James Law

List of John Benjamins publications in which James Law is involved.

Articles

Law, James 2023 Constructional change and frameelement selection: Insights from the French Spending frame Constructions and Frames 15:1, pp. 119–144 | Article

While most work in diachronic construction grammar considers individual constructional changes, these changes share an understudied relationship with broader changes at the level of the semantic frame. Literary corpus data shows that in the Spending frame in French, between the 12th and 20th… read more

Law, James 2023 Regularity of semantic change in Romance anatomical terms Journal of Historical Linguistics 13:2, pp. 295–325 | Article

While semantic change is notoriously idiosyncratic, cross-linguistic evidence suggests some general trends in the directions and mechanisms of semantic shifts. Notable among these are trends applying to the target domain of the human body, a domain that has received considerable attention due to… read more

Law, James 2019 Diachronic frame analysis: The Purpose frame in French Constructions and Frames 11:1, pp. 43–78 | Article

Frame Semantics offers a valuable perspective on mechanisms of semantic change, particularly metonymy. However, corpus-based frame analysis has rarely been applied to diachronic data. The potential of this approach is illustrated with a diachronic description of the Purpose frame in French, based… read more