scholarly journals Constructions and language change

Diachronica ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tore Nesset ◽  
Julia Kuznetsova
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Verb Semantics ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Contemporary Standard

This article reports on a corpus study of ongoing language change in Russian, whereby genitive-governing verbs like bojat’sja “fear” combine with objects in the accusative in addition to the traditionally normative genitive. While the use of the accusative is still not very frequent in Contemporary Standard Russian, we demonstrate that it is increasing and that a number of factors such as individuation (animacy), grammatical voice, frequency and verb semantics (intensionality and directionality) promote the use of the accusative. Our analysis is couched in Construction Grammar, and we show that the shift from genitive to accusative objects in Russian provides empirical support for Construction Grammar as a theory applicable to language change.

EXPLORING ENGLISH VERBS OF MOTION AT THE SYNTAXSEMANTICS INTERFACE (AN ANALYTICAL OVERVIEW)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nataliya Gontarenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Research Papers ◽  
Verb Semantics ◽  
Verbs Of Motion ◽  
Motion Verb

This article provides an overview of research papers which explore English verbs of motion at the syntax-semantics interface. Among the issues addressed are controversial aspects of motion verb semantics. It is argued that the theoretical principles of construction grammar help to determine whether the meaning of motion is attributed to the verb or the syntactic construction.

The history of the quasi-auxiliary use(d) to

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob Neels
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Cognitive Representation ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Time Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Aspect Marker ◽  
Feeding Process ◽  
Discourse Frequency ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms

This article is a corpus-based study on the grammaticalization of the quasi-auxiliary use(d) to. It describes and seeks to explain the historical process whereby use(d) to, starting from the Middle English source construction use ‘be in the habit of’ + to + verb, grammaticalized into a habitual aspect marker with idiosyncratic morphosyntactic properties. A detailed corpus study is presented, based on four historical English corpora, which together cover a time period from 1410 to 2009. The results of the corpus analysis are interpreted within the theoretical framework of usage-based grammar, with the aim of uncovering the mechanisms that propelled the gradual grammaticalization of use(d) to on the semantic, morphological, syntactic and phonological dimensions. Among the underlying mechanisms and processes identified are semantic generalization via host-class expansion and habituation, pragmatic enrichment, analogy, chunking, loss of analyzability and internal structure, as well as phonological reduction through neuromotor automation. Supported by the quantitative empirical evidence from the corpus analysis and drawing on findings from usage-based research on language change, the present study depicts the grammaticalization of use(d) to as a self-feeding process driven by frequency effects, i.e. by the effects that the increasingly high discourse frequency of the use(d) to construction had on its cognitive representation.

The growth of the transitivising Reaction Object Construction

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Bouso
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Traditional Form ◽  
Historical Trend ◽  
Object Construction ◽  
Early Modern English

Abstract This paper explores the growth of the Reaction Object Construction (ROC) as in Pauline smiled her thanks, offering new insights into its characterisation and historical development from the perspective of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006, 2019) and its application to patterns of language change (Hilpert 2013; Traugott & Trousdale 2013). It is argued that the modern ROC qualifies as a traditional form-meaning pairing and, at a deeper level, as a polysemous construction that follows the path of development of other transitivising constructions such as the way-construction (Israel 1996), and of processes of constructionalisation in general. Once the ROC imposes a coreferential constraint on its object argument, acquiring in this way its status as a form-meaning pairing over the Early Modern English period (1500–1700), the construction increases its productivity and schematicity; at the same time it decreases its compositionality since the link between the form/syntax and the overall meaning of the construction becomes less transparent, as in The door jingled a welcome. The ROC can thus be argued to be part and result of a broader development in the grammar of English, namely the historical trend towards transitivisation.

Principles of Constructional Change

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirjam Fried
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Construction Grammar

This chapter considers the application of the principles of Construction Grammar to language change. It describes a particular change in a morphological construction of Old Czech and discusses some of the ways in which constructions may change internally. The chapter explains the concept of constructionalization and establishes its connection with Construction Grammar. It highlights the gradual nature of constructional change, the micro-steps involved at different constructional levels, and the importance of context.

scholarly journals Syllable Complexity and Morphological Synthesis: A Well-Motivated Positive Complexity Correlation Across Subdomains

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelece Easterday ◽  
Matthew Stave ◽  
Marc Allassonnière-Tang ◽  
Frank Seifart
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Power ◽  
Significant Positive Correlation ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Morphological Complexity ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Novel Method ◽  
The Relationship

Relationships between phonological and morphological complexity have long been proposed in the linguistic literature, with empirical investigations often seeking complexity trade-offs. Positive complexity correlations tend not to be viewed in terms of motivations. We argue that positive complexity correlations can be diachronically well-motivated, emerging from crosslinguistically prevalent processes of language change. We examine the correlation between syllable complexity and morphological synthesis, hypothesizing that the process of grammaticalization motivates a positive relationship between the two features. To test this, we conduct a typological survey of 95 diverse languages and a corpus study of 21 languages with substantive (predominantly >10,000 words) corpora from the DoReCo project. The first study establishes a significant positive correlation between syllable complexity, measured in terms of maximal syllable patterns, and the index of synthesis (morpheme/word ratio). The second study tests the hypothesis that the relationship between syllable complexity and synthesis holds at local (word-initial and word-final) levels and within noun and verb types, as predicted by a grammaticalization account. While the findings of the corpus study are limited in their statistical power, the observed tendencies are consistent with our predictions. This study contributes important findings to the complexity literature, as well as a novel method which incorporates broad typological sampling and deep corpus analysis.

Reinforcement by realignment in diachronic construction grammar

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-238
Author(s):  
Yueh Hsin Kuo
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Construction Grammar

Abstract This paper suggests that xiē ‘some’ in Mandarin Chinese originated as a quantifier but became a classifier in the yi ‘one’ construction via realignment, or change in inheritance in diachronic construction grammar. This change has created yi xiē, semantically equivalent to xiē, therefore it is also a case of reinforcement in the sense of Jespersen’s Cycle. However, this study argues that yi xiē has not necessarily undergone grammaticalisation. Generalising the analysis, two types of reinforcement are proposed: reinforcement by innovation and by realignment. The former involves grammaticalisation, but the latter may not. The study highlights the importance of higher-level generalisations in language change.

Slovak comparative correlatives

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-229
Author(s):  
Jakob Horsch
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Processing Efficiency ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
Universal Applicability

Abstract Comparative Correlatives (CCs) are biclausal constructions (e.g. The harder you work, the more you earn) that have complex semantics and form. This is the first construction grammar-based corpus study to investigate Slovak CCs, based on a 500-token sample. I argue that intra-clausal word-order phenomena can be explained through processing efficiency, based on Hawkins’ principle of Early Immediate Constituents (2004), and I use covarying-collexeme analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2005) to provide evidence for the existence of meso-constructions. The findings of this study contribute to construction grammar’s “aspirations toward universal applicability” (Fried 2017: 249), proving that the theory is also suitable for analysis of syntactic patterns in Slavic languages.

The Gendered Economics of Synchronized Retirement

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (7) ◽  
pp. 623-644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Per Gustafson
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Early Retirement ◽  
Older Persons ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Married Couples ◽  
Register Data ◽  
Pension Systems ◽  
Income Inequalities ◽  
Number Of Factors

Women generally receive lower pensions than men, and research on gender and pensions has identified a number of factors underlying this pattern. The present article examines one factor that has largely gone unnoticed—synchronized retirement. In most married couples, the husband is older than his wife, yet many couples prefer to retire together. At the same time, pension systems are increasingly designed to discourage early retirement and reward late retirement. If younger wives and older husbands tend to synchronize their retirement, this may reinforce gendered income inequalities among older persons. Analyses of register data on Swedish married couples provide empirical support for this argument. Comparisons of their pre- and postretirement incomes show that women who synchronized retirement with their husbands had, in relative terms, lower postretirement incomes than other women, whereas men who synchronized had higher postretirement incomes than other men.

Construction Grammar as Cognitive Structuralism: the interaction of constructional networks and processing in the diachronic evolution of English comparative correlatives

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
THOMAS HOFFMANN
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Secondary Role ◽  
The Family ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
Processing Effects ◽  
Constructionist Approach ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Correspondence Hypothesis

Following the Uniformitarian Principle, the Performance–Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis (PGCH; Hawkins 2004) predicts a directionality in language change: if the same content can be expressed by two competing structures and one of these is easier to process (see Hawkins 1999, 2004), then the simpler structure will be preferred in performance. Consequently, it will be used more often with a greater range of different lexical items, which increases its type frequency and ultimately leads to it being more cognitively entrenched than its alternative (see Hawkins 2004: 6). As an analysis of the diachronic evolution of the family of English comparative correlative constructions (the more iconiccause–before–effectC1C2 constructionthe more you eat, the fatter you getvs the less iconiceffect–before–causeC2C1 constructionyou get the fatter, the more you eat) shows, however, the PGCH only played a secondary role in the genesis of this set of constructions. In this article, I will present a usage-based constructionist approach that allows researchers to reinterpret the classical Structuralist notion of gaps in the system as gaps in the mental constructional network. This type of Cognitive Structuralist analysis accounts for the presence of the less iconic C2C1 structure (and the absence of the more iconic C1C2 structure) in OE, the genesis of C1C2 structures at the end of the OE period as well as the processing effects predicted by the PGCH once both the C1C2 and the C2C1 constructions were in competition during the ME period.

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