Paradigms lost – paradigms regained

Based on Diewald (2009, 2015a, 2017), it is claimed that the notion of paradigm needs to be introduced into constructional accounts, as otherwise the essence of grammaticalization cannot be properly captured in construction grammar. It is suggested to define grammatical paradigms as a new node type, a “hyper-construction”, which represents the categorical, non-gradient specifics of grammatical meaning. This line of argumentation is supported by a discussion of changes in the German and English modality, tense, determiner, and number paradigms. Independent arguments for the psychological reality of paradigms come from the study of implicational relations in inflectional morphology and diachronic phenomena such as layering, suppletion, and paradigm pressure.