The history of the Modern English 'way'-construction is traced to show the relevance of a diachronic perspective to related general issues of synchronic grammatical representation. A corpus of 1,211 examples from the Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM and 1,047 contemporary examples from the Oxford University Press is used to argue that the evolution of the 'way'-construction supports a usage-based model of grammar in which linguistic knowledge is organized according to two principles: (global) schema extraction and (local) analogical extension. The modern 'way'-construction is asserted to have evolved through the use of this noun as the direct object of a verb of either motion, path creation, or possession in three distinct, independently motivated constructions and leading to separate analogical extensions. Two of these proto-constructions, pertaining to means and manner, are examined. The complementary roles of schema extraction and analogical extension in innovation and imitation are illuminated by the interaction of two principles: (1) the production principle in which utterances should resemble things that the speaker has heard previously; and (2) the comprehension principle, in which representation should capture similarities across experienced usages. (Copyright 1997, Sociological Abstracts, Inc., all rights reserved.) (L. R. Hunter in LLBA 1997, vol. 31, n. 4)