In (8) and (12), I sketched synchronic clines of objectivity/subjectivity for both
“fail to”and“not fail to”. I also mentioned that these might represent possible diachronic clines for the evolution of the more subjective sense, noting, at the same time, that this development must have taken place prior to the borrowing of the constructions in English. The question addressed in this section is whether there has been a further semantic development in the case of the positive polarity construction from‘disappoint speaker’s expectation’, the most subjective sense in (8), to‘does not’. In other words, has the element of speaker expectation become so bleached, at least in certain contexts, that what is left is a mere negation marker? Representative examples where this sort of interpreta- tion would seem plausible are (48)–(50).
(48) When the autism strategy was published in March itfailed to makethe establishment of specialist autism teams a requirement for all local authorities.
(COCA, Jeremy Dunning, Evidence grows for specialist teams,Community Care, 2010)
(49) Social support appeared to be only modestly associated with psychological distress in the bivariate analysis. When included in multivariate analyses, itfailed to achievestatistical significance.
(COCA, Barbara Kilbourne, Sherry M. Cummings & Robert S. Levine, The influence of religiosity on depression among low-income people with diabetes,Health & Social Work34(2), 2009)
(50) The Cold War is also an excellent example of a war that ended at a time and in a way that most people living through itfailed to foresee–and had even stopped trying to foresee.
(COCA, Philip H. Gordon, Can the war on terror be won?,Foreign Affairs
86(6), 2007) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
The writer of (48) does not imply that theautism strategy(metonymically) made an effort to require the establishment of autism teams, or that it had a duty to do so. Nor is there any suggestion that the speaker had expected them to do so.It failed to makein (48), shorn as it is of the senses of disappointed effort, duty
and expectation, boils down semantically to the mere negation ofmake; in other words, it just means‘did not make’. Similarly, (49) could be aptly paraphrased
‘did not achieve’and (50)‘did not foresee’. Indeed, in (50) the objective sense is explicitly excluded in thefinal clause by the writer.
(48)–(50) are just three of many examples which exhibit bleaching of the element of expectation on the part of the speaker denoted by the subjective sense of “fail to”. A semantic change like this is not usually considered suffi- cient, however, to conclude that a process of grammaticalization has taken place. As pointed out in Section 2, we need a means of ascertaining an increase in functional load on the part of the items in question. We can apply Boye and Harder’s (2009) formulation, introduced in Section 2, in terms of primary and secondary information to the “fail to” construction, by looking at examples where did follows a fail to phrase and functions as an anaphoric pro-form. Depending on the referent of did we can ascertain whether failed to is dis- cursively primary or secondary. Consider in this respect examples (51)–(53), downloaded from the internet with the aid ofWebCorp.
(51) When they launched it, everyone from engineers to Communist Party big shotsfailed to realizeits importance. Only Korolyovdid.
(http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2007/10/07/Space-remains-a/, accessed on 1 June 2015)
(52) The simpler N,N’-bis(salicylidene)-ethylenediaminocobalt(II) [Co(Salen)2]
failed to catalyzedeoygenations in THF butdidin DMF
(http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/00404039/1999/00000040/ 000|00050/art01880, accessed on 1 June 2015)
(53) What hefailed to mention(and neitherdidDimbleby) was that this principled Nazi perjured himself in that“trial”to try and“convict”an innocent man.
(http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2011/05/ratko-mladic-arrested.html, accessed on 1 June 2015)
In each of these three examples,didrefers to the complement clause predicate rather than the matrix verb fail. Thus the second sentence in (51) must (on account of contrastiveOnly) be read“Korolyovdid realize its importance”and not “Korolyovfailed to realize its importance”. The expressionfailed to realize
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
(Unicode 9 19/11/16 18:03) WDG-New (155mm230mm) DGMetaSerifScience (OpenType) pp. 167–196 1758 van Olmen_06_Egan (p. 191)
does not imply unsuccessful effort, dereliction of duty or disappointed expecta- tion. It is employed by someone who could equally well have written did not realize. In other words, “fail to”is here just another means of encoding nega- tion. This usage of “fail to” instantiates semantic attrition of the element of speaker expectation in the subjective sense in (8). In addition, it instantiates attrition of the element of subjectivity itself. Kranich (2010: 118) maintains that while in the early stages of grammaticalization“the newly emerging construc- tions are often made use of by speakers to express subjective shades of mean- ings, such meanings tend to get lost in later stages of grammaticalisation”. While I would hesitate to assert that “fail to” is in the later stages of gram- maticalization, it certainly exhibits, in sentences like (51)–(53), the sort of loss of subjective shades of meaning to which Kranich is referring.
One reason for asserting that“fail to”is only in the early stages of gramma- ticalization is the continued existence alongside the negation sense of the other four main senses, the objective effort sense and duty sense, the intersubjective antagonistic sense and the subjective expectation sense. There are also examples, such as (54)–(55), where anaphoricdidrefers tofail torather than the complement clause predicate, as it did in (51)–(53).
(54) The Britishfailed to conquer, and sodidRussia.
(http://volokh.com/posts/1235088497.shtml, accessed on 4 January 2010) (55) The White House hadfailed to notice. And sodidCNN.
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-grenell/cnn-and-npr-fail-to- quest_b_876848.html, accessed on 1 June 2015)
Just asneitherin (53) signals a previous negative polarity predication,soin (54) and (55) indicates a previous positive polarity predication (with, of course, in this case a negative meaning). Despite the evidence of the many tokens where it functions as a negation marker, the fact that “fail to” in sentences like (54) and (55) carries primary rather than secondary information in Boye and Harder’s (2009) terms, taken together with the fact that it still occurs with the earlier objective, subjective and intersubjective senses, shows clearly that it is still only in the early stages of grammaticalization.