Analogy as driving force of language change: a usage-based approach towoanddaclauses in 17th and 18th century German

Abstract

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 (or semantically vague), 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.

Emerging into your family of constructions

“…Unlike the reviewer, we regard w-auch immer subordinators as the most likely model of analogy for the [IRR w] schema. We will be unable to do justice to the role of analogy in the emergence of [IRR w] and its subschemata in the present paper, but in this case it would certainly be an exaggeration to describe analogy as the "driving force of language change", as plausibly asserted by Gillmann (2021) in reference to a type of subordinate clause in historical German where emergence from discourse is not at issue.…”