Full Description
After several decades in scientific purgatory, language evolution has reclaimed its place as one of the most important branches in linguistics. This renewed interest is accompanied by powerful new methods for making empirical observations. At the same time, construction grammar is increasingly embraced in all areas of linguistics as a fruitful way of making sense of all these new data, and it has enthused formal and computational linguists, who have developed sophisticated tools for exploring issues in language processing and learning. Separately, linguists and computational linguists are able to explain which changes take place in language and how these changes are possible. When working together, however, they can also address the question of why language evolves over time and how it emerged in the first place. This special issue therefore brings together key contributions from both fields to put evidence and methods from both perspectives on the table.
Contents
1. Computational construction grammar and constructional change (by Beuls, Katrien); 2. Chopping down the syntax tree: What constructions can do instead (by Trijp, Remi van); 3. For a radically usage-based diachronic construction grammar (by Noel, Dirk); 4. Tracking shifts in the literal versus the intensifying fake reflexive resultative construction: The development of intensifying dood 'dead' in 19th-20th Century Dutch (by Gyselinck, Emmeline); 5. A reflection on constructionalization and constructional borrowing, inspired by an emerging Dutch replica of the 'time'-away construction (by Colleman, Timothy); 6. Unidirectionality as a cycle of convention and innovation: Micro-changes in the grammaticalization of [be going to INF] (by Petre, Peter); 7. A boy named Sue: The semiotic dynamics of naming and identity (by Steels, Luc); 8. A gentle introduction to the minimal Naming Game (by Baronchelli, Andrea); 9. The evolution of Lexical Usage Profiles in social networks (by Schaden, Gerhard); 10. Modelling pronominal gender agreement in Dutch: From a syntactic to a semantic strategy (by Radulescu, Roxana); 11. Embodied cognitive semantics for quantification (by Pauw, Simon); 12. Why are embodied experiments relevant to cognitive linguistics? (by Valenzuela, Javier)
