The author and the text in radically usage-based diachronic construction grammar, or why historical linguists have started analysing text again

Abstract

As the historical morphosyntactic branch of ‘cognitive linguistics’, research in ‘diachronic construction grammar’, which concerns itself with the study and theory of the evolution of the constructional resources of languages, is often explicitly affiliated with a ‘usage-based’ perspective on language. A central concept in this model is the ‘usage event’, an ‘instance of use’ of a form-meaning pairing in a text, which in usage-based approaches to constructional change is considered to be the locus of innovation. Innovative instances of use are products of individual minds, but owing to modern (historical) linguistics’ traditional fixation with conventionalized systems there was until recently little interest in idiolectal grammars. More ‘radically’ usage-based research has now begun to surface which centrally relates innovative grammar to individual usage and which takes into account the textual context of usage events.