Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Graeme Trousdale develop an approach to language change
based on construction grammar. Construction grammar is a theory of signs construed at the …

This book offers reconstructions of various syntactic properties of Proto-Germanic, including
verb position in main clauses, the syntax of the wh-system, and the (non-) occurrence of null …

The main goal of this chapter is to discuss the value of the Construction Grammar framework
to solving perceived problems with diachronic syntax. As such, one part of this chapter …

Construction grammar is an approach to language that posits that units and structures in
language can be exhaustively described as pairings between form and meaning. These …

This dissertation investigates the nature of the Philippine-type voice system and two
associated diachronic questions:(i) what is the nature of noun-verb (nominalizer-voice affix) …

Based on crosslinguistic data and the postulation of six language types, the Negative
Existential Cycle was proposed by Croft (1991) as a way of modeling the evolution of …

In this article we show that the semantic characterization of the English ditransitive
construction, primarily based on the concept of transfer and generally assumed in the …

This article investigates the terminology and the processes underlying the fundamental
historical relations between words in linguistics (cognacy) and genes in biology (homology) …

As the historical linguistic community is well aware, reconstructing semantics is a notoriously
difficult undertaking. Such reconstruction has so far mostly been carried out on lexical items …

This chapter examines the application of the constructional approach to syntactic
reconstruction. It argues that a constructional approach to language is an optimal theoretical …