In much writing on language change, there is a tacit assumption that change operates on a single source construction to produce an innovative target construction. This volume challenges this assumption, by showing that many changes involve interactions between multiple source constructions. In fact, the involvement of multiple source constructions is unexceptional. The phenomenon is observed in phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. It is seen in language-internal change as well as in contact-induced change. Interactions may obtain between independent but historically related constructions as well as between historically unrelated constructions. The contributions to this volume, on the one hand, present specific case studies on changes involving multiple source constructions, in various domains of grammar and in a variety of languages. On the other hand, they discuss how such changes can be accommodated in current theoretical models of language. Originally published in Studies in Language Vol. 37:3 (2013).

While ample studies exist on ditransitives in various languages, notably from a typological perspective, more work needs to be done on identifying the main processes and factors that trigger and constrain the changes they undergo over time. The goal of this volume is to help fill this gap by bringing together data and information on individual languages that have thus far been left out of the discussion and by expanding our knowledge of already studied linguistic traditions so as to achieve a broader diachronic description. Since one of the distinctive features of ditransitives is their synchronic variability in terms of structural alternation and alignment split, diachronic research can throw up new insights into developmental dynamics that are eminently complementary; namely, on the one hand, the emergence, development and loss of construction alternation and, on the other, the acquisition of new functions over time. The analyses offered in the book yield different and interconnected answers to the general question of how ditransitives change by drawing on different functional principles that play a role in the diachronic reorganization of this dynamic domain and by providing a number of original theoretical suggestions.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 22nd Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2021, held in Nanjing, China in May 2021. The 68 full papers and 4 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 261 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: Lexical Semantics and General Linguistics; Natural Language Processing and Language Computing; Cognitive Science and Experimental Studies; Lexical Resources and Corpus Linguistics.

In its 1500-year history, the English language has seen dramatic grammatical changes. This book offers a comprehensive and reader-friendly account of the major developments, including changes in word order, the noun phrase and verb phrase, changing relations between clausal constituents and the development of new subordinate constructions. The book puts forward possible explanations for change, drawing on the existing and most recent literature, and with reference to the major theoretical models. The authors use corpus evidence to investigate language-internal and language-external motivations for change, including the impact of language contact. The book is intended for students who have been introduced to the history of English and want to deepen their understanding of major grammatical changes, and for linguists in general with a historical interest. It will also be of value to literary scholars professionally engaged with older texts.

This book explores syntactic and semantic change in three types of construction in Spanish and Portuguese: (i) complex determiner phrases with clausal adjunction (el hecho de, o facto de), (ii) complex prepositions/complementizers and complex connectives (sin embargo de/sem embargo de, so(b) pena de), and (iii) complex predicates containing light verbs (dar consejo/conselho de). While these constructions are syntactically different, they are all clause-taking complex expressions containing a noun followed by the functional preposition de ('of'). This book is the first work to use a systematic comparative corpus study to explore these expressions together; this approach allows individual changes to be distinguished from general changes, as well as emphasizing the chronological clustering of changes that involve complex constructions in both languages. By studying mechanisms of language change and their outcomes in two sister languages, Patrícia Amaral and Manuel Delicado Cantero address questions such as: How do complex constructions evolve? How does the meaning of the noun change when considered in isolation and when compared to the meaning of the whole construction? And how do syntactic categories change over time? This study of two closely-related languages reveals distinct developments occurring in parallel, and provides a crucial test case for theories of language change.

Despite a significant increase in interest over the last two decades in the English Noun Phrase, there are still many open questions and unexplored issues. The papers collected in this volume contribute to this ongoing research by addressing a range of topics concerning the internal structure, use and development of English Noun Phrases. The eleven chapters represent three main themes: 1. Determination, modification and complementation; 2. Shell nouns and the X-is construction; 3. Binominal constructions. These topics are approached in different ways: some chapters are synchronic in nature, others diachronic; and while most subscribe to functional-cognitive modelling, some take a more formal approach. In addition, different methodologies are employed, varying from qualitative and quantitative corpus analyses to experimental methods. As a result, the contributions to this volume represent both the main topics currently discussed in research on the English Noun Phrase, and the diversity in the way these topics are investigated.

The Late Modern period is the first in the history of English for which an unprecedented wealth of textual material exists. Using increasingly sophisticated databases, the contributions in this volume explore grammatical usage from the period, specifically morphological and syntactic change, in a broad context. Some chapters explore the socio-historical background of the period while others provide information on prescriptivism, newspaper language, language contact, and regional variation in British and American English. Internal processes of change are discussed against grammaticalisation theory and construction grammar and the rich body of textual evidence is used to draw inferences on the precise nature of historical change. Exposing readers to a wealth of data that informs the description of a broad range of syntactic phenomena, this book is ideal for graduate students and researchers interested in historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and language development.

Conceptually, the volume focuses on the relationship of the three key notions that essentially triggered the inception and subsequent realization of this project, to wit, language contact, grammaticalization, and areal grouping. Fully concentrated on the areal-typological and historical dimensions of Slavic, the volume offers new insights into a number of theoretical issues, including language contact, grammaticalization, mechanisms of borrowing, the relationship between areal, genetic, and typological sampling, conservative features versus innovation, and socio-linguistic aspects of linguistic alliances conceived of both synchronically and diachronically. The volume integrates new approaches towards the areal-typological profiling of Slavic as a member of several linguistic areas within Europe, including SAE, the Balkan Sprachbund and Central European groupings(s) like the Danubian or Carpathian areas, as well as the Carpathian-Balkan linguistic macroarea. Some of the chapters focus on structural affinities between Slavic and other European languages that arose as a result of either grammatical replication or borrowing. A special emphasis is placed on contact-induced grammaticalization in Slavic micro-languages

Both compounds and multi-word expressions are complex lexical units, made up of at least two constituents. The most basic difference is that the former are morphological objects and the latter result from syntactic processes. However, the exact demarcation between compounds and multi-word expressions differs greatly from language to language and is often a matter of debate in and across languages. Similarly debated is whether and how these two different kinds of units complement or compete with each other. The volume presents an overview of compounds and multi-word expressions in a variety of European languages. Central questions that are discussed for each language concern the formal distinction between compounds and multi-word expressions, their formation and their status in lexicon and grammar. The volume contains chapters on German, English, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Finnish, and Hungarian as well as a contrastive overview with a focus on German. It brings together insights from word-formation theory, phraseology and theory of grammar and aims to contribute to the understanding of the lexicon, both from a language-specific and cross-linguistic perspective.

The volume surveys over a hundred diachronic changes from typologically diverse languages and concludes that the definitional property of meaning change in grammaticalization is that it never results in a decrease in the semantic or pragmatic scope of the construction.