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Review of Cognitive Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Culture in a radically usage-based model of language change, with special reference to constructional attrition

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This article offers theoretical and programmatic reflection on how the impact of culture on language change should be accounted for from a radically usage-based diachronic construction grammatical perspective, with a focus on how cultural change can cause constructions to disappear from a language. It approaches this question through an assessment of how culture is incorporated in Schmid’s (2020) Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization model of ‘the dynamics of the linguistic system’. Against the backdrop of various proposals on the effect of ‘democratization’ in Anglo-Saxon culture on subtractive historical developments in the modal domain of English, and based on a study of interpersonal variation in the intrapersonal longitudinal development of a declining modal construction, the paper argues that the influence of culture on language change is mediated by entrenchment and that culture has a more extensive impact on entrenchment than the EC-model currently allows for.
Keywords: diachronic construction grammar, usage-based model, Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization model, individual differences, constructional attrition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Constructional attrition and culture in the EC-model
    • 2.1A summary of the EC-model
    • 2.2Constructional attrition in the EC-model
    • 2.3Culture in the EC-model
  • 3.Democratization and the attrition of modal constructions
    • 3.1Attrition in the English modal domain
    • 3.2Democratization as an (independent) cultural factor
  • 4.In favour of a bigger role for culture in the entrenchment component of the EC-model
    • 4.1Individual differences in the decline of the Deontic nci construction
    • 4.2Culture as a force on entrenchment
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 May 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00152.noe
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