Functional Transposition of After from a Diachronic Perspective

The paper aims at tracing the origin of preposition, adverb, and conjunction after, starting with first examples registered before 850; distinguishing primary transposed categories; reconstructing process functional transposition in general. analysis is undertaken on basis examples, which have been manually selected from HCET CLMET undergone following PoS tagging, statistical data retrieved COHA BNC. It proved that after emerges as preposition transposes into adverb conjunction. predominates throughout Old English, loses its position favor second half Middle English period. Later, it stabilizes correlation, remains more or less consistent up to now. reaches peak Early Modern then starts rapid declension, now quantity close null. conjunction, being neglected middle period, increase Present-Day English. testifies transposition, undeservingly disregarded linguistics, still remaining progress for fundamental newly-coined lexical units.