Diachronic construction grammar

Abstract

Diachronic construction grammar is a field of cognitive linguistics which takes a construction grammatical theoretical perspective to the study of linguistic change and which descriptively traces the development of constructions and constructicons. This chapter surveys its core conceptual apparatus and sketches the still young history of the discipline. It critically discusses the theoretical distinction between ‘constructionalization’ and ‘constructional change’ and introduces research clusters on changes in productivity and/or schematicity, diachronic constructional semasiology, the disappearance of constructions, connectivity changes in the constructional network, and contact-induced constructional change. The chapter ends with a methodological consideration of the cognitive relevance of corpus research in diachronic construction grammar.