Diachronic Construction Grammar

0455667 - ÚJČ 2016 RIV NL eng M - Monography Chapter
Fried, Mirjam
Irregular morphology in regular syntactic patterns: A case of constructuional re-alignment.
Diachronic Construction Grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2015 - (Barddal, J.; Smirnova, E.; Sommerer, L.; Gildea, S.), s. 139-172. ISBN 978-90-272-0440-0
R&D Projects: GA ČR GAP406/11/2021
Keywords : irregular morphology * construction grammar * constructionalization * constructional mismatch * grammatical change
Subject RIV: AI - Linguistics

In exploring the multi-dimensional and incremental nature of grammatical change that emerges from the recurrent interaction between a form and its environment, the study demonstrates that a systematic examination of morphological irregularity can enrich our understanding of the anatomy of grammatical change. The empirical focus is the functional crystallization of a particular type of participial adjective (PA) in Old Czech, as manifested in morphologically irregular tokens of this category. The analysis of their behavior vis-a-vis the regular PAs in comparable environments (clausal vs. adnominal constructions) shows that the two formation types are both sensitive to roughly the same set of features in developing a different functional status (secondary predicate vs. adnominal modifier), but each 'compensates' for the mismatch between its morphology and each syntactic function in a characteristically different way. At the theoretical level, the analysis leads toward clarifying the content of the notion 'constructionalization' as a hypothetically distinct type of change, and offers some thoughts on spelling out the role of constructions in grammatical reorganization.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0256286