Constructionalization and Constructional Changes (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics)

✍ Scribed by Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Graeme Trousdale

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 299
• Edition: Illustrated
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In this book Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Graeme Trousdale develop an approach to language change based on construction grammar. Construction grammar is a theory of signs construed at the level of the phrase, clause, and complex sentence. Until now it has been mainly synchronic. The authors use it to reconceptualize grammaticalization (the process by which verbs like 'to have' lose semantic content and gain grammatical functions, or word order is reorganised as syntax-prominent rather than discourse-prominent), and lexicalization (in which idioms become fixed and complex words simplified). Basing their argument on the notions that language is made up of language-specific form-meaning pairings and that there is a gradient between lexical and grammatical constructions, Professor Traugott and Dr Trousdale suggest that language change proceeds by micro-steps that involve closely related changes in syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse functions. They illustrate their exposition with numerous English examples drawn from Anglo-Saxon times to the present, many of which they discuss in depth.

The book is organized in six chapters. The first outlines the approach and the questions to be addressed, while the second reviews usage-based models of language change, and the third considers the relation between grammatical constructionalization and grammaticalization. Chapters 4 and 5 focus respectively on lexical constructionalization and the role of context, before the final chapter draws the authors' arguments together and outlines prospects for further research. Constructionalization and Constructional Changes propounds and demonstrates a new and productive approach to historical linguistics.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Constructionalization and Constructional Changes
Copyright
Contents
Series preface
Acknowledgements
Figures and tables
Figures
Tables
Abbreviations
Inventory of notation
Data bases and electronic corpora
1: The Framework
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Constructional approaches to language
1.2.1 Berkeley Construction Grammar
1.2.2 Sign-Based Construction Grammar
1.2.3 Cognitive Construction Grammar
1.2.4 Radical Construction Grammar
1.2.5 Cognitive Grammar
1.2.6 Our representation of constructions
1.3 Networks and construction grammar
1.4 Constructions and factors relevant to them
1.4.1 Constructions characterized
1.4.2 Schematicity, productivity, and compositionality
1.4.2.1 Schematicity
1.4.2.2 Productivity
1.4.2.3 Compositionality
1.5 A constructional view of change
1.5.1 A characterization and example of constructionalization
1.5.2 Constructional changes
1.5.3 The relation of constructional changes to constructionalization
1.5.4 Instantaneous constructionalization
1.6 Diachronic work particularly relevant to this book
1.6.1 ‘Construction’ as used in earlier historical linguistics
1.6.2 Grammaticalization
1.6.3 Lexicalization
1.6.4 Mechanisms of change
1.6.4.1 Neoanalysis ('reanalysis')
1.6.4.2 Analogization ('analogy')
1.6.5 Work on diachronic construction grammar
1.7 Evidence
1.8 Summary and outline of the book
2: A Usage-Based Approach to Sign Change
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Usage-based models
2.2.1 Storage as a unit
2.2.2 Sanction
2.3 Networks in a usage-based model
2.3.1 The relationship between networks, language processing, and language learning
2.3.2 Spreading activation
2.3.3 Implications for 'analogy'
2.4 Types of links
2.4.1 Relational links
2.4.2 Inheritance links
2.5 Growth, obsolescence, and reconfiguration in a network
2.5.1 The life-cycle of constructions
2.5.1.1 Growth at the margins
2.5.1.2 Staying at the margins
2.5.1.3 Marginalization and loss of a construction
2.5.2 Reconfiguration of links
2.6 Categories, gradience, and gradualness
2.7 A case study: the development of the way-construction revisited
2.7.1 The way-construction in PDE
2.7.2 Precursors of the way-construction
2.7.3 Constructionalization of the way-construction
2.7.4 Further expansion of the way-construction
2.7.5 Growth of the way-construction in a network
2.7.6 The status of the way-construction on the lexical-grammatical gradient
2.8 Summary and some questions
3: Grammatical Constructionalization
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Approaches to grammaticalization
3.2.1 Grammaticalization as reduction and increased dependency
3.2.2 Grammaticalization as expansion
3.2.3 The interconnectedness of the GR and GE approaches
3.3 A constructional approach to directionality
3.3.1 Increase in productivity
3.3.2 Increase in schematicity
3.3.3 Decrease in compositionality
3.3.4 The interweaving of GR and GE factors in constructionalization and constructional change
3.3.5 Possible motivations for directionality of change
3.4 Rethinking degrammaticalization in terms of constructionalization
3.4.1 Deinflectionalization
3.4.2 Debonding
3.4.3 A caution against projecting original uses from the present
3.5 A case study: the development of ALL- and WHAT-pseudo-clefts
3.5.1 Precursors of ALL- and WHAT-pseudo-clefts
3.5.2 Early pseudo-clefts
3.5.3 The later history of ALL- and WHAT-pseudo-clefts
3.5.4 Discussion
3.6 Summary
4: Lexical Constructionalization
4.1 Introduction
4.2 On some characteristics of lexical constructions
4.3 Some approaches to lexicalization
4.3.1 Alleged discrete outputs of lexicalization and grammaticalization
4.3.2 Lexicalization as entry into the inventory
4.3.3 Toward rethinking views of lexicalization in the light of lexical constructionalization
4.4 Changing productivity, schematicity, and compositionality in lexical constructionalization
4.4.1 Productivity
4.4.2 Schematicity
4.4.3 Compositionality
4.5 The development of lexical (sub)schemas
4.5.1 OE DOM
4.5.2 OE RÆDEN
4.5.3 Choices among nominal affixoids in OE and ME
4.6 The development of atomic lexical constructions
4.7 Lexical constructionalization of clauses and phrases
4.8 On the instantaneous development of some lexical constructions
4.9 Lexical constructionalization and degrammaticalization
4.10 Summary
5: Contexts for Constructionalization
5.1 Introduction
5.2 A framework for thinking about contexts
5.2.1 Key contextual factors in pre-constructionalization
5.2.2 Post-constructionalization contextual changes
5.3 Types of contexts for constructionalization
5.3.1 Contexts for the development of word-formation schemas: -dom, -ræden, and -lac.
5.3.2 Partitive contexts for the development of binominal quantifiers: a lot of
5.3.3 Contexts for the development of an adjective of difference into a quantifier: several
5.3.4 Contexts for the development of future BE going to
5.3.5 Slots as contexts for the development of snowclones: not the ADJest N1 in the N2
5.3.6 Contexts for the rise of pseudo-clefts
5.4 Persistence of enabling contexts
5.5 Summary
6: Review and Future Prospects
6.1 Introduction
6.2 The major objectives
6.2.1 A summative example: ish
6.3 Some areas for further research
References
Index of Key Historical Examples
Index of Names
Index of Subjects