ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which the historical changes for complexity features during the 19th and 20th centuries are not merely increases in the frequency of use. Rather, there have been dramatic extensions to the grammatical/discourse functions of these complexity devices accompanying the quantitative increases in use. For example, premodifying nouns in the 17th and 18th centuries were almost always concrete tangible nouns (e.g., cannon ball, corn field), often referring to specific places (e.g., Hampton Court) or other general locations (e.g., ground floor and town wall). In contrast, premodifying nouns in the 20th century often refer to intangible constructs, such as casualty department and emergency powers. In many cases, such premodifying nouns are nominalizations referring to abstract processes, such as correlation coefficient and publication house. Similar functional extensions accompanied the increase in use for prepositional phrases as nominal postmodifiers. For example, the preposition in almost always expressed concrete locational meanings in the 17th and 18th centuries (e.g., the oil in the thermometer), while it has come to more commonly express abstract meanings in 20th-century academic writing (e.g., a rapid increase in the size of the egg). This chapter goes on to document similar functional extensions in the use of other complexity structures, such as appositive noun phrases and noun+participle compounds as nominal premodifiers.
