Constructional Change and Distributional Semantics

Frontiers in psychology, 2017

In this paper, I will vindicate the importance of syntactic change for the study of synchronic stages of natural languages, according to the following outline. First, I will analyze the relationship between the diachrony and synchrony of grammars, introducing some basic concepts: the notions of I-language/E-language, the role of Chomsky's (2005) three factors in language change, and some assumptions about language acquisition. I will briefly describe the different approaches to syntactic change adopted in generative accounts, as well as their assumptions and implications (Lightfoot, 1999, 2006; van Gelderen, 2004; Biberauer et al., 2010; Roberts, 2012). Finally, I will illustrate the convenience of introducing the diachronic dimension into the study of at least certain synchronic phenomena with the help of a practical example: variation in object case marking of several verbs in Modern Russian, namely, the verbs denoting avoidance and the verbs slušat'sja "obey" an...

Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium, 2021

Diachronic Construction Grammar (DCxG) is a relatively recent strand of research that emerged at the turn of the 21 st century when the grammaticalization theory took "a constructionist turn" (Noël, Colleman 2021: 664). It focuses on the crucial role of constructions and the frequency of their usage in the processes of language change. The recent decade has brought the publication of a textbook-type introduction to the field, which defines its basic concepts and tenets (Traugott, Trousdale 2013), as well as two major edited volumes (Barðdal et al. 2015; Sommerer, Smirnova 2020). Martin Hilpert's contribution to constructionist research, in addition to a number of articles, includes two diachronic-themed monographs: Germanic Future Constructions (2008) and Constructional Change in English (2013), as well as a popular introductory textbook, now in its second edition, Construction Grammar and Its Application to English ([2014] 2019). The

Functions of Language, 2007

Grammaticalization theorists are becoming increasingly aware of the relevance of constructions to their discipline, to the point that one of its leading exponents has recently defined grammaticalization as the creation of new constructions. This is precisely the problem which construction grammarians engaging in diachronic research are addressing — or one they should be addressing, because to date diachronic construction grammar has not really taken off as a discipline. The question arises of whether grammaticalization theory could simply be turned into the historical branch of construction grammar, or whether diachronic construction grammar has its own raison d’être as a separate discipline. Since grammaticalization theoretical practice is fairly narrowly focused on the change of extant constructions along a path towards the grammatical end of the meaning continuum, there is a need for a wider discipline that also concerns itself with the primary emergence of constructions. Though grammaticalization presupposes ‘constructionalization’, the two developments need to be kept apart because not all constructions go on to grammaticalize.

Linguistics Vanguard, 2015

This paper explores how the visualization tool of motion charts can be used for the analysis of meaning change in linguistic constructions. In previous work, linguistic motion charts have been used to represent diachronic frequency trends and changes in the morphosyntactic behavior of linguistic units. The present paper builds on that work, but it shifts the focus to the study of semantic change. How can motion charts be used to visualize semantic change over time? In order to answer this question, we draw on semantic vector space modeling to visualize aspects of linguistic meaning. As an analogy to this approach, the title of this paper alludes to a petri dish in which the growth and development of biological microorganisms can be observed. On the basis of diachronic corpus data, we monitor developments in the semantic ecology of a construction. This allows us to observe processes such as semantic broadening, semantic narrowing, or semantic shift. We illustrate our approach on the basis of a case study that investigates the diachrony of an English construction that we call the 'many a NOUN' construction.

Constructions and Frames, 2009

Through a discourse-grounded internal reconstruction that aims at capturing theemergenceof grammatical structure, the study examines the development of the subjective epistemic particlejestli‘[in-my-opinion-] maybe’ in conversational Czech. Through internal reconstruction, the change (syntactic complementizer > speaker-centered epistemic contextualizer > subjective epistemic particle) is presented as a metonymy-based conventionalization of a pragmatic meaning implied by certain tokens of indirect Y/N questions into a new modal meaning. Taking a Construction Grammar approach, so far largely untested on diachronic data, the point of the analysis is to show that we can engage in a systematic treatment of the gradualness of change, by (i) combining the ‘holistic’ (constructional) dimension with the internal, feature-based and discourse-motivated mechanisms of complex grammatical shifts, and (ii) appealing to the explanatory potential of general cognitive and communicative principl...

Linguistics, 2016

This paper investigates syntactic productivity in diachrony with a data-driven approach. Previous research indicates that syntactic productivity (the property of grammatical constructions to attract new lexical fillers) is largely driven by semantics, which calls for an operationalization of lexical meaning in the context of empirical studies. It is suggested that distributional semantics can fulfill this role by providing a measure of semantic similarity between words that is derived from lexical co-occurrences in large text corpora. On the basis of a case study of the construction " V the hell out of NP " , e.g., You scared the hell out of me, it is shown that distributional semantics not only appropriately captures how the verbs in the distribution of the construction are related, but also enables the use of visualization techniques and statistical modeling to analyze the semantic development of a construction over time and identify the determinants of syntactic productivity in naturally occurring data.

The use of corpus data is in no way unique to work in Construction Grammar, let alone to the study of constructional change. Modern and historical corpora are used across the entire spectrum of linguistics, with very diverse methods and still more diverse goals (Lüdeling and Kytö 2008). The present chapter focuses on a growing body of research that uses the methods of historical corpus linguistics in a way that is consistent with a constructional approach to language change (Fried, this volume). Not all of this work explicitly aligns itself with a particular brand of Construction Grammar, but nonetheless an implicit commitment to the constructionist agenda is there: the focus of investigation lies on form-meaning pairings and developments with regard to their structure, function, and frequency. Showcasing some of this work, it is discussed (a) why diachronic corpora and similar textual resources such as the Oxford English Dictionary are a particularly apt source of data for the study of constructional change, (b) how these resources are used for that purpose, and (c) how the constructional perspective sets this work apart from other approaches to language change. The case studies that are chosen also illustrate the rich variety of processes that can be grouped together under the heading of constructional change, showing in each case how the phenomenon in question can be fruitfully investigated and how these investigations advance the theory of Construction Grammar.

Modality and Diachronic Construction Grammar, 2021

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.