What does solid spelling reveal about cognition? Evidence from Middle Low German

This paper investigates the diachronic evolution of lexically complex graphemic units in Middle Low German – sequences that once occurred written as one word, but from today’s perspective are considered separate linguistic units. Examples are enwolde ‘did not want’ or isset ‘is it’. This phenomenon has received little attention, although it gives direct insight into the word concept of German and its diachronic change. The central question is what favors the perception of multiple words as a unit. Data from the Reference Corpus Middle Low German/Low Rhenish (1200–1650) show that it is mainly function words that occur in lexically complex graphemic units. Moreover, this study shows that besides from prosodic patterns, agreement and government relations reinforce lexical sequences to be perceived as linguistic units.

The diachronic development of the verbal bracket construction in German

This work-in-progress paper reports the first results of a study dedicated to the investigation of the cognitive status of the sentence bracket construction in German. The project aims at a comprehensive corpus analysis of diachronic data from the Early New High German period (ENHG, 1350–1650). The study focuses on the syntactic structures of German main clauses and is guided by two general research questions. First, on the conceptual level, it addresses the question of whether the sentence bracket construction can be considered a construction in its own right. Second, the paper deals with the issue of the diachronic source(s) of the sentence bracket construction. Based on ENHG corpus data, it examines the role of grammaticalization of verbal auxiliaries in the development of the bracket construction. On a more general level, the objective of the paper is to encourage the discussion on the cognitive status of syntactic phenomena which often escape a straightforward modelling in cognitive and constructionist terms, as they do not seem to bear a particular dedicated semantic and/or functional value.

Diachronic Cognitive Linguistics

Diachronic studies have played an increasingly important role in recent Cognitive Linguistics. This introductory paper provides an overview of some major lines of research in this field, starting with the inherently panchronic approach that characterizes most flavors of usage-based theory from Cognitive Grammar to recent complex adaptive systems approaches. In particular, the “constructionist turn” and the “quantitative turn” in Diachronic Cognitive Linguistics are discussed in detail. Diachronic Cognitive Linguistics is introduced as a multi-faceted, dynamic framework that aims at providing a holistic and nuanced picture of the complex interplay between language, cognition, and cultural evolution. In addition, this paper introduces the contributions to the present volume in some detail and discusses their relation to current research trends and paradigms within the broader framework of Diachronic Cognitive Linguistics.

Of travels and travails: The role of semantic typology, argument structure constructions, and language contact in semantic change

This paper is an investigation into the role of argument structure constructions as catalysts or blockers of lexical semantic change. It presents a case study of the divergent semantic development of French travailler ‘work’ and English travel ‘journey’ from their shared earlier meaning ‘labour, toil’. This divergence is shown to not be random: It can be explained as a product of the different intransitive motion constructions (IMCs) and different communicative habits in these two languages. Consequently, the development of travailler ‘journey’ in the Anglo-Norman dialect of French can be understood as the result of contact influence of Middle English. By pointing to similar instances in which verbs meaning ‘labour, toil’ have acquired a polysemous ‘motion’ sense in languages with an IMC that can coerce non-motion verbs into contextual motion readings, the paper argues that this is most probably a regular semantic trajectory in satellite-framing, manner-conflating languages.

The problem of universalism in (diachronic) cognitive linguistics

Modern cognitive science and cognitive linguistics are characterized by a universalist perspective, i.e., they are investigating features and principles of cognition which can be found in all members of the human species. This in turn means that they should not only be relevant for present-day cognizers and language users, but also historically. This theoretical, programmatic paper first explores this notion of universalism in cognitive science and cognitive linguistics and suggests that the notion of cognitive universalism should be supplemented by perspectives from cognitive sociology and social cognition. These offer a middle ground in that they look at cognition as it is socially and culturally grounded, and hence inter-individual, but yet not universal. A final section on diachronic cognitive linguistics shows that in language history all three perspectives, individual, social, and universal, can have their place, and that one line of future research should explore this new perspective of social cognition in language history in order to arrive at a fuller picture of historical language users and their cognition.

Morphosyntactic vagueness and directionality

This paper shows that morphosyntactic vagueness exists between several minor morphosyntactic categories in Mandarin (modal, protasis connective and types of classifier): these categories share formal distributional properties and functional similarities such that their morphosyntactic distinctions become neutralized in some contexts. Consequently, bidirectionality rather than unidirectionality may characterize these categories diachronically. This paper proposes that any direction of change that is motivated by morphosyntactic vagueness should be regarded as regular and systematic, even if it is not unidirectional, and identifies some directions for future research on morphosyntactic vagueness in diachrony.

Variation and change in idiolects: Tracing a lexical substitution inside a psychiatric hospital around 1900

This paper presents a case study on the lexical substitution of Wärter (‘guard’) by Pfleger (‘nurse’) in records from a southern German psychiatric hospital around 1900. Its goal is to shed light on language variation and change from the perspective of idiolects. Therefore, I analyse how this change, implemented by official documents in 1876, spreads ‘from above’ into the written language of 108 patients and 10 family members. The results show a quick implementation of the new variant, comprising its semantic generalization and the near-complete replacement of the older variant. This process can sometimes be observed in individual lifespan changes, while other writers continue using Wärter in idiosyncratic ways. Finally, a comparison with two more general corpora (DWDS and Google Books) shows that this lexical change appears delayed and less consistent outside the hospital context.

The emergence of light verb constructions

This paper takes a data-driven perspective on the grammaticalization of German light verb constructions (LVCs) with kommen ‘come’. LVCs are complex predicates consisting of a semantically light verb and an eventive noun realized within a phrasal complement, e.g. German zur Vollendung kommen, lit. ‘come into completion’. We assume that (at least) two different processes interact in the emergence of LVCs: the desemanticization of the verb on the one hand and the realization of eventive nouns in the complement-PP of the verb on the other. In order to check whether these processes take place in parallel or if one precedes the other, we conduct a corpus study based on samples from the Reference Corpus of Middle High German (REM) and the Bonn Early New High German Corpus (FnhdC), focusing on the animacy and concreteness of the subject NPs and the PP-internal nouns. Our results indicate that we can first observe an increase in the use of abstract nouns in subject position and that only later – from Middle High German to Early New High German – eventive nouns in PP-internal position become more frequent.

The syntax of metaphor

This paper analyses diachronic changes which result from metaphorical extension. Its aim is to assess whether such semantic shifts may lead to further semantic and syntactic differentiation between the verb senses and whether they can be described as shifts away or towards prototypical transitivity (cf. Hopper & Thompson 1980). It focusses on changes the verb derail underwent in the 19th and 20th centuries. In a corpus-based analysis, it utilises CART trees and a random forest to determine which syntactic and semantic properties differentiate literal and metaphorical uses of derail. Results reveal a syntactic shift from transitive to intransitive in the older literal construction which hardly affects the younger metaphorical one. This indicates that differentiation can be an epiphenomenon of semantic shifts.