Diachronic construction grammar: A state of the art

Abstract

This paper will offer a state-of-the-art survey of work in historical linguistics (mainly, but not exclusively, on English) that can be brought under the heading of “diachronic construction grammar”. As a new development in diachronic linguistics, this discipline name subsumes two big strands of research. One of these I will simply call the “construction grammar” strand. It consists of work by people who have come to diachronic construction grammar from synchronic construction grammar. The other major strand has its origin in grammaticalization theory and encompasses the research efforts of those working within grammaticalization theory who have relatively recently come to recognize that the most central theoretical concept of construction grammar is a highly relevant and useful one in the description of and theorizing about grammaticalization changes and who have now even started to use the term “constructionalization” in lieu of “grammaticalization”, distinguishing between “grammatical constructionalization” and “lexical constructionalization”. The main difference between both strands is that while the grammaticalization strand is concerned with the question of how languages acquire constructions, first and foremost lexically-specified ones, this is not necessarily the case in the construction grammar strand. Three sub-strands of the latter will be distinguished. A first sub-strand consists of work by Goldbergian construction grammarians who consider particular argument structure constructions from a historical perspective. Another thread of research is work on “constructional attrition”. The third area of investigation appeals to language contact and borrowing to explain the presence of a construction in the constructicon of a language. Returning to the grammaticalization strand of diachronic construction grammar the paper will also address the question of what the conditions are for work on grammaticalization to be considered part of diachronic construction grammar.