The real-time dynamics of the individual and the community in grammaticalization

Abstract

Grammaticalization research has led to important insights into the driving processes of innovation and propagation. Yet what has generally been lacking is a principled way of analyzing their interaction. Research into innovation focuses on the role of individual language users and tends to take a more qualitative approach, while propagation is typically studied in terms of the community grammar and tends to be more statistically driven. We propose an approach that bridges the two. Drawing on a much larger historical data set than is commonly done, our study shows how a highresolution analysis of semantic and morphosyntactic behavior can be married to statistics, resulting in a method that measures the degree of grammaticalization at the level of single attestations. We apply this method to the early grammaticalization of be going to inf, showing how a communal increase breaks down into different rates of change in the run-up to, the middle of, and right after conventionalization. Additionally, we trace lifespan change of individual authors longitudinally. While not robustly in evidence, there are hints of postadolescence reanalysis in the run-up generation, and of increased realization of innovative features in the middle generation.*

How gradual change progresses: The interaction between convention and innovation

“…Third, the assumed interdependence of the steps of change should also be visible over speakers' lifetimes (cf. Petré & Van de Velde, 2014). As pointed out, for 38 speakers, the dataset contains observations over more than one decade.…”

The extravagant progressive: an experimental corpus study on the history of emphatic [beVing]

“…The corpus consists of the collected works of ten prolific authors from two different generations born in the seventeenth century, at the time when the extension of [ be V ing ] to progressive semantics in present-tense main clauses was gaining momentum. The texts are partly drawn from Early Modern Multiloquent Authors (EMMA, Petré et al 2017), partly from the corpus used in Petré & Van de Velde (2017). The main criterion for inclusion was the size of each author's corpus, which was set to minimally 500,000 words.…”

Individuality in syntactic variation: An investigation of the seventeenth-century gerund alternation

“…However, in recent years, a growing group of historical (socio-)linguists has placed more explicit emphasis on using corpus data to study individual language use (e. g., papers in this issue; Schmid and Mantlik 2015;Feltgen et al 2017;Hundt et al 2017;Petré 2017;Petré and Van de Velde 2018). In two notable studies, Nevalainen et al (2011) and Baxter and Croft (2016) set out to investigate how individuals behave with respect to morphological and syntactic variation that is diachronically unstable at the population level.…”