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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).
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.
This monograph presents the first comprehensive diachronic account of copular and passive verb constructions in Old and Middle English. Peter Petré analyzes: · The mysterious loss of the high-frequency verb weorðan 'become' as a casualty of changing word order in narrative during Middle English. · The merger of is 'is' and bið 'shall be, is generally' into a single suppletive verb, and how it is related to the development of a general analytic future shall be. · The co-occurrence of multiple changes that led to become and wax crossing a threshold of similarity with existing copulas, from which they analogically adopted full productivity in one fell swoop. In explaining each of these changes, Petré goes beyond the level of the verb and its complements, drawing attention to analogical networks and the importance of a verb's embeddedness in clausal and textual environments. Using a radically usage-based approach, treating syntax as emerging from (changing) frequencies, Petré draws attention to general principles of constructional change, including but not limited to grammaticalization and lexicalization. He proposes novel parallelisms between linguistic and ecological evolution. Going beyond the view of language change as propagating only in social interaction, Petré explains how each individual's mental grammar can be seen as a dynamic ecosystem with hierarchical environments (clausal niches, textual habitats). In this view, the interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated changes, itself resulting from cognitive economy principles, is arguably more decisive in lexical change than is functional competition.
Linguists have typically studied language change at the aggregate level of speech communities, yet key mechanisms of change such as analogy and automation operate within the minds of individual language users. Drawing on lifespan data from 50 authors and the intriguing case of the special passives in the history of English, this study addresses three fundamental issues relating to individuality in language change: (i) how variation and change at the individual level interact with change at the community level; (ii) how much innovation and change is possible across the adult lifespan; (iii) and to what extent related linguistic patterns are associated in individual cognition. As one of the first large-scale empirical studies to systematically link individual- and community-based perspectives in language change, this volume breaks new ground in our understanding of language as a complex adaptive system.
The chapters in this volume present a state of the art of grammaticalization research in the 2010s. They are concerned with the application of new models, such as constructionalization, the ongoing debate about the status and modelling of the development of discourse markers, and reveal a renewed interest in the typological application of grammaticalization and in the cognitive motivations for unidirectionality. The contributors consider data from a wide range of languages, including several that have not or marginally been looked at in terms of grammaticalization: Chinese, Dutch, (varieties of) English, French, German, Japanese, Maltese, Old Saxon, Spanish, and languages of the South Caucasian and Zhuang Tai-Kadai families. The chapters range from theoretical discussions to fine-grained analyses of new historical and comparative language data. This volume will be of interest to linguists studying morphosyntactic changes in a range of languages, and in particular to those interested in models for grammatical change.
This volume focuses on detailed studies of various aspects of Construction Morphology, and combines theoretical analysis and descriptive detail. It deals with data from several domains of linguistics and contributes to an integration of findings from various subdisciplines of linguistics into a common model of the architecture of language. It presents applications and extensions of the model of Construction Morphology to a wide range of languages. Construction Morphology is one of the theoretical paradigms in present-day morphology. It makes use of concepts of Construction Grammar for the analysis of word formation and inflection. Complex words are seen as constructions, that is, pairs of form and meaning. Morphological patterns are accounted for by construction schemas. These are the recipes for coining new words and word forms, and they motivate the properties of existing complex words. Both schemas and individual words are stored, and hence there is no strict separation of lexicon and grammar. In addition to abstract schemas there are subschemas for subclasses of complex words with specific properties. This architecture of the grammar is in harmony with findings from other empirical domains of linguistics such as language acquisition, word processing, and language change.
Both compounds and multi-word expressions are complex lexical units, made up of at least two constituents. The most basic difference is that the former are morphological objects and the latter result from syntactic processes. However, the exact demarcation between compounds and multi-word expressions differs greatly from language to language and is often a matter of debate in and across languages. Similarly debated is whether and how these two different kinds of units complement or compete with each other. The volume presents an overview of compounds and multi-word expressions in a variety of European languages. Central questions that are discussed for each language concern the formal distinction between compounds and multi-word expressions, their formation and their status in lexicon and grammar. The volume contains chapters on German, English, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Finnish, and Hungarian as well as a contrastive overview with a focus on German. It brings together insights from word-formation theory, phraseology and theory of grammar and aims to contribute to the understanding of the lexicon, both from a language-specific and cross-linguistic perspective.
This book comprises a series of studies by a number of scholars working on what might broadly be termed the “medieval” period of the history of English, focusing on Old English, Middle English, and the relatively less well-documented period of transition from the former to the latter. The volume brings together contributions not only from a variety of fields, ranging from semantics and syntax to prosody and phonology, but also from different theoretical standpoints, in order to improve the reader’s understanding of the rapid changes that affect the language at this time. The collection of papers here should be of interest to all scholars and students working on Old or Middle English, as well as to students of historical linguistics in general, given that many of the processes and methodological parameters described here will prove to be directly applicable to the study of other periods and of other languages.
This book provides a collection of articles on subordination in English framed from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. It covers ample areas of the history of the major subordinated structures of English and their recent development in various native and non-native varieties. Most contributions are based on large electronic databases and corpora of written and spoken texts. The book focuses on the continuum that links subordinated and coordinated structures in a fluid way, shows their permanent state of flux, and sheds light on the whole system's dynamic essence by discussing a large number of explanatory principles at work in shaping it. Many of these are well-known from the grammaticalization and the Construction Grammar theories, such as the concepts of attractor, multi-sourcing, inheritance, categorial incursion, metaphorization or exaptation. This volume represents the latest trends in the field by some of its most prestigious specialists.
This book takes an integrated approach to the fields of Corpus Linguistics, Construction Grammar, and World Englishes through a thorough constructional and corpus-based examination of the patterning of the versatile high-frequency verb make in British English and New Englishes. It contributes to Construction Grammar theory by adopting a verb-based, rather than construction-based, perspective on argument structure. This allows the probing of the interface between verb-independent generalizations and item-specificity from an underexplored angle that offers new insights into the shape of the constructicon. From a variationist perspective, it seeks to (i) identify features of New Englishes and gauge whether these features exhibit traces of conventionalization, and (ii) assess whether the degree of institutionalization of the New Englishes correlates with linguistic behavior, both from a social and cognitive perspective, thereby contributing to the budding effort to integrate the cognitive and social dimensions into the modeling of linguistic variation in World Englishes.