Facets of connectivity change: tracing the dynamics of attraction and differentiation in the rise of the English deverbal prepositions given and considering

Abstract

Although the emergence of deverbal prepositions has been well documented in studies on grammaticalization, existing research has largely focused on individual items, paying limited attention to their interactions over time. Addressing this gap, this article examines whether the rise of the past participle given as a deverbal preposition over the past century reflects attraction to or differentiation from the paradigmatically related and more established form considering . Using two tree-based machine-learning methods, namely Boruta Feature Selection and Conditional Inference Trees, the present study reveals that the two constructions exhibit attraction in the formal and pragmatic dimensions, as evidenced by their distributions across left-peripheral positions and modal contexts. By contrast, the two constructions display differentiation in the discourse dimension, as evidenced by a clearer division of labor across genres. Taken together, these findings advance the theoretical understanding of connectivity change by showing that it cannot be reduced to a simple strengthening-versus-weakening dichotomy. Instead, it involves a probabilistic interplay of both attraction and differentiation across distinct linguistic dimensions.