Hoffman, Sebastian

meaning. The first OEC entry for this item, “Þhan may Þe saules in purgatory, By way of grace specialy, be delivered of pyn” (67) dates from 1340. Not until the eighteenth century are found such uses as, “I ... left the city by way of the Bowery” (OED, 1787, 69), in which the meaning is concrete, as a ‘path’ or ‘route’. This item demonstrates how the corpus approach in this study make possible accessing data which show the seemingly backward development of the unit with the concrete meaning of way. Likewise, the unit by virtue of appears in clearly compositional usage in the fourteenth century in the OED, “He was i-bore of Þe mayde Marie by vertu of God wiÞ oute mannys mone (71), but appears as a unit rather suddenly in the eighteenth, “The piston continues to descend by virtue of the expansion of the steam” (OED, 72), when the concrete meaning of the Fr. stem appears to have dissolved. The rapid advent of this item can be accounted for quite likely by the fact that in French, par la vertu de is attested from the thirteenth century; the output in English is most likely a calque (72). We can make a similar observation about by way of in its seeming shift from abstract to concrete meaning. After the eleventh century a very high degree of bilingualism existed among the literate classes, who constituted, nonetheless, a very small proportion of the English speaking California Linguistic Notes Volume XXXII No. 2 Spring, 2007