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Grammaticalization meets Construction Grammar
Edited by Evie Coussé, Peter Andersson and Joel Olofsson
[Constructional Approaches to Language 21] 2018
► pp. 277–311

A Radical Construction Grammar approach to construction split in the diachrony of the spatial particles of Ancient Greek

Some theoretical preliminaries

Within the context of a Radical Construction Grammar approach to grammaticalization, this paper presents construction split as a model of the diachrony of spatial particle constructions from Proto-Indo-European to Ancient Greek, accounting for the behaviour of Greek preposition and prefix constructions. The paper discusses some theoretical preliminaries for the RCG approach and for long-term construction developments, with special reference to phenomena in Ancient Greek. An argument is made for central tenets of RCG: there is no structure external to language-specific constructions; language change is fundamentally a matter of degree and ultimately dependent on the pragmatics of discourse; constructions are defined in terms of cues. This is framed in a conceptual discussion on the complementarity of grammaticalization and construction perspectives.
Keywords: Radical Construction Grammar, grammaticalization, utterance selection, construction split, Articulatory Phonology, Ancient Greek, spatial particles
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A RCG approach to the units of grammatical change
    • 2.1Utterances as constructions, constructions as cues
    • 2.2Deconstructing syntactic relations: Adjacency, agreement, linear order
  • 3.Construction split
    • 3.1Preliminaries
    • 3.2Some phonological underpinnings of grammaticalization
    • 3.3A grammaticalization mechanism for split
    • 3.4Split of adpositions and affixes
  • 4. The diachrony of the spatial particle constructions in Ancient Greek
    • 4.1Spatial particles in Proto-Indo-European
    • 4.2Construction developments in Ancient Greek
    • 4.3Grammaticalization of aspectuality in discourse
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.21.c10
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