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In:Diachronic Construction Grammar
Edited by Jóhanna Barðdal, Elena Smirnova, Lotte Sommerer and Spike Gildea
[Constructional Approaches to Language 18] 2015
► pp. 107–138

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The influence of constructions in grammaticalization

Revisiting category emergence and the development of the definite article in English

 | University of Vienna, Vienna
Published online: 30 July 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.18.04som
In this chapter it will be argued that a proper understanding of grammaticalization has to take into account the driving force of lexically underspecified constructions. Using evidence from an extensive qualitative and quantitative corpus study in the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE), it will be suggested that the OE demonstrative se developed into the definite article due to the emergence of an abstract, syntactic, and lexically underspecified macro-construction with a determination slot for marking definiteness in early Old English. This slot becomes a functionally exploitable structural category itself, which leads to the recruitment of the demonstrative as a default slot filler (= definite article). What has traditionally been interpreted as a case of grammaticalization on the morphosyntactic level (OE demonstrative se > ModE article the) is at the same time a case of “grammatical constructionalization.” The demonstrative does not grammaticalize on its own but in the context of an emerging schematic construction, which is formalized as the [[Xdeterminative]DETERMINATION + [Zcn]HEAD]NP{def}– construction. The emergence of this construction is best explained by a usage-based, form-driven, analogical model of morphosyntactic change which takes into account the frequency of linguistic surface forms (i.e. concrete tokens) and the formal influence of taxonomically related constructions.
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