The case-studies assembled in these two volumes span a lifetime of research into the diachrony of grammar. That is, into the rise and fall of syntactic constructions and their attendant grammatical morphology. While focused squarely on the data, the studies are nonetheless cast in an explicit theoretical perspective – adaptive, developmental, variationist. Taken as a whole, this work constitutes a frontal assault on Ferdinand de Saussure's corrosive legacy in linguistics. Over the years, reviewers slapped the author's wrist periodically for having dared to commit that most heinous of sins against de Saussure's hallowed legacy – panchronic grammar. In this work he pleads guilty, having never seen a piece of synchronic data that didn't reek, to high heaven, of the diachrony that gave it rise. Reek in two distinct ways: first with the frozen relics of the past that prompt us to reconstruct prior diachronic states; and second with the synchronic variation that hints at ongoing change. Conversely, the author confesses to having never seen a diachronic explanation that did not hinge on the synchronic principles – Carnap's general propositions – that govern language behavior. The synchrony and diachrony of grammar are twin faces of the same coin. To study one without the other is to gut both. By understanding how synchronic grammars come into being we also understand the cognitive, communicative, neurological and developmental universals that constrain diachronic change – and through it synchronic typology.

Nobody can deny that an account of grammatical change that takes written contact into consideration is a significant challenge for any theoretical perspective. Written contact of earlier periods or from a diachronic perspective mainly refers to contact through translation. The present book includes a diachronic dimension in the study of written language contact by examining aspects of the history of translation as related to grammatical changes in English and Greek in a contrastive way. In this respect, emphasis is placed on the analysis of diachronic retranslations: the book examines translations from earlier periods of English and Greek in relation to various grammatical characteristics of these languages in different periods and in comparison to non-translated texts.

This book presents the first major study of ditransitives in Swedish. Using a combination of well-established and innovative corpus-based methods, the book reveals considerable changes in the constructional behaviour of ditransitive verbs over the course of the last 200 years. The key finding is that the use of the so-called double object construction has decreased dramatically in terms of frequency, lexical richness and semantic range. This development is parallelled by a decisive increase in prepositional object constructions. The results are of high relevance to the ongoing debate within construction grammar on constructional productivity and on the nature of horizontal links.

This innovative volume offers a comprehensive account of the study of language change in verb meaning in the history of the English language. Integrating both the author’s previous body of work and new research, the book explores the complex dynamic between linguistic structures, morphosyntactic and semantics, and the conceptual domain of meaning, employing a consistent theoretical treatment for analyzing different classes of predicates. Building on this analysis, each chapter connects the implications of these findings from diachronic change with data from language acquisition, offering a unique perspective on the faculty of language and the cognitive system. In bringing together a unique combination of theoretical approaches to provide an in-depth analysis of the history of diachronic change in verb meaning, this book is a key resource to researchers in historical linguistics, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and the history of English.

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 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.

Spoken on Kurima, a miniscule island in the Miyakojima municipality in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan, Kurima-Miyako is a South Ryukyuan topolect, a regional variant of the Miyako language. With most fluent speakers aged 80 or older and the island’s depopulation progressing, the topolect of Kurima faces imminent extinction, a reflection of a common pattern in the Ryukyus, whereupon the vernaculars of small islands and isolated remote areas have been facing multifold minorization for decades on the part of the dominant variety/varieties of the area (Shimoji and Hirara in the case of Kurima), Okinawan, and standard Japanese. Responding to the urgent task of producing a comprehensive description while it still has native speakers, the present volume is the first ever attempt at a systemic presentation of the Kurima topolect in any language. It also uses comparative evidence from Ryukyuan and Mainland Japonic languages to provide new proto-language reconstructions and offer insights into the history of Japonic languages.

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.

Τhis book offers a new approach to the theory of change in argument structure and voice morphology. It investigates the diachrony of transitivity, and especially the changes in causative verbs and transitivity alternations, based on data mainly from the Greek and English diachrony (all historical data are transcribed and accompanied by glosses and translations into Modern English). Data from earlier periods provide new information on burning questions in both Historical and Theoretical Linguistics. The study shows that (a) causativisations are the result of reanalysis of intransitive verbs as transitive on the basis of the linguistic cue of Case; (b) the changes in voice morphology do not depend on the derivation and direction of new transitivity alternations. Finally, the study demonstrates that the generalisation that guides the changes in voice demands morphological differentiation of the anticausative from the passive types.

Complex hierarchic syntax is a hallmark of human language. The highest level of syntactic complexity, recursive-embedded clauses, has been singled out by some for a special status as the evolutionary apex of the uniquely - human language faculty - evolutionary yet mysteriously immune to Darwinian adaptive selection. Prof. Givón's book treats syntactic complexity as an integral part of the evolutionary rise of human communication. The book first describes grammar as an adaptive instrument of communication, assembled upon the pre-existing platform of pre-linguistic object- and-event cognition and mental representation. It then surveys the two grand developmental trends of human language: diachrony, the communal enterprise directly responsible for fashioning synchronic morpho-syntax and cross-language diversity; and ontogeny, the individual endeavor directly responsible for acquiring the competent use of grammar. The genesis of syntactic complexity along these two developmental trends is compared with second language acquisition, pre-grammatical pidgin and pre-human communication. The evolutionary relevance of language diachrony, language ontogeny and pidginization is argued for on general bio-evolutionary grounds: It is the organism's adaptive on-line behavior- invention, learning and skill acquisition - that is the common thread running through all three developmental trends. The neuro-cognitive circuits that underlie language, and their evolutionary underpinnings, are described and assessed. Recursive embedding turns out to be not an adaptive target on its own, but the by-product of two distinct adaptive moves: (i) the recruitment of conjoined clauses as modal operators on, or referential specifiers of, other clauses; and (ii) the subsequent condensation of paratactic into syntactic structures.