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Modality and Diachronic Construction Grammar
Edited by Martin Hilpert, Bert Cappelle and Ilse Depraetere
[Constructional Approaches to Language 32] 2021
► pp. 13–52

Contractions, constructions and constructional change

Investigating the constructionhood of English modal contractions from a diachronic perspective

| Kiel University

In this paper, I argue that construction grammarians may have to consider integrating modal contractions into the English modal system as distinct constructions rather than variants of their uncontracted forms. Based on data from COHA, it can be shown that the contractions investigated here have emancipated themselves from the full forms both in terms of relative usage frequency as well as function over the past two centuries, thus yielding a series of constructional changes. From a usage-based, constructionist perspective, these results contribute to modelling the modal network as possibly represented in the minds of speakers, but they also support the understanding that this network appears to be much more heterogeneous than perhaps desired (by some linguists).

Keywords: modal contractions, Construction Grammar, constructional change, COHA
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.English modal verb contractions across textbooks, grammars and corpus-based studies
  • 3.The constructionhood of modal contractions: Three case studies
    • 3.1Formal properties of contracted modal cxns
      • 3.1.1The negative contractions can’t and won’t
      • 3.1.2The enclitic ’d
    • 3.2Corpus selection and outline for data exploration
    • 3.3Relative frequency distribution across time
    • 3.4Changes in the collostructional behavior of the alternations
    • 3.5Modelling speakers’ choice between a contracted modal cxn and its full form
  • 4.From contractions to constructions
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora, software, packages and scripts
  • References
Published online: 12 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.32.02dau
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