On Exception Markers Derived from Verbs: From the Perspective of Grammaticalization

The main purpose of this paper is to describe the grammatical change of exception-marking prepositions, focusing on exception markers derived from verbs and functioning as preposition: except, excepting, bar, barring, save, saving, and excluding. This paper describes the grammaticalization process qualitatively and quantitatively. That is, the syntactic and semantic changes of the respective prepositions are qualitatively expounded in terms of grammaticalization principles and mechanisms and their common characteristics identified. Quantitatively, the frequencies of those items under discussion are identified with the help of the two corpora, the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English.