From adverb to approximator: Practically in Late Modern English

The degree modifier practically, meaning ‘almost, nearly’ and functioning as a “approximator downtoner” (Quirk et al. 1985) or “approximator” in the “totality modifer class” (Paradis 2008), arises in Late Modern English, developing from an adverb of manner or respect meaning ‘in a practical manner, in practice, in reality’ in Early Modern English. This paper explores the historical development of practically. Modifying predicative and appositive adjectives and prepositional and adverbial phrases and occurring in noun and determiner phrases, practically comes to serve as a degree adverb. Modifying verbs and participles, it comes to function as a degree adjunct, often with negative implicature and emphasizer rather than degree function.

Corpus findings point to the appearance of approximator uses of practically in all syntactic contexts in a confined period from 1830–1863 (cf. Núñez-Pertejo 2023). In ambiguous or “bridging” contexts, the manner meaning ‘in practice, in effect’ can be reinterpreted as ‘most often the case’ and hence as falling short of the expected level, thus giving rise to the approximator meaning ‘almost, nearly’. The change from a lexical adverb to a degree modifier is a process of grammaticalization, involving decategorialization (functional shift), host-class expansion, syntactic context expansion, desemanticization, semantic-pragmatic change, and subjectification. The later appearance of the degree modifier practically with bare verbs argues for a trajectory from degree adverb to degree adjunct rather than the reverse. With lexical adjectives, the approximator is grammaticalized first in predicative position and only later in attributive position, most likely because the predicative position is most similar to the “locus for reanalysis”, namely be/have + past participle (De Smet 2012). Finally, the negative implicature of the degree adjunct practically most likely develops because of the preponderance of verbs with negative semantic prosody, where ‘almost P’ is reinterpreted as ‘not (quite) P’, motivated by subjectification (Ziegeler 2015; 2016).