This volume explores how Diachronic Construction Grammar can shed new light on changes in a central and well-researched domain of grammar, namely modality. Its main goal is to show how constructional analyses can help us address some of the long-standing questions that have informed discussions of modal expressions and their development, and to illustrate the processes that are involved in these developments on the basis of data from languages such as English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, and Japanese. The studies in this volume are organized around three interrelated topics. The first of these concerns the organization of modal constructions in a network. A second focus area of the studies in this volume concerns the developmental pathways that modal constructions follow diachronically. The third topic that ties the contributions of this volume together is the contrast between constructionalization and constructional change.

This volume brings together ten contributions by leading experts who present their current usage-based research in Diachronic Construction Grammar. All papers contribute to the discussion of how to conceptualize constructional networks best and how to model changes in the constructicon, as for example node creation or loss, node-external reconfiguration of the network or in/decrease in productivity and schematicity. The authors discuss the theoretical status of allostructions, homostructions, constructional families and constructional paradigms. The terminological distinction between constructionalization and constructional change is revisited. It is shown how constructional competition but also general cognitive abilities like analogical thinking and schematization relate to the structure and reorganization of the constructional network. Most contributions focus on the nature of vertical and horizontal links. Finally, contributions to the volume also discuss how existing network models should be enriched or reconceptualized in order to integrate theoretical, psychological and neurological aspects missing so far.

Construction Grammar as a framework offers a new perspective on traditional historical questions in diachronic linguistics and language change: how do new constructions arise, how should competition in diachronic variation be accounted for, how do constructions fall into disuse, and how do constructions change in general, formally and/or semantically, and with what implications for the language system as a whole? This volume offers a broad introduction to the confluence of Construction Grammar and historical syntax, and also detailed case studies of various instances of syntactic change modeled within Construction Grammar. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar as a theory is particularly well suited for modeling historical changes in morphosyntax, and it also documents challenging new phenomena that require a theoretical account within any competing framework of syntactic change.

This book explores the evolution of modal constructions of necessity and obligation in New Englishes. Focusing on Singapore English, analysis of corpus data reveals lower levels of grammaticalization compared to its lexifier, British English. This trend is explained through the lenses of a “pan-stratist” model, which considers a spectrum of forces influencing the dynamics of contact. On the one hand, cognitive mechanisms seem to favour the selection of less grammaticalized (and more transparent) variants from the lexifier. On the other hand, the substrate is positioned as a background force, actively contributing to the selection of new material to address functional gaps in the system.

Modal verbs in English communicate delicate shades of meaning, there being a large range of verbs both on the necessity side (must, have to, should, ought to, need, need to) and the possibility side (can, may, could, might, be able to). They therefore constitute excellent test ground to apply and compare different methodologies that can lay bare the factors that drive the speaker’s choice of modal verb. This book is not merely concerned with a purely grammatical description of the use of modal verbs, but aims at advancing our understanding of lexical and grammatical units in general and of linguistic methodologies to explore these. It thus involves a genuine effort to compare, assess and combine a variety of approaches. It complements the leading descriptive qualitative work on modal verbs by testing a diverse range of quantitative methods, while not ignoring qualitative issues pertaining to the semantics-pragmatics interface. Starting from a critical assessment of what constitutes the meaning of modal verbs, different types of empirical studies (usage-based, data-driven and experimental), drawing considerably on the same data sets, shows how method triangulation can contribute to an enhanced understanding. Due attention is also given to individual variation as well as the degree to which modals can predict L2 proficiency level.

This book presents the first in-depth investigation of modality in Galician linguistics, offering a theoretical discussion of modal categories and a fine-grained description of epistemic adverbs. The first half of the monograph deconstructs the most relevant approaches to modal categories and shows how the traditional concept of modality is a problematic notion, how it relates to other concepts such as evidentiality and mitigation, and how it ought to be conceived of in order to become a more useful instrument for linguistic analysis. A new way of understanding modality is explored and illustrated through Galician examples. The second half of the book zooms in on six epistemic adverbs, which are exhaustively studied from both a formal and a functional perspective. Combining a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, the book shows that adverbs make up a rich semantic scale and establishes several factors that condition their occurrence in discourse, challenging previous conceptions of this grammatical domain.

Construction Grammar (CxG) has developed into a broad and highly diverse family of approaches that have in common that they see constructions, i.e. form-meaning pairs at various levels of abstraction and complexity, as the basic units of language. This Element gives an overview of the origin and the current state of the art of constructionist approaches, focusing, on the one hand, on basic concepts like the notion of 'constructions', while at the same time offering an in-depth discussion of current research trends and open questions. It discusses the commonalities and differences between the major constructionist approaches, the organization of constructional networks as well as ongoing research on linguistic creativity, multimodality and individual differences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This volume, which can be considered as a follow-up publication to Pusch & Wesch (2003), contains ten studies on verbal periphrases in a wide array of Romance languages, both in a synchronic and in a historic perspective. Thus, this collective volume addresses the Romance verbal periphrastic system as a whole. The aim of the contributions is twofold: on the one hand, the authors intend to enrich the knowledge about the inventory of verbal periphrases of Romance languages, both in descriptive and analytical terms. On the other hand, the volume seeks to provide new insights for the study of the grammatical, pragmatic, and cognitive foundations of verbal periphrases, in order to enlarge our comprehension of their genesis, their evolution and their usage. Languages treated in the contributions include Catalan, (European) French, Friulian, (European) Portuguese, Romanian, (European) Spanish, and Catalan Sign Language (LSC).

Mood, modality and evidentiality are popular and dynamic areas in linguistics. Re-Assessing Modalising Expressions – Categories, co-text, and context focuses on the specific issue of the ways language users express permission, obligation, volition (intention), possibility and ability, necessity and prediction linguistically. Using a range of evidence and corpus data collected from different sources, the authors of this volume examine the distribution and functions of a range of patterns involving modalising expressions as predominantly found in standard American English, British English or Hong Kong English, but also in Japanese. The authors are particularly interested in addressing (co-)textual manifestations of modalising expressions as well as their distribution across different text-types and thus filling a gap research was unable to plug in the past. Thoughts on categorising or re-categorising modalising expressions initiate and complement a multi-perspectival enterprise that is intended to bring research in this area a step forward.

In this book, Martin Hilpert lays out how Construction Grammar can be applied to the study of language change. In a series of ten lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar, the book presents the theoretical foundations, open questions, and methodological approaches that inform the constructional analysis of diachronic processes in language. The lectures address issues such as constructional networks, competition between constructions, shifts in collocational preferences, and differentiation and attraction in constructional change. The book features analyses that utilize modern corpus-linguistic methodologies and that draw on current theoretical discussions in usage-based linguistics. It is relevant for researchers and students in cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and historical linguistics.