Towards a radically usage-based account of constructional attrition: integrating subtractive language developments in the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization model

Abstract

This chapter reflects on how the gradual disappearance of a construction from a language can be accounted for in a radically usage-based diachronic construction grammar through an exploration of how the phenomenon can be accommodated in Schmid’s (2020) Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization model. This theory of the dynamics of the linguistic system is radical in its usage-based account in that it separates collective conventionalization from individual entrenchment and models how they interact in usage. Schmid focuses on the accumulative dynamics of the system, however, and gives scant attention to subtractive/attritional developments. Considering diachronic corpus data on the decline of the DEONTIC NCI construction, the chapter brings to bear the EC-model’s conceptual apparatus to gauge the role of individual speakers in language-level constructional attrition.