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Diachronic Construction Grammar
Edited by Jóhanna Barðdal, Elena Smirnova, Lotte Sommerer and Spike Gildea
[Constructional Approaches to Language 18] 2015
► pp. 139–172

Irregular morphology in regular syntactic patterns

A case of constructional re-alignment

| Charles University, Prague

In exploring the multi-dimensional and incremental nature of grammatical change that emerges from the recurrent interaction between a form and its environment, this study demonstrates that a systematic examination of morphological irregularity can enrich our understanding of the anatomy of grammatical change. The empirical focus is the functional crystallization of a particular type of participial adjective (PA) in Old Czech, as manifested in morphologically irregular tokens of this category. The analysis of their behavior vis-à-vis the regular PAs in comparable environments (clausal vs. adnominal constructions) shows that the two formation types are both sensitive to roughly the same set of features in developing a different functional status (secondary predicate vs. adnominal modifier), but each ‘compensates’ for the mismatch between its morphology and each syntactic function in a characteristically different way. At the theoretical level, the analysis leads toward clarifying the content of the notion ‘constructionalization’ as a hypothetically distinct type of change, and offers some thoughts on spelling out the role of constructions in grammatical reorganization.

Published online: 30 July 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.18.05fri
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Hartmann, Stefan
2021. Diachronic Cognitive Linguistics. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 9:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Herbst, Thomas & Judith Huber
2022. Diachronic Construction Grammar – Introductory Remarks to This Special Issue. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 70:3 ► pp. 213 ff. DOI logo
Johnson, Cynthia A., Peter Alexander Kerkhof, Leonid Kulikov, Esther Le Mair & Jóhanna Barðdal
2019. Argument structure, conceptual metaphor and semantic change. Diachronica 36:4 ► pp. 463 ff. DOI logo
Kuo, Yueh Hsin
2020. Reinforcement by realignment in diachronic construction grammar. Constructions and Frames 12:2 ► pp. 206 ff. DOI logo
Torres-Martínez, Sergio
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