Dutch, like other Germanic languages, disposes of two strategies to express past tense: the strong inflection (e.g., rijden – reed ‘drive – drove’) and the weak inflection (spelen – speelde ‘play – played’). This distinction is for the most part lexically determined in that each verb occurs in one of the two inflections. Diachronically the system is in flux though, with the resilience of some verbs being mainly driven by frequency. Synchronically this might result in variable verbs (e.g., schuilen – (...) schuilde/school ‘hide – hid’ or raden – raadde/ried ‘guess – guessed’). This diachronic (1300–2000) corpus study shows that this variation is not haphazard, but that semantic factors are at play. We see two such effects. First of all, synchronically, the variation is exapted in an iconic manner to express aspect: durative meanings tend to be expressed by longer verb forms and punctual meanings tend to be expressed by shorter verb forms. Secondly, we see that metaphorical meanings come to be associated within obsolescent inflectional forms, as predicted by Kuryłowicz’s “fourth law of analogy”. (shrink)

De Smet et al. (2018) propose that when functionally similar constructions come to overlap, analogical attraction may occur. So may differentiation, but this process involves attraction to other subnetworks and is both “accidental” and “exceptional”. I argue that differentiation plays a considerably more significant role than De Smet et al. allow. My case study is the development of the dative and benefactive alternations. The rise of the dative alternation (e.g., “gave the Saxons land” ∼ “gave land to the Saxons”) has (...) been shown to occur in later Middle English between 1400 and 1500 (Zehentner 2018). Building on Zehentner and Traugott (2020), the rise of the benefactive alternation (e.g., “build her a house” ∼ “build a house for her”) in Early Modern English c1650 is analyzed from a historical constructionalist perspective and compared with the rise of the dative alternation. The histories of the alternations exemplify the rise of functionally similar constructions that overlap, and show that differentiation from each other plays as large a role as attraction. Both attraction and differentiation occur at several levels of abstraction: verb-specific constructions, schemas and larger systemic changes. (shrink)

This paper presents a case study conducted on 17th and 18th century German corpora, confirming that both attraction and differentiation are important mechanisms of change, which interact with socio-symbolic properties of constructions. The paper looks at the frequencies and semantics of wo ‘where’ clauses at the beginning of the New High German period, which are compared to the frequencies and semantics of the connector da ‘there, since’ in the same period. The study reveals that the subordinating connectors wo and da (...) overlapped in their functions and were highly polysemous, establishing spatial, temporal, causal, conditional, and contrast links between clauses. This suggests that the connectors had become functionally similar by means of mutual attraction; however, they differed in that they belonged to different registers. Over the course of the 18th century, the polysemy of wo and da clauses reduced. Being gradually confined to one single meaning, the connectors became less similar. This differentiation occurs because the connectors aligned to distinct high-level schemas in the associative network. The study confirms that analogy is crucial to both attraction and differentiation of functionally overlapping constructions. While attraction involves analogy of specific instances of constructions, differentiation occurs in analogy to high-level abstract constructions in the associative network. (shrink)

Linguists have debated whether complex prepositions deserve a constituent status, but none have proposed a dynamic model that can both predict what construal a given pattern imposes and account for the emergence of non-spatial readings. This paper reframes the debate on constituency as a justification of the constructional status of complex prepositional patterns from a historical perspective. It focuses on the Prep NP IL of NP lm construction, which denotes a relation of internal location between a located entity and a (...) reference entity. Four subschemas of the Internal Location construction are examined: middle cxn, center cxn, heart cxn, and midst cxn. All occurrences are extracted from the COHA, along with their co-occurring landmark NPs. Using vocabulary growth curves, all patterns are shown to be productive over the whole period covered by the corpus, although at different levels. Using word2vec, a semantic vector space with the landmark collocates of each pattern is made. Curves indexed on association scores are plotted to see how densely semantic areas have been populated across four consecutive periods: 1810s–1860s, 1870s–1910s, 1920s–1970s, and 1980s–2000s. Two divisions of labor have emerged. midst cxn and heart cxn are in complementary distribution and operate mostly at the level of abstract locations whereas middle cxn and center cxn are in parallel distribution and operate at the level of concrete locations. (shrink)