Acknowledgments

This book is the outcome of collective research coordinated since 2015 at the Lattice and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure with several researchers, post-doctoral researchers and colleagues around a Labex project. During the summer of 2011 at the LSA Summer institute in Boulder (Colorado, United States), Eve Sweetser and I taught a class and that LSA Institute was a special place for many discussions with scholars of the cognitive community. Before that, while I was a visiting researcher at Berkeley, encountering Charles J. Fillmore, was – as for many of us – a wonderful gift in my life and a great motivation to conduct further research in Cognition exploring either frames or constructions. Most of all, I must express my gratitude to Elizabeth Traugott, who, when I visited her in her office once at Stanford, gave me a paper on linguistic change and said “I hope this will be of interest to you”. My Master’s research had already focused on language change, but from a lexical point of view. This motivation of studying language change has now enlarged to encompass lexicon and grammar, and has turned towards collaborations involving other languages of the world thanks to all the wonderful researchers I also met at the ICLC cognitive linguistics conferences and the ICCG conferences on construction grammar.

The Ecole Normale Supérieure has always been of great support in my research projects on Constructions and Cognitive Grammar, and I warmly thank in particular Annabelle Milleville. This work has received support from the Labex TransferS (laboratoire d’excellence, program “Investissements d’avenir” ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL* and ANR-10-LABX-0099). As a member of the Lattice team, I particularly thank the Labex and the MSH for two post-doctoral grants on this project, allocated to Linda Badan and Karolina Krawczak. The results of their research are presented here. Last but not least, I greatly thank the readers of this manuscript, Debra Ziegeler, Linda Badan, Eric Melac and two anonymous readers.

We would like to thank Amanda Edmonds, Xénia De Heering, Françoise Robin, Camille Simon, and Debra Ziegeler for their valuable comments, which allowed us to deepen our understanding of this paper’s topic.