Friday - November 10th, 2006
1:30pm – 3:00pm
Student Union Ballroom A
Keynote Speaker: Elizabeth Traugott
Stanford University
GRAMMATICALIZATION, EMERGENT CONSTRUCTIONS, AND THE NOTION OF “NEWNESS”
Work in the last year has suggested ways in which two lines of research, one on grammaticalization, which is largely diachronic in orientation, the other on construction grammar, which is largely synchronic in orientation, can enhance each other. Focus has been on evidence that constructions can be emergent (e.g. Trousdale 2005, 2006, Traugott 2006, Bergs and Diewald Forthcoming). I will continue the discussion with suggestions about how grammaticalization and construction grammar studies, especially those of the type proposed in Croft (2001), complement each other with respect to the questions:
a. In what sense do constructions “emerge”?
b. How do new subtypes of a construction arise?
c. Do grammatical constructions grammaticalize?
d. How should “new grammatical structure” be conceptualized, and what implications does the answer have for the role of reanalysis and analogy in grammaticalization?
My example will be the development of some binominal Partitive Constructions into Degree Modifier Constructions with nominal complements, cf. a lot of furniture (as in an auction) > a lot of fun, followed by the extension of nominal complements to other Degree Modifiers, e.g. It’s very fun/pretty cowboy. These are “emergent” in the sense of the “logical outcome” (Dahl 2004) of local changes, but, as in all cases of grammaticalization, they are not “necessarily” emergent: some Partitive Constructions do not develop into Degree Modifiers, or only marginally so, e.g. a deal of, a piece of. My hypothesis is that there may be no totally “new” structures; however, there are new crystallizations of constructions. From this perspective, analogy should play an increased role in work on grammaticalization (see also, from different perspectives, Kiparsky 2005, Fischer forthcoming).
References:
Bergs, Alexander & Gabriele Diewald, eds. Forthcoming. Constructions and Language Change.
Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Dahl, Östen. 2004. The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity. (Studies in Language Companion Series, 71). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Fischer, Olga. Forthcoming. Approaches to Morphosyntactic Change from a Functional and Formal
Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kiparsky, Paul. 2005. Grammaticalization as optimization. http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2006. Constructions and language change revisited: Constructional emergence from the perspective of grammaticalization. Paper presented at DELS, Manchester April 6th - 8th.
Trousdale, Graeme. 2005. Words and constructions in grammaticalization: The end of the English impersonal construction. Paper presented at SHEL 4, Flagstaff, AZ, Sept. 30th – Oct. 1st.
Trousdale, Graeme. 2006. Constructions and grammaticalization: Evidence from an English light verb.
Paper presented at DELS, Manchester April 6th - 8th.
