A reflection on constructionalization and constructional borrowing, inspired by an emerging Dutch replica of the ‘time’-away construction

Abstract

While recent years have seen an increased interest for the potential effects of language contact on the formal and/or semantic properties of constructions, existing case studies of (potentially) contact-induced change in individual constructions (e.g. Pietsch 2010; Höder 2012, 2014; Van de Velde and Zenner 2010; Colleman and Noël 2014, etc.) have so far made little impact on the booming field of diachronic construction grammar at large, i.e. they have stayed largely under the radar of constructionist theorizing about language change. The present paper reflects on the theoretical significance of a recent innovation in Dutch, viz. the emergence of an argument structure construction that mirrors the form and semantics of the English ‘time’-awayconstruction first described in Jacken-doff (1997). While it is fairly uncontroversial that English influence hassomethingto do with this innovation, it is by no means easy to determine exactly what has happened. Even though an alternative scenario, in which the new Dutch pattern developed out of pre-existing Dutch pattern featuringweg‘away’, cannot be ruled out, I will argue that one plausible way of accounting for the observed facts is to assume that a ready-made English form-meaning unit was copied into Dutch. On this view, the observed change would count as an instance of instantaneous grammatical constructionalization.

Most borrowable construction ever! A large-scale approach to contact-induced pragmatic change

“…Precisely how we can determine whether a specific constructional change in Language 1 is influenced by a related construction in Language 2, is an unresolved matter in linguistics (see Poplack et al 2012, Colleman 2016. For this paper, we combine the principles of variationist linguistics with a pragmatic analysis of the construction under scrutiny (compare Levey et al 2013).…”

“…To describe the hypothesized changes in the ooit/ever construction, we follow the growing field of Construction Grammar. This approach provides us with an insightful framework to study contactinduced variation and change (see Höder 2012, Colleman 2016, Doğruöz & Backus 2009. The basic tenets of Construction Grammar are well known (see Goldberg 1995Goldberg , 2006Croft &Cruse 2004 andHoffmann &Trousdale 2013): language is seen as a network of constructions.…”

Oor feekse en helleveë

“…Langacker (1987) se beskrywing van die grammatika as 'n "structured inventory of symbolic units" wat in dinamiese netwerke aan mekaar verbind is, word meer as 30 jaar later steeds as een van die basiese uitgangspunte van gebruiksgebaseerde konstruksiegrammatika beskou. Oor die afgelope dekade het die konsep konstruksionalisering ook deeglik posgevat in diachroniese konstruksiegrammatika (Colleman, 2015(Colleman, , 2016Enghels & Garachana Camarero, 2021;Hilpert, 2013;Traugott & Trousdale, 2013).…”