I'm a cognitive-functional grammarian. I work at the Université de Neuchâtel. Phone: Phone + 41 32 718 19 31 Address: Université de Neuchâtel
Institut de langue et littérature anglaises
Espace Louis-Agassiz 1
CH-2000 Neuchâtel
In this book, Martin Hilpert lays out how Construction Grammar can be applied to the study of lan... more 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.
mainly focused on words, syntactic phrases, and sentence-level constructions. There is nothing in... more mainly focused on words, syntactic phrases, and sentence-level constructions. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but there is nonetheless a problem. Adopting this perspective uncritically will prevent us from seeing and studying phenomena that do not easily fit into the view of constructions as structural units with formal and functional characteristics. In other words, our view on language is biased towards certain phenomena, and we run the risk of overlooking others that are perhaps equally important. Construction Grammar shares with many linguistic frameworks what Linell (1982) has termed the written language bias. The concepts that linguists use to analyze language are primarily designed to account for phenomena in writing. The opening lines from Chomsky's (1957: 13) Syntactic Structures offer an illustration: From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements. [...] The fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis of a language L is to separate the grammatical sequences which are the sentences of L from the ungrammatical sequences which are not sentences of L and to study the structure of the grammatical sequences.
Up to now, most research in Construction Grammar has focused on single languages, most notably En... more Up to now, most research in Construction Grammar has focused on single languages, most notably English. This volume aims to broaden the scope of Construction Grammar towards issues in bi- and multilingualism, second language learning, and generalizations across different languages and language varieties. The contributions in this volume show that speakers entertain generalizations across their repertoire of languages, which holds important implications for a multilingual Construction Grammar.
Over the past few years, Construction Grammar has become an increasingly more popular theoretical... more Over the past few years, Construction Grammar has become an increasingly more popular theoretical framework for the analysis of language change (see for instance Noël 2007, Traugott and Trousdale 2013, De Smet 2013, Hilpert 2013, Petré 2014, Barðdal et al. 2015, Torrent 2015, Heine et al. 2016, amongst many others). In this talk, I will try to take stock of what has been done so far, identify common threads and recurring issues in the existing research, and, more importantly, point to questions that are currently unresolved and that, in my view, deserve the attention of future research efforts. One such question concerns the status of constructions as mental representations of linguistic structure. Construction Grammar aims to describe speakers’ knowledge of language, and there have been exciting advances in usage-based constructional approaches that have linked frequencies from corpus data to the notion of entrenchment and other aspects of linguistic knowledge. Despite these advances, it is clear that historical corpora give us only a very rough idea of language use in the past. It is therefore an open question how confidently we can make statements about the linguistic knowledge of earlier generations of speakers, and whether this is actually the main goal of diachronic Construction Grammar. A second interesting issue is the phenomenon that Traugott and Trousdale (2013) call constructionalization, i.e. the creation of a new node in the speaker’s mental network of constructions. With historical corpus data, it is of course possible to detect novelties in language use and to determine approximate dates for their emergence and spread. However, the concept of constructionalization itself could be criticized for evoking the Sorites paradox, i.e. the question how many grains of sand it takes to make a heap. Just after how many constructional changes exactly do we have a construction that counts as a new node? The term, as defined, asks us to think of a discrete threshold. Whether such a threshold exists is an open question. The third question that I would like to address does not just concern diachronic Construction Grammar, but the field as a whole. It appears to be a largely unquestioned consensus that linguistic knowledge is to be modeled as an associative network in which there are nodes, i.e. constructions, and links between those constructions. Recently, Schmid (2016) has argued for a view in which knowledge of language exclusively takes the format of associations, which effectively reduces constructions to links between form and meaning. This proposal is not primarily motivated by theoretical parsimony, but rather by the aim of describing linguistic knowledge in inherently dynamic terms. It is clear that this idea has profound implications for the constructional study of language change, some of which I will try to explore. It is clear that I cannot promise final, or even preliminary answers to these questions. It might even turn out that they are the wrong questions to ask in the first place. What I hope to do though is to start a discussion that will stimulate new and exciting research in diachronic Construction Grammar.
In this video I present linguistic motion charts that visualize processes of language change. The... more In this video I present linguistic motion charts that visualize processes of language change. The video features three case studies that I have worked on recently.
Where is the discipline of linguistics going? What are the most pressing research questions? What... more Where is the discipline of linguistics going? What are the most pressing research questions? What would be your research project if you could assemble a dream team of linguists and other scientists? If the video does not show up below, you can watch it here (http://youtu.be/X4OaN39sNAI).
This talk was part of the round table 'Quo Vadis Linguistics in the 21st Century?', which took place at the SLE 2014 conference in Poznan. The main speakers of the round table were Martin Haspelmath and Peter Hagoort, the discussants were Eitan Grossmann, Katarzyna Bromberek-Dyzman, and myself. All contributions of the round table will appear on the diversity linguistics comment blog (http://dlc.hypotheses.org/).
In this book, Martin Hilpert lays out how Construction Grammar can be applied to the study of lan... more 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.
mainly focused on words, syntactic phrases, and sentence-level constructions. There is nothing in... more mainly focused on words, syntactic phrases, and sentence-level constructions. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but there is nonetheless a problem. Adopting this perspective uncritically will prevent us from seeing and studying phenomena that do not easily fit into the view of constructions as structural units with formal and functional characteristics. In other words, our view on language is biased towards certain phenomena, and we run the risk of overlooking others that are perhaps equally important. Construction Grammar shares with many linguistic frameworks what Linell (1982) has termed the written language bias. The concepts that linguists use to analyze language are primarily designed to account for phenomena in writing. The opening lines from Chomsky's (1957: 13) Syntactic Structures offer an illustration: From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements. [...] The fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis of a language L is to separate the grammatical sequences which are the sentences of L from the ungrammatical sequences which are not sentences of L and to study the structure of the grammatical sequences.
Up to now, most research in Construction Grammar has focused on single languages, most notably En... more Up to now, most research in Construction Grammar has focused on single languages, most notably English. This volume aims to broaden the scope of Construction Grammar towards issues in bi- and multilingualism, second language learning, and generalizations across different languages and language varieties. The contributions in this volume show that speakers entertain generalizations across their repertoire of languages, which holds important implications for a multilingual Construction Grammar.
Over the past few years, Construction Grammar has become an increasingly more popular theoretical... more Over the past few years, Construction Grammar has become an increasingly more popular theoretical framework for the analysis of language change (see for instance Noël 2007, Traugott and Trousdale 2013, De Smet 2013, Hilpert 2013, Petré 2014, Barðdal et al. 2015, Torrent 2015, Heine et al. 2016, amongst many others). In this talk, I will try to take stock of what has been done so far, identify common threads and recurring issues in the existing research, and, more importantly, point to questions that are currently unresolved and that, in my view, deserve the attention of future research efforts. One such question concerns the status of constructions as mental representations of linguistic structure. Construction Grammar aims to describe speakers’ knowledge of language, and there have been exciting advances in usage-based constructional approaches that have linked frequencies from corpus data to the notion of entrenchment and other aspects of linguistic knowledge. Despite these advances, it is clear that historical corpora give us only a very rough idea of language use in the past. It is therefore an open question how confidently we can make statements about the linguistic knowledge of earlier generations of speakers, and whether this is actually the main goal of diachronic Construction Grammar. A second interesting issue is the phenomenon that Traugott and Trousdale (2013) call constructionalization, i.e. the creation of a new node in the speaker’s mental network of constructions. With historical corpus data, it is of course possible to detect novelties in language use and to determine approximate dates for their emergence and spread. However, the concept of constructionalization itself could be criticized for evoking the Sorites paradox, i.e. the question how many grains of sand it takes to make a heap. Just after how many constructional changes exactly do we have a construction that counts as a new node? The term, as defined, asks us to think of a discrete threshold. Whether such a threshold exists is an open question. The third question that I would like to address does not just concern diachronic Construction Grammar, but the field as a whole. It appears to be a largely unquestioned consensus that linguistic knowledge is to be modeled as an associative network in which there are nodes, i.e. constructions, and links between those constructions. Recently, Schmid (2016) has argued for a view in which knowledge of language exclusively takes the format of associations, which effectively reduces constructions to links between form and meaning. This proposal is not primarily motivated by theoretical parsimony, but rather by the aim of describing linguistic knowledge in inherently dynamic terms. It is clear that this idea has profound implications for the constructional study of language change, some of which I will try to explore. It is clear that I cannot promise final, or even preliminary answers to these questions. It might even turn out that they are the wrong questions to ask in the first place. What I hope to do though is to start a discussion that will stimulate new and exciting research in diachronic Construction Grammar.
In this video I present linguistic motion charts that visualize processes of language change. The... more In this video I present linguistic motion charts that visualize processes of language change. The video features three case studies that I have worked on recently.
Where is the discipline of linguistics going? What are the most pressing research questions? What... more Where is the discipline of linguistics going? What are the most pressing research questions? What would be your research project if you could assemble a dream team of linguists and other scientists? If the video does not show up below, you can watch it here (http://youtu.be/X4OaN39sNAI).
This talk was part of the round table 'Quo Vadis Linguistics in the 21st Century?', which took place at the SLE 2014 conference in Poznan. The main speakers of the round table were Martin Haspelmath and Peter Hagoort, the discussants were Eitan Grossmann, Katarzyna Bromberek-Dyzman, and myself. All contributions of the round table will appear on the diversity linguistics comment blog (http://dlc.hypotheses.org/).
This paper contributes to the study of grammaticalization phenomena from the perspective of Const... more This paper contributes to the study of grammaticalization phenomena from the perspective of Construction Grammar (Coussé et al. 2018). It is concerned with modal uses of the English verbgetthat express a permitted action, as inThe prisoners always get to make one phone call. Different views exist on the contexts in which permissivegetemerged. Gronemeyer (1999: 30) suggests that the permissive meaning derives from causative uses (I got him to confess). An alternative is proposed by van der Auwera et al. (2009: 283), who view permissivegetas an extension of its acquisitive meaning (I got a present). We revisit these claims in the light of recent historical data from American English. Specifically, we searched the COHA (Davies 2010) for forms ofgetfollowed bytoand a verb in the infinitive. Besides examples of permissiveget, we retrieved examples of obligativegot to(I got to leave), causativeget(Who did you get to confess?), possessivegot(What have I got to be ashamed of?), and a category that we label inchoativeget(You’re getting to be a big girl now). Drawing on distributional semantic techniques (Perek 2016,2018), we analyse how permissivegetand inchoativegetdeveloped semantically over time. Our results are consistent with an account that represents an alternative to bothGronemeyer (1999)andvan der Auwera et al. (2009), namely the idea that permissivegetevolved out of inchoative uses that invited the idea of a permission.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, May 13, 2020
This article investigates the collocational behavior of English modal auxiliaries such as may and... more This article investigates the collocational behavior of English modal auxiliaries such as may and might with the aim of finding corpus-based measures that distinguish between different modal expressions and that allow insights into why speakers may choose one over another in a given context. The analysis uses token-based semantic vector space modeling (Heylen et al., 2015, Monitoring polysemy. Word space models as a tool for large-scale lexical semantic analysis. Lingua, 157: 153–72; Hilpert and Correia Saavedra, 2017, Using token-based semantic vector spaces for corpus-linguistic analyses: From practical applications to tests of theoretical claims. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory) in order to determine whether different modal auxiliaries can be distinguished in terms of their collocational profiles. The analysis further examines whether different senses of the same auxiliary exhibit divergent collocational preferences. The results indicate that near-synonymous pairs of modal expressions, such as may and might or must and have to, differ in their distributional characteristics. Also, different senses of the same modal expression, such as deontic and epistemic uses of may, can be distinguished on the basis of distributional information. We discuss these results against the background of previous empirical findings (Hilpert, 2016, Construction Grammar and its Application to English, 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Flach, in press, Beyond modal idioms and modal harmony: a corpus-based analysis of gradient idiomaticity in modal-adverb collocations. English Language and Linguistics) and theoretical issues such as degrees of grammaticalization (Correia Saavedra, 2019, Measurements of Grammaticalization: Developing a Quantitative Index for the Study of Grammatical Change. PhD Dissertation, Université de Neuchâtel) and the avoidance of synonymy (Bolinger, 1968, Entailment and the meaning of structures. Glossa, 2(2): 119–27).
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Jan 25, 2019
The term lexicalization describes the addition of new open-class elements to a repository of holi... more The term lexicalization describes the addition of new open-class elements to a repository of holistically processed linguistic units. At the basis of lexicalization are word-formation processes such as affixation, compounding, or borrowing, which are a necessary precondition for lexicalization. Still, lexicalization goes beyond word formation in important respects. First, lexicalization also involves multi-word expressions and set phrases; second, it includes a range of processes that follow the coinage of a new element. These processes conjointly lead to holistic processing, that is, the cognitive treatment of a linguistic element as a unified whole. Holistic processing contrasts with analytic processing, which is the cognitive treatment of a linguistic unit as a complex whole that is composed of several parts. Lexicalization is usefully contrasted with grammaticalization, that is, the emergence of new linguistic units that fulfill grammatical functions. Finally, lexicalization is also a concept that lends itself to the study of cross-linguistic differences in the types of meaning that are lexicalized in specific domains such as, for example, motion.
Recent analyses of written text types have discovered significant frequency increases of colloqui... more Recent analyses of written text types have discovered significant frequency increases of colloquial or conversational elements, such as contractions, personal pronouns, questions or the progressive. This trend is often referred to as colloquialization. This paper presents a new perspective on colloquialization, with a special focus on the discourse markerwell. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, we present new evidence of colloquialization on the basis of the TIME Magazine Corpus (Davies 2007), which allows analyses of diachronic change in recent written American English. The focus of our analysis is on highly frequent “inserts” (Biber et al. 1999: 56), which are elements such as discourse markers (e.g.,wellandoh), backchannels (yeah, uh-huh, etc.), and hesitators (uhandum, etc.). We conclude that inserts significantly increase diachronically in TIME. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the elementwellin its function as a discourse marker. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative analytical steps, we analyze its diachronic development in terms of its structural contexts and its pragmatic functions, fleshing out how the process of colloquialization has affected its usage in recent written American English. We argue that the integration of corpus linguistic and pragmatic methods in this case study represents a new step towards the field of corpus pragmatics, that is, “the rapprochement between corpus linguistics and pragmatics and an integration of their key methodologies” (Rühlemann and Aijmer 2014: 23).
In their contribution to this special issue, De Smet &amp... more In their contribution to this special issue, De Smet & Van de Velde suggest that the analysability of a morphologically complex word is an indicator of how easily that word is primed by elements that are formed by the same word formation process. To illustrate, hearing or reading the words roughly, equally and luckily within a short span of time should activate the word formation process of ly-suffixation in the listener's mind, so that the subsequent production of fully compositional ly-adverbs, as for instance permanently or comfortably, should become relatively more likely.
This paper uses corpus data and methods of distributional semantics in order to study English cli... more This paper uses corpus data and methods of distributional semantics in order to study English clippings such as dorm (< dormitory), memo (< memorandum), or quake (< earthquake). We investigate whether systematic meaning differences between clippings and their source words can be detected. The analysis is based on a sample of 50 English clippings. Each of the clippings is represented by a concordance of 100 examples in context that were gathered from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. We compare clippings and their source words both at the aggregate level and in terms of comparisons between individual clippings and their source words. The data show that clippings tend to be used in contexts that represent involved text production, which aligns with the idea that clipped words signal familiarity with their referents. It is further observed that individual clippings and their source words partly diverge in their distributional profiles, reflecting both overlap and di...
This is episode number ten in a course in Cognitive Linguistics. Does your language influence the... more This is episode number ten in a course in Cognitive Linguistics. Does your language influence the way you think? This episode is the first of three videos that address the question, starting off the series with a discussion of language and color. Human beings see color in the same way, but crucially, languages differ in the way they label colors: 'grue' languages have a word that includes the spectrum of both 'green' and 'blue'. Do speakers of 'grue' languages behave like speakers of 'green-blue' languages in psychological experiments? Find out for yourself.
This is episode number nine in a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode discusses Ron Lang... more This is episode number nine in a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode discusses Ron Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, which is an approach to grammar that tries to account for the forms and meanings of grammar in terms of domain-general cognitive processes. The video explains several technical terms of the Cognitive Grammar framework, including profile and base, construal, things and relations, elaboration, and trajectory and landmark.
This is episode number eight in a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode presents frame se... more This is episode number eight in a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode presents frame semantics as an approach to word meaning that differs substantially from feature-based semantic theories. Frames are mental schemas of recurrent situations that people use to make sense of the world, word meanings denote parts of those frames.
This is episode number seven in a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode presents the usag... more This is episode number seven in a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode presents the usage-based model of language in a series of ten claims that discuss the respective roles of domain-general cognitive processes, diachrony, frequency, analogy, categorization, gradience, and universals.
This is the sixth episode of a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode turns to the topic o... more This is the sixth episode of a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode turns to the topic of conceptual integration. Several concepts are central to the idea of conceptual integration, among them input spaces, vital relations, projection into a blend, and emergent structure. All of these are discussed one by one, the video ends with a brief discussion of the differences between conceptual integration and conceptual metaphor.
This is the fifth episode of a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode returns to the topic... more This is the fifth episode of a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode returns to the topic of conceptual metaphor, with an eye to the question whether there is always bidirectional activation from source domain to target domain, and vice versa. Psychological experiments by Lera Boroditsky and Daniel Casasanto show that target-to-source activation does not always happen. This is an important caveat to the conceptual view of metaphor.
This is the fourth episode of a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode addresses the topic... more This is the fourth episode of a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode addresses the topic of polysemy, which describes the phenomenon that a single linguistic form maps onto several related meanings. I contrast polysemy with homonomy and vagueness, and I go over some psycholinguistic and corpus-based work that investigates the semantic structure of polysemous meaning networks.
This is the third episode of a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode addresses the topic ... more This is the third episode of a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode addresses the topic of categorization. I contrast the idea of classic, Aristotelian categories with the idea of prototypes, and I discuss several types of evidence that motivate the prototype view.
This is the second episode of a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode addresses the topic... more This is the second episode of a course in Cognitive Linguistics. This episode addresses the topic of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. This theory holds that metaphor is understanding one thing in terms of another thing. Metaphor is thus a matter of thought, not a matter of words. By now, there is psychological evidence that supports this view.
This is the first episode of a video series in which I present Cognitive Linguistics. What is cog... more This is the first episode of a video series in which I present Cognitive Linguistics. What is cognitive linguistics? Is it a branch of psycholinguistics? Is it functional? About metaphor? Anti-Chomskyan? Find out for yourself!
This paper describes a method to automatically identify stages of language change in diachronic c... more This paper describes a method to automatically identify stages of language change in diachronic corpus data, combining variability-based neighbour clustering, which offers objective and reproducible criteria for periodization, and distributional semantics as a flexible and objective representation of lexical meaning. This method partitions the history of a grammatical construction according to qualitative stages of productivity corresponding to different sets of semantic classes attested in one of its lexical slots. Two case studies are presented. The first case study on the " Verb the hell out of NP " construction shows that the semantic development of a construction does not always match that of its quantitative aspects, like token or type frequency. The second case study on the way-construction compares the results of the present method with those of collostructional analysis. While the results overlap to some degree, it is shown that the former measures semantic change with greater precision, both regarding the nature of changes and their chronology. In sum, this method offers a promising exploratory approach to capturing variation in the semantic range of lexical fillers of constructions and to modeling constructional change.
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One such question concerns the status of constructions as mental representations of linguistic structure. Construction Grammar aims to describe speakers’ knowledge of language, and there have been exciting advances in usage-based constructional approaches that have linked frequencies from corpus data to the notion of entrenchment and other aspects of linguistic knowledge. Despite these advances, it is clear that historical corpora give us only a very rough idea of language use in the past. It is therefore an open question how confidently we can make statements about the linguistic knowledge of earlier generations of speakers, and whether this is actually the main goal of diachronic Construction Grammar.
A second interesting issue is the phenomenon that Traugott and Trousdale (2013) call constructionalization, i.e. the creation of a new node in the speaker’s mental network of constructions. With historical corpus data, it is of course possible to detect novelties in language use and to determine approximate dates for their emergence and spread. However, the concept of constructionalization itself could be criticized for evoking the Sorites paradox, i.e. the question how many grains of sand it takes to make a heap. Just after how many constructional changes exactly do we have a construction that counts as a new node? The term, as defined, asks us to think of a discrete threshold. Whether such a threshold exists is an open question.
The third question that I would like to address does not just concern diachronic Construction Grammar, but the field as a whole. It appears to be a largely unquestioned consensus that linguistic knowledge is to be modeled as an associative network in which there are nodes, i.e. constructions, and links between those constructions. Recently, Schmid (2016) has argued for a view in which knowledge of language exclusively takes the format of associations, which effectively reduces constructions to links between form and meaning. This proposal is not primarily motivated by theoretical parsimony, but rather by the aim of describing linguistic knowledge in inherently dynamic terms. It is clear that this idea has profound implications for the constructional study of language change, some of which I will try to explore.
It is clear that I cannot promise final, or even preliminary answers to these questions. It might even turn out that they are the wrong questions to ask in the first place. What I hope to do though is to start a discussion that will stimulate new and exciting research in diachronic Construction Grammar.
This talk was part of the round table 'Quo Vadis Linguistics in the 21st Century?', which took place at the SLE 2014 conference in Poznan. The main speakers of the round table were Martin Haspelmath and Peter Hagoort, the discussants were Eitan Grossmann, Katarzyna Bromberek-Dyzman, and myself. All contributions of the round table will appear on the diversity linguistics comment blog (http://dlc.hypotheses.org/).
One such question concerns the status of constructions as mental representations of linguistic structure. Construction Grammar aims to describe speakers’ knowledge of language, and there have been exciting advances in usage-based constructional approaches that have linked frequencies from corpus data to the notion of entrenchment and other aspects of linguistic knowledge. Despite these advances, it is clear that historical corpora give us only a very rough idea of language use in the past. It is therefore an open question how confidently we can make statements about the linguistic knowledge of earlier generations of speakers, and whether this is actually the main goal of diachronic Construction Grammar.
A second interesting issue is the phenomenon that Traugott and Trousdale (2013) call constructionalization, i.e. the creation of a new node in the speaker’s mental network of constructions. With historical corpus data, it is of course possible to detect novelties in language use and to determine approximate dates for their emergence and spread. However, the concept of constructionalization itself could be criticized for evoking the Sorites paradox, i.e. the question how many grains of sand it takes to make a heap. Just after how many constructional changes exactly do we have a construction that counts as a new node? The term, as defined, asks us to think of a discrete threshold. Whether such a threshold exists is an open question.
The third question that I would like to address does not just concern diachronic Construction Grammar, but the field as a whole. It appears to be a largely unquestioned consensus that linguistic knowledge is to be modeled as an associative network in which there are nodes, i.e. constructions, and links between those constructions. Recently, Schmid (2016) has argued for a view in which knowledge of language exclusively takes the format of associations, which effectively reduces constructions to links between form and meaning. This proposal is not primarily motivated by theoretical parsimony, but rather by the aim of describing linguistic knowledge in inherently dynamic terms. It is clear that this idea has profound implications for the constructional study of language change, some of which I will try to explore.
It is clear that I cannot promise final, or even preliminary answers to these questions. It might even turn out that they are the wrong questions to ask in the first place. What I hope to do though is to start a discussion that will stimulate new and exciting research in diachronic Construction Grammar.
This talk was part of the round table 'Quo Vadis Linguistics in the 21st Century?', which took place at the SLE 2014 conference in Poznan. The main speakers of the round table were Martin Haspelmath and Peter Hagoort, the discussants were Eitan Grossmann, Katarzyna Bromberek-Dyzman, and myself. All contributions of the round table will appear on the diversity linguistics comment blog (http://dlc.hypotheses.org/).