Constructional Change in English

Constructional Change in English
Author: Martin Hilpert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2013-02-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1107013488

Is construction grammar a useful framework for the study of language change? Hilpert combines the current linguistic theory of construction grammar with advanced corpus-based methodology in order to study language change in a new way. This new perspective has wide-ranging consequences for the way historical linguists think about language change.

Constructions in Contact 2

Constructions in Contact 2
Author: Hans C. Boas
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027259976

The last few years have seen a steadily increasing interest in constructional approaches to language contact. This volume builds on previous constructionist work, in particular Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) and the volume Constructions in Contact (2018) and extends its methodology and insights in three major ways. First, it presents new constructional research on a wide range of language contact scenarios including Afrikaans, American Sign Language, English, French, Malayalam, Norwegian, Spanish, Welsh, as well as contact scenarios that involve typologically different languages. Second, it also addresses other types of scenarios that do not fall into the classic language contact category, such as multilingual practices and language acquisition as emerging multilingualism. Third, it aims to integrate constructionist views on language contact and multilingualism with other approaches that focus on structural, social, and cognitive aspects. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar is a framework particularly well suited for analyzing a wide variety of language contact phenomena from a usage-based perspective.

Frame-Constructional Verb Classes

Frame-Constructional Verb Classes
Author: Ryan Dux
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2020-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027261016

While verb classes are a mainstay of linguistic research, the field lacks consensus on precisely what constitutes a verb class. This book presents a novel approach to verb classes, employing a bottom-up, corpus-based methodology and combining key insights from Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar, and Valency Grammar. On this approach, verb classes are formulated at varying granularity levels to adequately capture both the shared semantic and syntactic properties unifying verbs of a class and the idiosyncratic properties unique to individual verbs. In-depth analyses based on this approach shed light on the interrelations between verbs, frame-semantics, and constructions, and on the semantic richness and network organization of grammatical constructions. This approach is extended to a comparison of Change and Theft verbs, revealing unexpected lexical and syntactic differences across semantically distinct classes. Finally, a range of contrastive (German–English) analyses demonstrate how verb classes can inform the cross-linguistic comparison of verbs and constructions.

Categories, Constructions, and Change in English Syntax

Categories, Constructions, and Change in English Syntax
Author: Nuria Yáñez-Bouza
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2022-06-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781108411424

A pioneering collection of new research that explores categories, constructions, and change in the syntax of the English language. The volume, with contributions by world-renowned scholars as well as some emerging scholars in the field, covers a wide variety of approaches to grammatical categories and categorial change, constructions and constructional change, and comparative and typological research. Each of the fourteen chapters, based on the analysis of authentic data, highlights the wealth and breadth of the study of English syntax (including morphosyntax), both theoretically and empirically, from Old English through to the present day. The result is a body of research which will add substantially to the current study of the syntax of the English language, by stimulating further research in the field.

Construction Grammar and its Application to English

Construction Grammar and its Application to English
Author: Martin Hilpert
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2014-03-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0748675868

Construction Grammar explains how knowledge of language is organized in speakers' minds. The central and radical claim of Construction Grammar is that linguistic knowledge can be fully described as knowledge of constructions, which are defined as symbolic units that connect a linguistic form with meaning.

Category Change from a Constructional Perspective

Category Change from a Constructional Perspective
Author: Kristel Van Goethem
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 902726435X

Category change, broadly defined as the shift from one word class to another, is often studied as part of other changes, such as grammaticalization or lexicalization, but not in its own right. This volume offers a survey of different types of category change and their properties, e.g. abrupt versus gradual changes, morphological versus syntactic changes, or context-independent versus context-sensitive changes. The purpose of this collection of papers is to explore the concepts of linguistic category and category change from the perspective of Construction Grammar. Using data from a variety of languages, the authors address a number of themes that are central to current theorizing about category change, such as the question of whether or not categories should be considered discrete entities, how new categories arise, or whether category change can be considered as the emergence of a new construction, i.e. a new form-meaning pairing. The novel approach advanced in this volume will be of interest to historical linguists as well as to general linguists working on the nature of linguistic categories.

The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar

The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar
Author: Thomas Hoffmann
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 609
Release: 2013-04-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0195396685

This Handbook is the first authoritative reference work solely dedicated to the theory, method, and applications of Construction Grammar, and will be a resource that students and scholars alike can turn to for a representative overview of its many sub-theories and applications.

On Multiple Source Constructions in Language Change

On Multiple Source Constructions in Language Change
Author: Hendrik De Smet
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2015-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027268002

In much writing on language change, there is a tacit assumption that change operates on a single source construction to produce an innovative target construction. This volume challenges this assumption, by showing that many changes involve interactions between multiple source constructions. In fact, the involvement of multiple source constructions is unexceptional. The phenomenon is observed in phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. It is seen in language-internal change as well as in contact-induced change. Interactions may obtain between independent but historically related constructions as well as between historically unrelated constructions. The contributions to this volume, on the one hand, present specific case studies on changes involving multiple source constructions, in various domains of grammar and in a variety of languages. On the other hand, they discuss how such changes can be accommodated in current theoretical models of language. Originally published in Studies in Language Vol. 37:3 (2013).

Modality and Diachronic Construction Grammar

Modality and Diachronic Construction Grammar
Author: Martin Hilpert
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2021-10-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027259003

This volume explores how Diachronic Construction Grammar can shed new light on changes in a central and well-researched domain of grammar, namely modality. Its main goal is to show how constructional analyses can help us address some of the long-standing questions that have informed discussions of modal expressions and their development, and to illustrate the processes that are involved in these developments on the basis of data from languages such as English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, and Japanese. The studies in this volume are organized around three interrelated topics. The first of these concerns the organization of modal constructions in a network. A second focus area of the studies in this volume concerns the developmental pathways that modal constructions follow diachronically. The third topic that ties the contributions of this volume together is the contrast between constructionalization and constructional change.

Diachronic Construction Grammar

Diachronic Construction Grammar
Author: Jóhanna Barðdal
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2015-07-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027268614

Construction Grammar as a framework offers a new perspective on traditional historical questions in diachronic linguistics and language change: how do new constructions arise, how should competition in diachronic variation be accounted for, how do constructions fall into disuse, and how do constructions change in general, formally and/or semantically, and with what implications for the language system as a whole? This volume offers a broad introduction to the confluence of Construction Grammar and historical syntax, and also detailed case studies of various instances of syntactic change modeled within Construction Grammar. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar as a theory is particularly well suited for modeling historical changes in morphosyntax, and it also documents challenging new phenomena that require a theoretical account within any competing framework of syntactic change.