[bergs,_alexander,_alexander_bergs]_constructions_(bookzz.org).pdf

Constructions and LanguageChange

Edited byAlexander BergsGabriele Diewald

Mouton de Gruyter

Constructions and Language Change

Trends in LinguisticsStudies and Monographs 194

Editors

Walter Bisang(main editor for this volume)

Hans Henrich HockWerner Winter

Mouton de GruyterBerlin New York

Constructions andLanguage Change

edited by

Alexander BergsGabriele Diewald

Mouton de GruyterBerlin New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.

Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelinesof the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Constructions and language change / edited by Alexander Bergs andGabriele Diewald.

p. cm. (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs ; 194)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-3-11-019866-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)1. Linguistic change. 2. Grammar, Comparative and general.

I. Bergs, Alexander. II. Diewald, Gabriele.P142.C67 20084171.7dc22

2008032045

ISBN 978-3-11-019866-9ISSN 1861-4302

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 BerlinAll rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of thisbook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechan-ical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, with-out permission in writing from the publisher.Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin.Printed in Germany.

Table of contents

Introduction: Constructions and Language ChangeAlexander Bergs and Gabriele Diewald 1

The grammaticalization of NP of NP patternsElizabeth Closs Traugot 23

Constructions and constructs:mapping a shift between predication and attributionMirjam Fried 47

Constructional idioms as products of linguistic change:the aan het + infinitive construction in DutchGeert Booij 81

Where did this future construction come from?A case study of Swedish komma att VMartin Hilpert 107

Bedusted, yet not beheaded:The role of be-s constructional properties in its conservationPeter Petr and Hubert Cuyckes 133

Negative verbal clause constructions in Puyuma:exploring constructional disharmonyMalcom Ross 171

Borrowed rhetorical constructions as starting pointsfor grammaticalizationMarianne Mithun 195

(De)grammaticalisation as a source for new constructions:the case of subject doubling in DutchGunther De Vogelaer 231

Syntax as a repository of historical relicsWallace Chafe 261

Subject index 269

Introduction: Constructions and Language Change

Alexander Bergs, Gabriele Diewald

1. Constructions

In their seminal 1968 article Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog show with regard tothe linguistic theories developed by Paul, Saussure, Bloomfield, and Chomskythat each refinement in the theory of language structure [. . . ] had the followingpotential effects: (a) a reclassification of observed changes according to newprinciples; (b) proposal of fresh constraints on change; and (c) proposal of newcauses of change. (1968: 126; emphasis original). This volume focuses on oneparticular refinement in the theory of language structure: the (re-)introductionof the theoretical notion of constructions, and how constructional approachesto language deal with problems in linguistic variation and change.

The notion of constructions is of course not new in linguistics. In thesense of formulaic, fixed sequences the idea can be traced back at least to themid-nineteenth century and can be found in writings of Saussure, Jespersen,Bloomfield, Firth, and many more (see Wray 2002: 78 for an overview). Theterm construction in linguistic analyses can be traced back even to Antiquityand the Modistae of the 13th century (for an overview, see Schonefeld 2006and Goldberg and Casenhiser 2006). In recent times interest in constructionshas culminated in the development of Construction Grammar (also abbreviatedas CxG in the following), a family of linguistic approaches which focusesexclusively on the structure and function of constructions in grammar (Ostmanand Fried 2004, Croft and Cruse 2004, Fischer and Stefanowitsch 2006 provideinformative overviews over the different strands and their development).

Despite or perhaps even because of this long-standing history, there is (still)no agreement as to what constructions actually are and what their place in lan-guage and linguistic theory actually is (see e.g. Wray 2002: 9 for an informativelist of diverging terminological decisions). Nevertheless, there is a common coreof theoretical positions shared by virtually all scholars working on ConstructionGrammar, which is specific to this approach and distinguishes it from generativegrammar as well as from more traditional grammatical schools. The followingissues are among the most important ones: (1) Constructions are defined as pair-ings of form and meaning, ranging from the morphemic to the utterance level oflinguistic structure; (2) constructions are organized in complex hierarchical net-works with inheritance, polysemy and synonymy relations;1 (3) the scope of the

2 Alexander Bergs, Gabriele Diewald

notion of construction ranges from lexicalized or idiomatic items to abstract,productive patterns; (4) constructions are highly sensitive to frequency as well asto their respective co- and con-texts.2 These positions among other, more spe-cific ones mark Construction Grammar as an innovative and integrative linguis-tic approach, which, by combining traditional concepts with results and positionsof modern linguistic theories of cognitive, functional as well as formal origin, in-creases the range as well as the depths of linguistic investigation. Most importantfor this volume is the fact that the central tenets of Construction Grammar leadon to theoretical and methodological consequences that make CxG a particularlysuitable tool for investigating and describing language change (see below).

While the present volume aims at improving our understanding of construc-tions, it is also in line with the present state-of-affairs as it is not committed toany single definition of the notion of construction. Nor is it explicitly couchedin any specific Construction Grammar framework. Most of the contributionsin this volume can be conveniently arranged into three different groups whichnaturally derive from the kaleidoscope of current research in constructions. Thefirst group subsumes contributions which clearly can be classified as state-of-the-art construction grammar analyses (e.g. Fried, Hilpert, Booij). The secondgroup includes contributions which use the term construction in a rather non-technical, but still very illuminating sense, and whose theoretical frameworkalso allows for more traditional grammatical notions (e.g. Mithun, Ross). Thecontributions in group three take a more distanced point of view and focus onmore theoretical issues in construction grammar and constructional approachesin contrast to other frameworks and traditions (e.g. Traugott, Chafe). It will be-come clear that these different points of view of course also lead to differentresearch questions. Studies in the framework of construction grammar need toaddress theoretical questions pertaining to that very framework while studies us-ing constructions as an additional notion in a more traditional framework ratherneed to think about what kind of advantages and disadvantages that notion canhave for them.

Moreover, the multitude of different approaches also has some consequencesfor the different presentations in this volume. Readers will immediately noticethat there is no single uniform notation for constructions. This of course stemsfrom the different approaches themselves, but it is also one of the credos of con-structional approaches and construction grammar in particular (cf. Ostman andFried 2004; Boas and Fried 2005). While often being highly formal, these do notrequire a strict, uniform notation, on the contrary. Constructional approachesbegin with the data and the phenomena and only then develop the necessaryformalism on the basis of what they find and deem necessary. It should be em-phasized here that this seeming inattentiveness towards an a priori given formal

Introduction: Constructions and Language Change 3

apparatus is in fact a pragmatic necessity for diachronic studies transcendingmerely theoretical reflections on change and in addition working with empiri-cal data. As diachronic data-based studies are notoriously confronted with thetrivial but far-reaching problems of lack of native speaker competence for pastlanguage stages and insufficient language data (cf. Labov 1994: 11), descriptivemodels requiring a complete analysis of the whole linguistic structure in terms ofa preset formalism inevitably run the danger of anachronistic distortions. In con-trast to that, the descriptive practice favored by constructional approaches, whichallows structural descriptions with varying granularity, provides for analyticalsolutions that avoid over-specified, non-provable descriptions and analyses (cf.Diewald 2006).

Thus, the present volume follows the policy outlined in Fried and Ostman(2004) and Boas and Fried (2005) in that every paper can use its own notationas long as the procedure and formalism is explained to the reader.

This introduction is organized as follows. First, we will discuss some moregeneral issues pertaining to linguistic change from a constructional point ofview. These are, for us, the units of change (since constructional approachesoften do not work with traditional linguistic units such as phoneme, morpheme,and phrase, including the traditional division between variable and variant) andcontext sensitivity, i.e. contextual factors in linguistic change. In a second step,we will concentrate on some more special issues, especially as they emergefrom the contributions to this volume. In particular, the question of how newstructures can emerge in linguistic change will be our focus here. The topics tobe treated include analogy, reanalysis, frequency, explorative expressions, andlanguage contact.

The third section of this introduction then gives detailed summaries of theindividual papers in their specific theoretical context.

2. Constructions in language variation and change

2.1. Units of change and context sensitivity

The notion of constructions has already figured prominently in many ap-proaches to linguistic change (Traugott, this volume), but very few of these sys-tematically investigate the potential of this notion. When we look at it closely,two basic ideas seem to underlie most constructional approaches to linguisticchange: (a) linguistic change often does not affect only single linguistic items,like words, morphemes, or phonemes, but also syntagmatic structures up to thesentential and utterance levels (i.e. the relevant co-text comprises all levels of


explicitly expressed linguistic material) and (b) linguistic change can be verycon-text-sensitive, i.e. motivated, triggered or influenced by pragmatic extra-linguistic factors. For example, as Diewald and Habermann (2005) show, thedevelopment of the German construction werden & infinitive as a future mark-ing device results from a highly complex interplay of co-textual factors, like theacquisition of different types of complements (including the bare infinitive) ofwerden (which enlarged the syntagmatic combinability), and con-textual fac-tors, like the influence of rhetoric traditions, text-type choices and theologicalpositions in the 16th centuries, which enriched the new syntagmatic formationwith a distinct meaning (in specific text types), thus leading to the rise of aspecific future-marking construction not found in related languages.

Let us look a bit more closely into the question of the units of change. Re-cent studies in grammaticalization have shown that strict distinctions betweenthe individual elements in linguistic structure and their independence can oftennot be upheld in linguistic change: grammaticalization does not merely seizea word or morpheme [. . . ] but the whole construction formed by the syntag-matic relations of the element in question (Lehmann 1982: 406; cf. Traugott2003: 625; Himmelmann 2004: 31; Wiemer 2004: 271ff). The development ofpresent-day Dutch progressive construction aan het + infinitive, for example,involves the preposition aan and the determiner het, which function as specificmarkers of the progressive when combined with infinitival forms of verbs. Anyexplanation which solely focuses on the linguistic elements in isolation missessome important factors in this development (Booij, this volume).

Wiemer (2004) analyzes the evolution of passives in Baltic and Slavic lan-guages and comes to the conclusion that this can also be regarded as one formof grammaticalization, despite the fact that not one single element, but a fullconstruction undergoes change. He thus suggests that new criteria for gram-maticalization are badly needed which take account of constructional factors.Himmelmann (2004: 33) argues in a similar vein and claims that the grammat-icalization of single elements (the traditional point of view), despite the factthat it still forms some part of the definition of grammaticalization, is actuallyepiphenomenal to the construction-based approach.

It should have become clear that constructional approaches to linguisticchange, and construction grammar in particular, not only raise some interestingnew questions here, but that they are also well suited for dealing with theseproblems and for treating multiple elements as single units, either in the form ofconstructions or what could be termed constructionalization, i.e. the formationof new units (constructions) out of hitherto independent material.

However, what has rarely, if ever, been discussed in this context is the issueof language variation as the basis of linguistic change, and thus also of gram-


maticalization. To begin with a rather uncontroversial idea: language changeis inextricably entwined with language variation. As early as 1968, Weinreich,Labov, and Herzog claimed: Not all variability and heterogeneity in languagestructure involves change; but all change involves variability and heterogene-ity (1968: 187). This sounds much more innocent and straightforward thanit actually is. Linguistic change usually does not simply arise from some kindof wild and random variability. It essentially requires structured heterogeneity.Change can then be described as the generalization of one particular alterna-tion, i.e. it is characterized by some sort of directionality. For example (cuttinga million corners), word order in present-day English (PdE) probably evolvedout of general syntactic variability in Old and early Middle English combinedwith information structuring principles. In the transition period between Oldand Middle English the topic domain might have been reanalyzed as the (fixed)subject position. Information structuring thus gave directionality to the basicvariability in syntax, which in turn was also dependent on and influenced by thechanges in the morphosyntactic marking of constituents3 .

So the question arises how linguistic variability, let alone directionality, canbe modeled in constructional approaches. Martin Hilpert (this volume), fruit-fully combines corpus linguistics with grammaticalization theory and CxG ap-proaches. This work as well as many others (cf. Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004a)impressively document the quantitative dimension of variability in language andlanguage change. What still needs to be discussed is the qualitative nature of thisvariability. Fortunately, previous research has led to several converging insights,which can be used as the starting point for tackling this problem.

It is common practice to distinguish between constructions on the one handand constructs on the other, or as suggested by Cappelle (2006), between con-structions and so-called allostructions. Constructions are seen as the more ab-stract blueprints which license well-formed linguistic expressions, while con-structs or allostructions are the more concrete realizations of constructions, i.e.actually occurring expressions or types of expressions (see for example Gold-berg 1995 as well as most CxG scholars). These notions, of course, are set upin analogy to central concepts of structuralism, like the notions of phoneme,allophone and phone, or morpheme, allomorph and morph (Fried and Ostman2004: 18f, Cappelle 2006).

However, in contrast to structuralism, CxG is explicitly performance-based,and there is a continuum between schematic and concrete constructions, i.e.a continuum of embedded, multi-layered type-token relations (see, e.g., Croft2001; Tomasello 2005). In particular, this performance-oriented nature of CxGin combination with the central tenets listed in Section 1 brings into close con-tact the two issues which have to be kept theoretically distinct. The first issue


is the relation between virtual linguistic signs (types) and the instances of theirrealization (tokens), the second issue is the systematic stratification of con-structions, i.e. the relation between more abstract constructions and their moreconcrete descendants, i.e. constructions which may show formal as well asfunctional and semantic variations between each other and thus create polysemyand synonymy relations (for inheritance relations see for example Goldberg1995, Booij, this volume, Ross, this volume). An attempt to account for thestratification in constructions is the distinction between macro-constructions,meso-constructions, and micro-constructions suggested by Traugott (thisvolume). Macro-constructions are defined as higher-level, more abstract func-tional constructions, meso-constructions, encountered on the next level, areseen as groupings of similar-behaving constructions, and finally, we find single,basic constructions (micro-constructions). Traugott (this volume) points outthat all three levels are to be interpreted as abstractions, as types. These need tobe distinguished from actual utterances, which she calls constructs, in line withFried and Ostmans analysis.

Some examples may be helpful in illustrating these issues. While the Subject-Predicate Construction, for example, clearly is a macro-construction in the waydefined above, which is actualized in a concrete realization (construct) like Peteate the bagel, an idiomatic entity like when push comes to shove, on the otherhand, would be the realization (the construct) of a micro-construction, i.e. of aconstruction whose formal as well as functional and semantic features are fixed.Still unsolved is the question of the place of allostructions (which at least inone reading can be equated with meso-constructions) in the linguistic system,in particular, the distinction between constructions on the one hand, and theirindividual allostructions on the other. What makes bring in the criminaland bring the criminal in two allostructions of the verb-particle construction?Gries (2003) claims that there are more differences than similarities between thetwo and that they do not form one single category. Capelle (2006) claims thereare enough similarities to warrant one basic construction with two variants. Sohow do we define the cut-off point in dissimilarity? And, what do we need: for-mal differences, functional differences, or both? While most researchers seemto agree that similar function in a similar context results in different construc-tions in competition with each other, this is not entirely clear. A further problemhaving to do with the interrelations among constructions is the issue of compo-sitionality. The original definition of constructions as conventionalized pairingsof form and meaning at all levels of linguistic structure necessarily treats ev-ery new form as a new construction. Originally, one caveat was added to thisdefinition: constructional meaning had to be non-compositional, i.e. not pre-dictable from the individual components (see, e.g., Goldberg 1995: 4). More


recent treatments (e.g., Goldberg 2006, Goldberg and Jackendoff 2005) alsoinclude compositional constructions as long as they are sufficiently frequent(Goldberg and Jackendoff 2005: 533).

In sum, it seems highly desirable to give the structure and function of vari-ability in construction grammar more thought. We have made great progress inthe statistical description of variants and their developments, but we still knowvery little about their theoretical and cognitive status.The whole dilemma, whichwill and can not be solved in an introduction like this, can be summarized inone simple question: If something is not a construction, what is it?

The second issue that was mentioned at the beginning of this section is con-text sensitivity. Linguistic change in general is often very context-sensitive, i.e.it involves factors which can be found outside the linguistic system as such.Not without good reason does Himmelmann (2004: 3134) describe grammat-icalization as context expansion. One of his examples is the development ofdemonstratives and articles. The evolution of articles out of demonstratives typ-ically involves three kinds of change, i.e. context expansion on three differentlevels: construction internally, in a larger syntactic context, and in semantic andpragmatic contexts. Articles can typically co-occur with proper names or nounsdesignating unique entities, demonstratives usually cant. This can be seen asconstruction internal context expansion. Similarly, Himmelmann argues (2004:32), emerging articles often first occur in core argument positions and rarely, ifever, in adpositional expressions. When they grammaticalize further, they mayalso become possible, even obligatory in these expressions and other syntacticcontexts. This exemplifies the second type of context expansions, i.e. in largersyntactic contexts. Finally, adnominal demonstratives only occur in expressionsinvolving deictic, anaphoric or recognitional reference. Articles, in contrast,are used in much wider and more general contexts in which demonstratives donot occur (e.g. associative anaphoric uses). This is an illustration of semantic-pragmatic context expansion (see Himmelmann 2004 for a full account of thismodel). Diewald (2002, 2006) is another important study which deals with therole of context in linguistic change and grammaticalization in particular. On thebasis of the development of modal verbs in German, she also suggests threedifferent stages in grammaticalization, which are specifically tied to particulartypes of context. The first stage involves the preconditions for grammatical-ization: the grammaticalized element is embedded and used unspecifically in anumber of new (syntagmatic, semantic, pragmatic) contexts. These contexts arecalled untypical contexts. The new meaning, which is to be further grammat-icalized, arises in these contexts via conversational implicature. Interestingly,untypical contexts show either morphological or semantic incompatibilities,but never both. The second type of context, the so-called critical context, is the


actual starting point for the grammaticalization process proper. The essentialpoint is that in this second context type, morphological and semantic incom-patibilities occur. The third type of context is the so-called isolating context,in which new incompatible meanings and functions independent of the originalinterpretation are conventionalized (see Diewald 2002, 2006 for a more detailedaccount).

Constructional approaches, and construction grammar in particular, gener-ally include contextual (i.e. co-textual and con-textual factors as introducedin Section 1) in their analyses (cf. the papers in Bergs and Diewald, in prep.;Diewald 2006). Co-textual factors are often already captured through syntag-matic configurations, but in fact, CxG also explicitly calls for an inclusion ofcontextual factors: by construction I intend a conventional association of any orall of the following kinds of grammatical information: syntactic, semantic in-cluding pragmatic, lexical and phonological (Kay 2002: 1). Goldberg is evenmore explicit on this point: Another notion rejected by Construction Gram-mar is that of a strict division between semantics and pragmatics. Informationabout focused constituents, topicality, and register is presented in constructionsalongside semantic information (Goldberg 1995: 7). Again, this means thatconstructional approaches and CxG in particular are perfectly compatible withrecent findings in studies of language change, and grammaticalization in partic-ular. If the road is kept open for two-way traffic, this relationship will certainlybe rather sym- than antibiotic.

2.2. Some more specific problems for a theory of change inconstructional terms

Apart from these two central issues, units of change and context sensitivity, thereare some other interesting problems regarding language variation and changefrom a constructional point of view.

When we talk about variability and linguistic change, we also have to con-sider the innovation of new forms and structures. In constructional terms thismeans that we need to ask how new constructions can be added to the suppos-edly structured inventory of constructions (or maybe they are only activated?).Traditionally, we see performance, contact, reanalysis, and expressivity as someof the central factors in the genesis of new linguistic forms and structures. Somechanges on the level of sound and morphology somehow go back to what Croftcalled imperfect replication. That is, word final sounds are likely candidatesfor weakening and deletion (e.g. [and] > [an], [give] > [giv]), some rare irregularverb forms like heft, bereft are likely to be regularized through analogical level-


ing into heaved and bereaved, some of the developments in the English analyticcomparative are also of this kind (see Mondorf 2006). Very little has been saidabout these phenomena from a constructional perspective, apart maybe fromusage and frequency factors which have moved closer to the center of attentionin many of these studies (cf. Fried and Ostman 2004; Gries and Stefanowitsch2004b). As far as analogy as one factor is concerned, the present volume con-tains an important investigation into its role (Traugott, this volume) and shedslight on the question of how constructions actually work. Constructions operatein this respect much like ordinary lexical items since they, like ordinary lexi-cal items, are defined as conventionalized pairings of meaning and form. CxG,being performance based, operates with frequency as a factor. This means thatfrequent exposure to certain constructions or perhaps rather constructs cantip the scales in a certain direction. Which means that analogy also becomes ex-plicable in terms of connectionist approaches psychology and recent theories oflearning as advocated by Tomasello (2005, 2006), for instance. Moreover, theyare easily extendable to syntactic structures, as they, too, count as constructions.

The role and relationship of analogy and reanalysis in linguistic change havebeen subject to many discussions (see Traugott, this volume). Reanalysis, whichfor construction grammar means the very concrete dissolution and creation ofnew constructions in the inventory, allows for some interesting perspectives,e.g. on the grammaticalization of the English going to future. This seems tobe an area where construction grammar can have a profound effect in terms ofreclassification, constraints, and causes. We start with going to, a complex, butregular construction for physical movement, consisting of the verb of movementcomplemented by a structurally independent adverbial (usually a prepositionalphrase) expressing the direction or goal. In order to derive a future markerlike gonna out of these sources, a new construction which includes both theverb going and the prepositional marker to is required. This new constructionhas a number of new formal and semantico-pragmatic properties, like new co-occurrence restrictions (it need not be followed by a noun phrase expressing thedirection, but can be followed by a purposive phrase and finally also verbs whichare incompatible with the source meaning physical movement, like love or go).We might want to call this process uniconstruction, or constructionalization. Inthis context, it seems important to note that the development apparently doesnot begin with constructions as such, but rather with constructs (i.e. concreterealization which are reanalyzed as different constructions), as Traugott (thisvolume) points out. Finally, after having gone through some intermediate stageswith ambiguous structures, the two elements are univerbated through phoneticerosion into gonna, which is incompatible with physical movement (*Im gonnaTexas). Traditional grammatical models can describe reanalyses of this kind


no doubt. But they seem to have a hard time incorporating semantico-pragmatic(contextual) factors, which are part and parcel of this process, as has beenpointed out above. CxG, by definition, includes both semantics and pragmaticsin constructions. Also, since CxG is explicitly cognitive and combines insightsfrom usage and frequency, it allows for some interesting observations aboutcognitive aspects of reanalysis and might even help to identify causes of changewhich have not been fully explored yet (syntactic priming might be such apromising approach). Gradualness in linguistic change is another issue thatmore traditional approaches have to struggle with. Constructional approaches, incontrast, can indeed model gradualness as a step-by-step change in the individualfeatures of a particular construction, or rather through its concrete constructs.In CxG, there is no theory internal reason to assume that certain changes mustleap from one stage to another.

Finally, some forms are created as explorative expressions, as Harris andCampbell (1995) call them, i.e. innovative (non-conventional) ways of express-ing the same propositional content (cf. also Haspelmath 1999). To some extent,reanalysis mostly focuses on language change initiated by the hearer, while ex-plorative expressions rather focus on the speaker. Examples from morphologyare plentiful if you watch just one episode of Seinfeld: here we learn new wordslike sidler, re-gifter, sponge-worthy, happy festivus, susher, shushee, and un-shushables. Traditional examples can be found in the development of negationin French and English, where emphatic markers are added to single negativemarkers for expressivity (ne V > ne V noght > V noght > V not > do notV). How about this kind of expressivity in CxG? Although constructions in thetraditional sense have slot-filler patterns, this does not correspond to what weknow about expressivity as a factor. Constructions are conventionalized form-meaning pairings. Explorative expressions are, by definition, non-conventional.So what we need is combinability of constructions in innovative ways, and theuse of constructions (as new, non-conventional constructs) in new co- and con-texts. One promising approach here comes from recent work (Michaelis 2003,2004) on coercion. Coercion, in a nutshell, is syntactically and morphologi-cally invisible: it is governed by implicit contextual reinterpretation mechanismstriggered by the need to resolve [semantic] conflicts (de Swart 1998: 360; cf.Michaelis 2003, but also Traugott 2007; Ziegeler 2007). In other words, coercionis what we see when we order two beers, since beer should be an uncountablemass noun, but the combination with the numeral coerces a new interpretation,namely two units (e.g. pints) of beer. This appears to be a very elegant way ofcapturing the introduction of new structures as a result of expressivity.

Some new forms and structures arise in language contact situations (cf., forexample, Heine and Kuteva 2006). Much of the English lexicon is not English,


the th-pronouns are Proto-Norse, derivational morphemes like able are French,and the PdE relativizer system perhaps was modeled on the basis of Latin. Howcan we deal with this in CxG? It is perhaps fair to say that research in this domainfrom a constructional point of view practically did not exist, but that we are nowwitnessing rapid and promising progress (exemplified, for example, by Heineand Kuteva (2006: 44) where replicating use patterns in language contact arecompared to constructions). Mithun (this volume) is one of the most detailedand systematic studies to investigate the borrowing of syntactic elements froma constructional perspective. Suffice it to say that the notion of construction(because of its proximity with lexical element) is very compatible and helpfulfor investigations in linguistic typology and the effects of language contact, andthat in the future some more excellent research results in this domain can beexpected.

3. This volume

The volume assembles papers working with construction grammar informedconcepts of constructions as well as studies which may be subsumed underthe label constructional approaches. The languages investigated in the casestudies include several Germanic languages (English, Dutch, and Swedish),Czech, North-West Coast Indian languages, African languages, Puyuma, andJapanese. The linguistic phenomena treated range from the development ofword formation (participles, prefixed verbs) to the rise of periphrastic verbalcategories (progressive in Dutch, future in Swedish), from case marking changesin connection with word order to multi-phrasal rhetorical processes, from thedevelopment of quantifiers to that of modals.

According to their theoretical and thematic orientation, the papers are groupedinto three sections. The first section, Construction grammar and languagechange, contains papers making extensive use of a particular models of Con-struction grammar, representing the data in construction grammar formats, anddiscussing the suitability of construction grammar approaches for modelingchange.

Elizabeth Closs Traugotts paper The grammaticalization of NP of NPpatterns unites a theoretical evaluation of the merits of construction grammarfor grammaticalization studies with a detailed case study of the developmentof degree modifiers from partitive constructions in English. The first part takesup reflections on constructions and grammaticalization Traugott had proposedin an earlier paper and develops them further in the direction of the radicalconstruction grammar approach suggested by Croft. It is argued that a con-


struction grammar approach is better equipped to tackle the notorious problemsof correlation between form, meaning and function that are most important ingrammaticalization processes, and also improves the ways of modeling differentdegrees of co-evolution (or its absence) between form and meaning. Traugott as-sumes several layers of constructional organization as well as different degreesof entrenchment of a construction, which is judged to be helpful for solvingthe problem of identifying the locus of change. It is suggested that innova-tion starts in constructs, and, if conventionalized, becomes an inherent part ofthe higher constructional levels, starting from micro-constructions to meso-construction-types and ultimately reaching the highest level of constructionsThe case study presented in the paper explores the rise of quantifying nounmodification in English, i.e. the development of items like bits of NP, as aninstance of grammaticalization. While the overall picture of the usefulness of aconstruction grammar approach to grammaticalization is judged to be positive,Traugott also points to some problematic aspects. For one thing, she warns thatthe holistic approach of construction grammar might prove a hindrance for thedescription of semantic change in grammaticalization, as the holistic model ofmeaning might lead to a neglect of the investigation of the complexities of se-mantic and pragmatic interrelations that are at work. Another word of cautionis expressed with reference to the notion of coercion, i.e. the notion of a con-struction exerting force on the meaning of an item inserted in that construction:This concept might stand in the way of recognizing important and typical phe-nomena connected with semantic change like the retention of older meaningsand contingent restrictions on the use of the construction containing that item.

The paper by Mirjam Fried with the title Constructions and constructs:mapping the shifts between predication and attribution is inspired by the samegeneral objective as the first paper. It explores the usefulness of constructiongrammar for the investigation of grammaticalization with special attendance tothe gradience of grammatical change and to the need of defining the exact locusof change. The theoretical positions are tested in a case study on morphologicalchange in the development of transpositional morphology in the case of the OldCzech participles, more precisely, the development of the so-called long formof the present participle. The paper starts with a succinct explication of the posi-tions of construction grammar and the particular model Fried adheres to, whichis based on Fillmore 1988, taken up by Fried and Ostmann 2004 and Croft 2001.In accordance with the preceding paper, it is emphasized that the distinction be-tween constructions as abstract elements of grammar and constructs as actualrealizations of constructions is an important one, and that change starts out inparticular constructs. The tension between holistic meaning and the possibilityfor small steps of change, which Traugott takes to be a problem for uniting


construction grammar and grammaticalization theory, is resolved here via thedefinition of construction. Fried states that non-compositionality in the narrowsemantic sense is not a necessary condition for constructional status Furtherimportant aspects are the tension between the holistic meaning of constructionson one side, and particular features that are affected by change on the other,as well as Crofts assertion that the syntactic function of lexical categories isdependent of particular constructional patterns (and thus not describable in uni-versal terms). The merits of construction grammar for representing diachronicprocesses are seen in the following points: First, construction grammar providesthe means for focusing on contextual features that motivate and trigger change,and to identify individual properties that together lead to a change in a holisticconstruction. Second, Fried points out that constructions are blueprints (gen-eralizations over constructs) and as such presuppose variation and change as aninherent part of grammar. Third, multi-layered representation with equal weightfor each layer accommodates non-compositionality, and, finally, as constructiongrammar does not require a full specification, this way of representation is mostsuited for diachronic stages.

Section 2, Verbal constructions and grammaticalization contains papers onverbal word formation and on the development of periphrastic analytic verbalcategories in Germanic languages, and thus tackles a classical topic of grammat-icalization studies in constructional terms.The paper by Geert Booij Construc-tional idioms and grammaticalization: the aan het + INFINITIVE constructionin Dutch takes up the development of verbal periphrasis for the encoding ofprogressive meaning, which is a well-known area of grammaticalization. Thefocus of this paper is not on the diachronic development of the progressive fromaan het + INFINITIVE but on the synchronic distribution of this form and itsintegration into the verbal paradigm. It takes its starting point from the well-known observation that grammaticalization processes do not affect linguisticitems in isolation but are bound to specific contexts or constructions. Applyingthe notion of construction in an informal way, which focuses on the associationof a structural pattern with partially non-compositional meaning, Booij arguesthat aan het + INFINITIVE may be defined as a constructional idiom in thesense of Jackendoff (1977; 2002) and Goldberg (1995). He further suggests thatthe notion of construction is suitable in accounting for the reflexes of grammati-calization on a synchronic grammatical system, in particular on the productivityof certain multi-word combinations, i.e. constructional idioms. After discussingtwo cross-linguistically frequent sources for progressives, namely postural verbs(like items meaning sit), and locative constructions like the Dutch aan het-construction, the latter construction is shown to have progressed far on thegrammaticalization cline (semantics, generalization to other infinitives, typical


restriction for progressives concerning the infinitive etc.) and that it is integratedas a periphrastic verbal construction into the verbal paradigms of Dutch as itinteracts with inflectional means to express progressive aspect. In particular itfunctions as an alternative realization to the present participle and may haveblocked its use in predicative position. Furthermore, it is argued that the regularaspects of the constructional idiom, which coexist together with the idiomaticones, can be accounted for by the notion of inheritance tree in the sense ofGoldberg 1995 and Jackendoff 2002, which allows a depiction of the transfer ofvalency features (predicate argument structure) from the verb to the whole con-struction within the inheritance tree (although this is not inheritance as definedin the classic way).

The second paper in this section, Martin Hilperts investigation on the riseof the Swedish COME-future Where did this future construction come from?The case of Swedish komma att V, too, takes up one of the favorite topics ofgrammaticalization studies, and explores the constructional status of the differ-ent stages of the development, which are documented by a diachronic corpus(starting from Old Swedish texts from between 1300 to 1450 up to ModernSwedish). The aim is to test which of two alternative suggestions for grammati-calization paths for future grams holds for the Swedish data: either the suggestionby Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca (1994), who describe the development of de-venitive future via a stage encoding intention, or the alternative hypothesisby Dahl (2000), who suggests that Germanic de-venitive futures develop frominchoative notions and do not require the stage of intentional meaning. For adefinition of the Swedish periphrastic forms as constructions, Hilpert followsthe classical definitions in Goldberg 1995, Fillmore, Kay and OConnor 1988,Fried and Ostman 2004. Accordingly, he postulates that constructions, as con-ventionalized sequences of morphemes have direct semantic representation,thus focusing on the aspect of non-compositionality (contra Fried). Further-more, again with reference to the authors quoted, he understands constructionsas polysemous having a number of conceptually interrelated functions. Thecorpus analysis reveals the existence of three construction types using COMEfor each period and their development through time. Hilpert points out that thedata clearly are in favor of Dahls suggestions and that the grammaticalizationpath MOTION > INTENTION > FUTURE has to be replaced by MOTION >INCHOATIVE > FUTURE in the case of the Swedish de-venitive future.

The word formation of English prefix verbs is the topic of the paper by PeterPetre and Hubert Cuyckens Bedusted, yet not beheaded: The role of be-sconstructional semantics in its conservation. It treats the retention and gram-maticalization of the construction with the inseparable prefix be- in English,and motivates it by the salience of the be-construction in contrast to other pre-


fixed verbs, which have become extinct. Petre and Cuyckens make explicit useof Goldbergian constructional schemata, whereby the resultative constructionswith unselected objects like He sneezed the napkin off the table are directly rele-vant for their data. In contrast to other prefixes, a subtype of the be-constructionhad special semantic and valency features Petre and Cuyckens call that con-structional salience which helped this construction to survive, while otherprefix constructions got lost because of the change from OV to VO (astigen >come down: object or other specification of verb must follow verb), and evengained ground and specialized in the formation of deverbal nouns and adjectives.

The third section Word order and argument structure (including clitics andcase marking) units papers which, though dealing with languages distributedacross the globe (American North-West Coast, Taiwan, Europe), converge intheir aim to tackle word order changes and their concomitant morphosyntacticchanges in a constructional model. They demonstrate that constructional ap-proaches are well-suited for this purpose. In his paper Negative verbal clauseconstruction in Puyuma: exploring constructional disharmony, Malcolm Rossdeals with the rise and accommodation of constructional disharmony, i.e. withthe relation among constructions in a paradigmatic field. The definition of con-structional (dis)harmony rests on the fact that, while harmonic constructions aresystematic and expected, disharmonic constructions are not, as they display anunexpected combination of parent constructions.The case discussed in the paperis the negative transitive construction in Puyuma, an Austronesian language ofTaiwan, which is described as a disharmonic construction as it does not patternregularly with its neighboring constructions, i.e. all combinations of the val-ues transitive/intransitive and positive/negative. Although the paper suggests apossible scenario for the complex diachronic development of the present-day sit-uation, which rests on frequency arguments (following Bybee 2005, and Bybeeand Hopper 2001), its main interest is in the relations among the paradigmati-cally associated constructions. The paper raises the question how disharmonicrelations among coexisting constructions within a grammatical paradigm canbe adequately represented by an inheritance network. The argumentation andsolution proposed is based on the constructional works of Fillmore, Kay andOConnor 1988, Kay and Fillmore 1999, and in particular Croft 2001, whosesuggestions for the representation of constructional inheritance are taken up andapplied to the Puyuma case. Modifying Crofts model of representation of con-structional relations, Ross suggests a network of inheritance relations instead ofthe hierarchically ordered taxonomy proposed by Croft 2001. He argues that anetwork can accommodate disharmonic constructions better, because in a net-work, as opposed to a taxonomy, constructions do not have to be derived fromthe same parents as their neighboring harmonic constructions.


The paper by Marianne Mithun Borrowed rhetorical constructions as start-ing points for grammaticalization combines diachronic linguistics with areallinguistics and language contact. It is concerned with contact-induced changesof constructional patters that give rise to a misplaced marking of argumentstructure in two neighboring, though genetically unrelated, language familiesof the Northwest Coast of North America, Wakashan and Tsimshianic. Mithunworks with the definitions of constructions a la Goldberg (1995), and showsthat the rhetorical pattern she is dealing with are constructions in the technicalsense, showing highly complex and specific features on several levels of lin-guistic organization. They involve multi-phrasal demonstrative structures witha cataphoric demonstrative referring to a NP in a separate prosodic unit, withwhich it agrees, but cliticising to the element preceding it, thus laying the groundfor the genesis of misplaced argument marking. The hypothesis put forward isthat those highly idiosyncratic constructions are due to the fact that the relevantentities that were transferred from one language to the other are not concrete lin-guistic items, but constructions seen as abstract templates, as patterns of usages.The origin of the constructions responsible for this case marking pattern lies in acommon discourse pattern favored in ceremonial speech, which finally evolvedinto a conventionalized rhetorical strategy. This strategy (and its constructionalmake-up) but not the concrete linguistic material was borrowed between the lan-guages in contact, and in the further history developed according to languagespecific features.

Gunther De Vogelaer takes up the issue of (De)grammaticalisation as thesource for new constructions: the case of subject doubling in Dutch. He pro-vides an empirical study combining dialect geography and grammaticalizationissues to treat the question of the rise and spread of constructions with doublesubject marking in Dutch dialects. Working with a loose and pre-theoreticalconcept of construction, he argues that subject doubling originates in invertedword order constructions with second person subjects, a construction which isrestricted to spoken language. The hypothesis is that grammaticalization as wellas degrammaticalization may lead to the rise of new constructions. It is exem-plified by the case of pronominal subject doubling in some Dutch dialects; thisconstruction is treated by De Vogelaer as the result of a degrammaticalizationprocess.

The volume concludes with a paper by Wallace Chafe dealing with Syntaxas a Repository of Historical Relics. In this programmatic paper, Chafe ad-dresses the very fundamental question of what syntax (and language) actuallyis, how constructions as syntactic units may come into being, and what theirfunction is. He assumes a primacy of meaning point of view and suggests thatthoughts give rise to semantic structures which are then modeled in (histori-


cally developed) syntactic structures. The historical developments which leadto certain syntactic structures include the creation of metaphors, collocations,and idioms. Similarly, grammaticalization and phonological changes may playa role here. Thus, syntax in general is interpreted as a museum of a numberof changes, each of which removes the linguistic expressions from its origins inlinguistic thought.

Notes

1. Inheritance relations deal with similarity and compositionality among different con-structions; polysemy refers to semantic and/or functional differentiation in one givenform (isomorphism), synonymy refers to similar meaning and/or function of differentconstructions and the related question of competition between constructions.

2. In this use of the terms co-text and con-text, which was introduced in translationstudies in the nineteen-sixties, co-text refers to the strictly linguistic environmentof a given item, while con-text encompasses extra-linguistic, communicative, andpragmatic factors (cf. Catford 1965).

3. This fairly straightforward analysis already poses some problems for more recentconstructional treatments, like Construction Grammar (CxG). Traditionally, lan-guage variation and change cuts across the boundaries of linguistic levels: changesin phonology affect morphology affect syntax affect discourse, and vice versa. Howcan we capture these concomitant and interdependent movements in a theoreticalframework that does not explicitly distinguish between the different levels?

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The grammaticalization of NP of NP patterns

Elizabeth Closs Traugott

1. Introduction

Constructions have been mentioned at least since Givon (1979) and Lehmann(1995 [1982]) as input, along with lexical items, to grammaticalization.1 How-ever, it is often not clear what is meant by construction. At best the termappears to have been used as weakly synonymous with collocation, string,phrase, constituent, or even syntagmatic context. The recent developmentof varieties of construction grammar2 has provided the opportunity to beginto refine what is meant by the statement that constructions grammaticalize. Aninvestigation of the histories of three English Partitive constructions in terms ofconstruction grammar, especially as represented by Radical Construction Gram-mar (Croft 2001), suggests some of the potential advantages and difficulties ofthis approach.

In this paper I provide overviews of earlier characterizations of the role ofconstructions in grammaticalization (section 2), and of construction grammar,especially Radical Construction Grammar (section 3). After a sketch of thedevelopment of the Complex Determiner/Quantifiers a kind/bit/shred of from[NP1 [of NP2]] > [[NP1 of] NP2], etc. (section 4), I assess some aspects ofa construction grammar approach to grammaticalization (section 5). Section 6provides a brief conclusion.

2. Some claims about constructions andgrammaticalization in earlier work

Meillet considered lexical items to be the source of most instances of gram-maticalization, but he also included word order and phrases, or lexical items incontext, as for example in his discussion of French suis I am in the context ofphrasal chez moi at home as opposed to lexical parti left (1958 [1912]: 131).Such phrases have been called constructions in the literature on grammatical-ization and have been seen as source as well as outcome of grammaticalization bye.g., Givon (1979), Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994), Heine (2003), Hopperand Traugott (2003 [1993]), Traugott (2003), and Himmelmann (2004). Somerepresentative statements are:

24 Elizabeth Closs Traugott

[G]rammaticalization does not merely seize a word or morpheme . . . but the wholeconstruction formed by the syntagmatic relations of the elements in question(Lehmann 1992: 406).

It is the entire construction, and not simply the lexical meaning of the stem,which is the precursor, and hence the source, of the grammatical meaning (Bybee,Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994: 11).

One of the key hypotheses in construction grammar, as in Cognitive Linguis-tics (e.g., Langacker 1987, 1991), has been that form and meaning are pairedas equals; meaning is not interpreted from syntax, as in generative grammar.Although the pairing of form and meaning has not always been explicitly envi-sioned in approaches to grammaticalization, nevertheless, correlations amonglevels of grammar have been considered as of the highest importance in mostwork on the subject.3 For example, Lehmann (1995 [1982]) proposes six param-eters which form a correlated set of paradigmatic and syntagmatic constraints(integrity, paradigmaticity, paradigmatic variability, structural scope, bonded-ness, syntagmatic variability), and says:

We may say that grammaticalization as a process consists in a correlative increaseor decrease of all the six parameters taken together (Lehmann 1995 [1982]: 124).

While semantics is backgrounded in Lehmanns work, it is foregrounded inmost functionalist work on grammaticalization (see e.g., Bybee, Perkins, andPagliuca 1994, Hopper and Traugott 2003 [1993], Himmelmann 2004, and es-pecially Heine, Claudi, and Hunnemeyer 1991). Furthermore, Bybee, Perkins,and Pagliuca hypothesize that there is coevolution of semantics, morphosyntax,and morphophonology:

Our hypothesis is that the development of grammatical material is characterizedby the dynamic coevolution of meaning and form (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca1994: 20).

Most recently, Himmelmann (2004) has considered the correlation of three typesof expansion (host-class, syntactic, semantic-pragmatic) essential to grammati-calization. His examples are from the development of articles out of demonstra-tives. He illustrates host-class expansion by the co-occurrence of articles withproper names or nouns designating unique entities (such as sun, sky, queen,etc.), i.e. nouns they typically did not co-occur with before; syntactic expan-sion by the emergence of articles with non-core (e.g., adpositional) argumentpositions later than core (subject, object) positions; and semantic/pragmaticexpansion by increase of usage contexts from deictic . . . anaphoric or recog-nitional reference to larger situation uses (the queen, the pub) and associatedanaphoric uses (a weddingthe bride) (Himmelmann 2004: 3233). According

The grammaticalization of NP of NP patterns 25

to Himmelmann, in grammaticalization all three contexts expand. However, inlexicalization the first does not expand, while syntactic or semantic-pragmaticcontexts may stay the same, expand, or narrow (Himmelmann 2004: 36).

Such correlational approaches to grammaticalization are consistent withmuch work on construction grammar, and at least in the case of Croft (2001)sRadical Construction Grammar, have in fact contributed to the development ofthe theory. It is therefore appropriate to consider to what extent constructiongrammar can inform and be informed by work on grammaticalization.

3. Construction grammar approaches

Key to most versions of construction grammar is the concept of grammar as aholistic and usage-based framework, i.e. no one level of grammar is autonomous,or core (see Fried and Ostman 2004: 24). Rather, semantics, morphosyntax,phonology, and in some models also pragmatics, work together in a construction.This is clearly very much in keeping with many approaches to grammaticaliza-tion. However, while the general position is that all of language is constructional,and that Construction Grammar can (or could) be a universal theory of gram-mar (Ostman and Fried 2004: 6), in practice earlier work, such as Goldberg(1995) and Kay and Fillmore (1999), focused primarily on patterns not strictlypredictable from their component parts. Indeed, the construction grammar pro-gram, as initiated by Goldberg, explicitly focused on idiosyncrasies:

[A] distinct construction is defined to exist if one or more of its properties arenot strictly predictable from knowledge of other constructions existing in thegrammar (Goldberg 1995: 4).

To the extent that the focus of data analysis is on idiosyncrasies, the objec-tives of practitioners of grammaticalization and construction grammar diverge,since most proponents of grammaticalization have sought to account for gen-eral, indeed universal, patterns in grammaticalization. Furthermore, the originsof grammaticalization have been sought in universal processes, whether gener-alized invited inferences arising in particular contexts of use (see e.g., Traugott2002, Hopper and Traugott 2003 [1993]: 8184), metaphorical extensions (e.g.,Heine, Claudi, and Hunnemeyer 1991), or the development of lexical into func-tional heads (e.g., Roberts and Roussou 2003). Nevertheless, some attempts toapproach grammaticalization, largely synchronically, from the perspective ofGoldbergs and Kay and Fillmores approaches to construction grammar havebeen made, see e.g., Wiemer and Bisang (2004), Noel (2005).


Recently, however, there has been a shift away from idiosyncrasy to construc-tions of all types (see e.g., Croft 2001, Goldberg 2003, 2006). This is encapsu-lated in the aphorism that its constructions all the way down (Goldberg 2006:xx). Because Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001) was developed inpart to account for grammaticalization, this model seems particularly appropri-ate for conceptualizing grammaticalization. In Radical Construction Grammarconstructions are symbolic units conceived as in Figure 1:

CONSTRUCTION

FORM

| symbolic correspondence link

(CONVENTIONAL) MEANING

syntactic propertiesmorphological properties phonological properties

semantic propertiespragmatic properties discourse-functional properties

Figure 1. Model of the symbolic structure of a construction in Radical ConstructionGrammar (Croft 2001: 18, Croft and Cruse 2004: 258; reprinted by permis-sion)

The link between form and conventional meaning is construed as internal tothe construction. Conceptual structures may be universal, but in other respectsconstructions are language-specific. With respect to grammaticalization, Radi-cal Construction Grammar assumes correlations such as have been outlined insection 2, e.g.:

a. In the grammaticalization process, the construction as a whole changes mean-ing (Croft 2001: 261).

b. The [newly conventionalized] construction is polysemous with respect to itsoriginal meaning . . . the new construction undergoes shifts in grammaticalstructure and behavior in keeping with its new function (Croft 2001: 127).

c. Extension of constructions to new uses is a change in the distribution of thatconstruction, and such changes are theorized to follow connected paths inconceptual space (Croft 2001: 130).

In the next two sections I briefly present some examples and raise questionsabout some of the assumptions that have been introduced in this section.4


4. Some examples: the development of three degree modifierconstructions

English has a large number of expressions with the form NP1 of NP2.5 Thissyntactic string has a wide array of functions, including locative the back of thehouse, partitive a piece of a plate, measure a cup of tea, approximative (a) sort ofa frog, and emotionally charged epithets such as an idiot of a teacher, as well assubjective genitives like a painting of (=by) Lee Krasner, and objective genitiveslike a portrait of a hunter. NP1 of NP2 strings therefore participate in a numberof different constructions, where syntax, meaning, and pragmatic function canbe construed at various degrees of granularity, ranging from general classes toindividual idiosyncratic combinations which differ with respect to the kind ofnoun or determiner that can realize either NP, or the pragmatics associated withthe string.

In this paper I consider a set of English binominal patterns, all constituencyconstructions (Zwicky 1994: 611):

(1) a. A side of the barnb. A kind of hawk b. (a) kind of a problemc. A bit of an apple c. a bit of a liard. A shred of a robe d. (not) a shred of honor

Syntactically patterns exemplified in (1 b.d.) undergo grammaticalization topatterns exemplified by (1 b.d.) via the changes in (2) (Cxn is short forconstruction):6

(2) [NP1 [of NP2]] > [[NP1 of] NP2]Head = NP1 > Head = NP2Partitive Cxn > Complex Determiner/Quantifier Cxn

There are at least three robust criteria for determining when the Complex Deter-miner/Quantifier (CompDet/Quant) construction, as opposed to the Partitive7

construction is involved (see Denison 2002, 2005):

a) agreement patterns: in the Partitive construction the initial determiner agreesin number with N1 (these kinds of skill), but in the CompDet/Quant construc-tion it agrees with N2 (these kind of skills), at least in colloquial use

b) in the Partitive construction NP2 may be preposed (of an apple a bit) but notin the CompDet/Quant construction (*of a liar a bit)

c) in the CompDet/Quant, but not in the Partitive construction, a N1 of can bereplaced by one word: a bit of/rather/quite a talker.


Some CompDet/Quant expressions develop further into Degree Modifiers whichserve as approximators (kind of ), or scalars (a bit) that can modify not only NPsbut also adjectives (kind of red, a bit red) and verbs (I kind of ran), and ultimatelyinto Free Adverbs that can be used without heads as responses to questions, asin Q. Did you like it? A. Kind of/(Not) a bit.

Semantically (1 a.d.) all involve part-whole relationships. Despite thesesimilarities, they have rather different histories. (1 a.) involves a part that is aspatial adjunct. The absence of an obviously quantificational inference seems tohave prevented side of from being reinterpreted as CompDet/Quant (in manylanguages such body-part expressions become case markers, see Svorou 1993,Heine 1997, Heine and Kuteva 2002). By contrast, in certain contexts (1.b.-d.) could be inferred to have quantificational properties and were reinterpretedas CompDet/Quant. Subsequently (1.b. and 1c.) were further reinterpretedas adverbial Degree Modifiers that scale their heads up or down on a scale ofcloseness to a prototype, but with different constraints, as summarized below(for fuller details, see Denison 2002 on a kind/sort of, Traugott Forthc a ona lot of, Forthc b on a lot/deal/piece of; also Brems 2003, Brems and Davidse2005 on the development of size nouns in, general). As Denison (2002) pointsout, all the constructions in question, and others of this type in English, dependcrucially on the reanalysis in Middle English after Step I of Old English of outof as the analytic equivalent of the genitive inflection, and eventually as thedefault preposition in English.

The following outlines are highly schematic and ignore many details, includ-ing distinctions among determiners within NP1 of NP2 patterns.

4.1. (a) kind of (see also a sort of )

(3) Step I, OE: gecynd kind, nature, (superordinate) class in a taxonomy: Crist . . . . wear acenned of menniscum gecynde of am Iudeiscum

cynne Christ . . . was born of human kind of that Judaic kin(c.1000LS, Maccabees 514 [DOE])

> Step II , early 16thC: kind individual included in a class/member ofclass, i.e. the superordinate term has been reinterpreted as a memberof the set: A newe kynde of sicknes came sodenly ... into this Isle (a1548 Hall

Chron., Hen. VII 3b [OED kind II.14a]) a Cotton or hempy kind of moss (c.1654 Howell, Lett. II. 54 [OED

hempy])> Step III , CompDet/Quant, early 18thC: member of class not possess-

ing full characteristics of the class:


kind of what dye call em ... a sort a Queen or Wife (1752 Foote,Taste II [OED what dye call em])

> Step IV , DegreeAdverb, late 18thC: I kind of love you [1804 Fessenden Poems 100 [OED kind 14d])

> Step V , Free Adverb, mid 19thC: Yes, kind of , sort of (1852 Aiken, Uncle Toms Cabin (dramatic

version) [UVa]); here kind of, sort of downtone the strength of theassent.

4.2. a bit (of) (see also a lot/bunch (of))

(4) Step I , OE: bita bite (out) of: Hu he wrec in adam e bite of an eappel How he avenged in Adam

the bite of an apple (c.1230 Ancr. 91a [MED]) is appyl a bete erof ou take this apple a bite thereof thou take

(= take a bite of this apple) (c.1475 Ludus C. 23/220 [MED]); notethe preposed NP2

> Step II , Partitive, 16thC: bite mouthful/morsel/small part of; bymetonymy from action of biting to result: Gif God was made of bits of breid (= bread) (c.1550 Scot. Poems

C. II. 197 [OED])> Step III , CompDet/Quant, mid 17thC: inadequate small part of:

if you think to scape with sending mee such bitts of letters you aremistaken (1653 DOsborne: Lett. 36.771 [PCEEC])

> Step IV , DegreeAdverb, mid 18thC: I would not be a bit wiser, a bit richer, a bit taller, a bit shorter,

than I am at this Instant (1723 Steele, The Conscious Lovers III.i[UVa])

You need not be a bit afraid of going on with me (1863 Trollope,Rachel Ray I [UVa])

> Step V , Free Adverb, 18thC; usually with not: A. Hear me. B. Not a bit (1739 Baker, The Cit Turnd Gentleman

[LION; English Prose Drama])

Note that the last two steps appear at about the same time, at the beginningof the 18thC. The sequence postulated is, however, not only logical, but alsosupported by evidence that a lot developed its Free Adverb function a hundredyears after its Degree Modifier one.


4.3. (not) a shred of (see also (not) an iota/drop/jot (of))

(5) Step I , OE schrede bit cut or broken off from fruit, vegetable, textile,coin, vessel: gif heo mei sparien eni poure schreaden if she may spare any poor

shreds (a1225 Ancrene Riwle 416 [OED])> Step II , Partitive, 14thC: small part of:

The white brent than rede, / That of him nas founden a schrede /Bot dust The white burned the red, so-that of him not-was founda shred but dust (= The white [dragon] burned the red so that notan iota was found of him except dust) (c1300 Arthur and Merlin1540 [MED and OED]); the preposing and the contrast with dustconfirm the Partitive reading

In the 16thC a shred of was generalized to language, mankind, nature;it was favored with but not restricted to mass nouns, and used to implyan insufficient exemplar compared to the expected norm: Suche shredis of sentence strowed in the shop of ancient Aritippus

Such scraps of wisdom strewn in ancient Aritippus shop (1529Skelton, Sp. Parrot 94 [OED])

> Step III , CompDet/Quant; usually used in negative polarity construc-tions (negatives, interrogatives, etc.), 19thC: some: Loto has not a shred of beauty (1867 Ouida, Under Two Flags

[LION; 19thC fiction])but it is not limited to negative polarity contexts: The multicultural cast gives a shred of substance to whats other-

wise a standard adolescent gross-out flick [2005 Google, Christ.Sci. Monitor])

5. Assessment of advantages and disadvantages of theconstruction grammar and radical constructiongrammar approaches to grammaticalization

5.1. A sketch of the main changes in terms of Crofts model

A first step in assessing the advantages and disadvantages of the Radical Con-struction Grammar approach is to consider how Figure 1 could be used to showcorrelations among the changes, from the perspective of both internal structureand relationships among the individual constructions. Figure 2 is an attempt tocapture some major aspects of the summaries in 4.1.4.3. Except for the left-hand item (Source, which is an eclectic group of [NP [of NP]] expressions that


PrePart Part DegMod/Q DegAdv FreeAdv Step I Step II Step III Step IIIa Step IV

SYMOPH > > > >>SMPG

DF

1000 1550 1750 1800 1850

SY

MOPH

> > > > >

SMPG

DF

1200 1550 1650 1750 1750

SYMOPH >

> > > >

> > > >

>

SMPG

DF

1300 1500 1850

Key: SY syntax = = = = carries over from prior cxn MO morphology +> implies PH phonology inad mem inadequate member SM semantics approx approximator PG pragmatics neg pol negative polarity DF discourse function pos evl positive evaluation

[NP1 [of NP2]] of proclitic a kind of

class of container

= = = = = = = == = = =

member of contained +> inad mem

[[NP1 of] NP2]of enclitic = = = =

downtoner approximator

Adv__A/V kind ofkinda

= = = = = = = =

hedge

Free Adv = = = == = = =

= = = = = = = =

tag, response

[NP1 [of NP2]] of proclitic a bite of

ablative act 3D shape

= = = = = = = =

a bit of

member of small part of +> inad mem

[[NP1 of] NP2]= = = == = = =

downtoner approx

Adv=== =

= = = =

= = = = = = = =

response; favors neg pol

[NP1 [of NP2]] of proclitic a shred of

elative

= = = = = = = == = = =

member of small part of +> inad mem

[[NP1 of] NP2]= = = == = = =

quantifier pos evl of NP2

favors neg pol

Adv__A a bit

= = = == = = = hedge

Figure 2. Model of the development of a kind of, a bit of, a shred of

are historically prior stages in English), the top line identifies what I considerto be functional superordinate macro-constructions: meaning-form pairingsthat are defined by function. The individual constructions, a kind of, a bit of, ashred of, as presented here, are at the lowest level in the hierarchy of relevantconstructions. However, they are representatives of sets of similar individualconstructions at an intermediary level that I will call meso-constructions. (A)kind of has as its congener (a) sort of, while a bit (of) has as its congeners a lot(of), a bunch (of), a tad (of ), and a shred of has a drop of, an iota of, a jot of.


In other words, there is a hierarchy of idealized category levels of which onlythe first and third are represented in Figure 2:i) macro-constructions (Partitive, CompDet/Quant, etc.),ii) meso-constructions (groupings of similarly-behaving constructions, e.g., a

kind of, a sort of, as a set distinct from the set a bit of, a lot of, etc.),iii) constructions (individual constructions such as a kind of, a bit of ). For

consistency I will call them micro-constructions.

These three levels are abstractions: types, as distinct from actual utterances.The latter are data-points, or constructs. In making these hierarchical distinc-tions, I follow the spirit of Fried and Ostman (2004) and add hierarchic levels toRadical Construction Grammar as discussed in Croft (2001). Note also that therepresentations in Figure 2 give a discreteness to the constructions under reviewthat is antithetical to the very slight distinctions among (micro-)constructions innear-continuous multidimensional space that Croft envisages both synchron-ically and diachronically (2001: 314). It also obscures the highly local structuralshifts normally subsumed under gradualness (in the sense of local step-by-stepdevelopment, see Lichtenberk 1991). However, schematic presentation is usefulto highlight analytic points.

In Figure 2 the phonology is represented by modern spelling. Discourse func-tion (DF) is only minimally specified.The DF is presumably meant to specify thelarger contexts in which constructions themselves appear (see Bergs 2005 on theimportance of investigating the contexts of constructions as factors and prod-uctsof grammaticalization). For example, it is presumably relevant to the devel-opment of the constructions in question that at Step I the constructs that came tobe used in the new ways that led to Step II, appear to have been used primarily inoblique position, in other words, in contexts where they were new information(focus) (this coincides with their indefiniteness). DF in Crofts model presum-ably also refers to external situational factors, but how to constrain such externalcontexts is difficult to determine for particular constructions such as these.

5.2. Some potential advantages of a Radical Construction Grammarapproach

While the correlations displayed in Figure 2 can be stated seriatim in any analy-sis, constructional or not, a constructional approach has the obvious advantageof allowing us to visualize the correlations simultaneously. They therefore allowus to evaluate instantaneously various hypotheses that have been put forwardabout grammaticalization. For example, they support the hypothesis cited at thebeginning that [i]t is the entire construction, and not simply the lexical meaning


of the stem, which is the precursor, and hence the source, of the grammaticalmeaning (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994: 11).

However, other hypotheses are called into question, most notably the hy-pothesis, also cited at the beginning, that there is coevolution of form andmeaning (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994: 20), at least in a strict interpre-tation of simultaneity.8 Note that phonological strings remain constant throughSteps II III, and IV V. Another hypothesis that is falsified is that there is acycle from syntax > morphology > 0 that is a cause for later renewal (amongmany works citing loss as a cause for renewal, see Heine and Reh 1984; alsovan Gelderen 2005 on loss of French ne via ne pas > pas [Jespersens Cy-cle]). The Partitive and adverbial Degree Modifier constructions are shown tohave been repeatedly renewed over a short period of time, without prior or evensubsequent loss of competing constructions. None of the construction-types il-lustrated disappears, although some of the particular meanings attested at StageI do.9 Therefore, it is still possible to refer to a class of things, even if the wordkind is not used with this meaning, and to a bite out of an apple, even thoughbite and bit have diverged phonologically.

Constructions serve as attractor sets and give substance to the observationthat gradualness is not a slippery slope but rather has cluster-points (Hopperand Traugott 2003 [1993]: 6). Noel (2005) suggests constructions are respon-sible for individual grammaticalizations, and Croft (2001: 127) that the newconstruction at least partially imposes the conceptualization of its original struc-ture and function. In other words, constructions highlight the force of analogyrather than reanalysis. Each entering item undergoes local reanalysis, but the at-tracting force is analogy, alignment with an already existing pattern (seeTraugottForthc b).10 From this perspective, we can see family resemblances emergingat various levels of abstraction: Partitive versus CompDet/Quant versus DegreeModifier, or within each of these construction-types, sets that behave in similarways but yet are different. The congeners of (a) kind of and a bit (of) differ inwhether the article or of has a phonological reflex and in the type of DegreeModifier they become (approximator vs. downtoner). By contrast, a shred of andits congeners cannot be used as Degree Modifiers (a bit bare, but not *a shredbare), or as Free Adverbs in answer to a question. But they share with a bit (of)the propensity to be used in negative polarity contexts, a factor which indicatesoverlap with another set of constructions.11 It appears then that the impositionby a construction is only partial.A question to be researched is at what hierarchiclevel this imposition (to the extent that it occurs) is most likely to occur.

The concept of attractor sets has the potential to allow for detailed studyof the degree to which any particular lower-level construction is firmly estab-lished in all six dimensions (see Figure 1) of the higher construction, in other


words, how well it fits the characteristics of the next higher-level construction.Once attraction/analogy has occurred, it should be possible to track the de-gree to which syntactic, morphological, phonological, semantic, pragmatic, anddiscourse-functional properties have been attracted. We can call this paradig-matic (vertical) entrenchment. While measures of the strength of associationon this paradigmatic dimension appear not to have been studied yet, suggestivework has been done on synchronic syntactic (horizontal) entrenchment: thestrength of association between a schematic slot in a (meso-)construction andthe lexical fillers of that slot (see Geeraerts, Tummer, and Speelman 2005 oncollostructions, citing concepts in Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004; also Hoff-mann 2004, Rice and Newman 2004). In diachronic terms this could be thoughtof as assessment of the strength of individual host-class expansions (see Hilpert2007). One could, for example, measure the strength of association over timebetween a bit of and apple, bread, liar, or evidence, compared with that of ashred of with the same NP2s. One could also perhaps extend the technique tomeasuring changing streng

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