here’s hoping v procesu gramatikalizace

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to examine the functional and formal features of the construction here’s hoping. Our analysis is informed by the frameworks of construction grammar (Fried, 2010, 2013), grammaticalization (Fried, 2009; Himmelmann, 2004), subjectification (Company, 2006) and impersonalization (Siewierska, 2008). The construction seems to have developed a novel subjectified function, i.e. to express the speaker’s positive expectation while retaining a degree of tentativeness and distance. The data for the analysis was excerpted from the corpus English Web 2021 (enTenTen21). The internal and external features of the construction (e.g. the (non-)deictic function of here, fixedness, syntactic isolation, initial position) together with the overall expansion of the semantic and pragmatic context and the gradual host-class expansion suggest that the process of grammaticalization/subjectification is currently under way (cf. Fried, 2010; Company, 2006).

Keywords

• grammaticalization
• construction
• here’s hoping
• deixis
• impersonalization