Edited by Caroline Gentens, Lobke Ghesquière, William B. McGregor and An Van linden
This volume is intended as a celebration of Kristin Davidse’s work and its impact within the broad traditions of cognitive, functional and usage-based grammars. Reflecting this wide functionalist lens, the contributions develop ideas central to Neo-Firthian theories of grammar (in particular,… read more
Edited by An Van linden, Jean-Christophe Verstraete and Kristin Davidse
This collective volume focuses on the crucial role of formal evidence in recognizing and explaining instances of grammaticalization. It addresses the hitherto neglected issue of system-internal factors steering grammaticalization and also revisits formal recognition criteria such as Lehmann and… read more
This paper gives a unified account of noun incorporation in Present-Day English from a constructional and typological perspective. We first investigate how productive it really is, given the contrasting statements in the literature. Using data from the WordBanks Online corpus, we show that the… read more
This article focuses on two types of constructional effects of indirect evidential marking in Harakmbut (isolate, Peru). Both types originate in a clash of interpretation: the use of indirect evidential marking indicates a shift of perspective away from the speaker (as if they did not witness… read more
Based on qualitative and quantitative corpus research, this chapter argues that constructions with chance(s) in Present-day English enrich Talmy’s (1988) greater modal system in various ways. Firstly, in their modal uses they are equivalent to core modal auxiliaries and encode especially dynamic… read more
In this introduction, we set out the central themes of the special issue. It concentrates on imperfect function-form mappings, and discusses several cases in which specific perspectival meanings are not fully predictable on the basis of a perspectivizing grammatical construction alone. We… read more
This paper focusses on verb-based nominalization in Harakmbut (isolate, Peru), which falls into two formal types on the basis of the prefix used. The first type, using the nominalizing prefix wa(ʔ)-, is restricted to participant nominalization and is predominantly used to produce nouns for NP-use.… read more
This paper studies from a synchronic-diachronic perspective the formal and semantic-discursive properties of adverbial expressions with a negative quantifier + wonder (henceforth ‘no’ wonder). They are used as mirative qualifiers which assess a proposition as ‘not surprising’, typically motivated… read more
In this paper, we reconstruct the emergence of the modal and discourse marker uses of adverbial and clausal expressions with no doubt. Their history contrasts in a number of surprising ways with typical grammaticalization hypotheses. Existential expressions with no doubt emerged directly with… read more
This article examines modal expressions with the comparative adverbs better, rather and sooner in American English, and assesses to what extent they have grammaticalized. The corpus data offer evidence that the three comparative modal groups exhibit considerable phonetic reduction in the 1810–2009… read more
This paper presents an analysis of complement insubordination in Dutch, i.e. structures that are formally marked as subordinate complement clauses but conventionally used as main clauses. We develop a typology of seven distinct construction types (in three semantic domains), none of which have been… read more
This article develops a functional synchronicLdiachronic description of the clausal complement patterns found with good in extraposition constructions (ECs), and compares these to the patterns found with other deontic-evaluative adjectives, such as appropriate, important and fitting. The adjectives… read more
This paper is a diachronic study of post-adjectival infinitive constructions with adjectives denoting goodness, fitness, or necessity. Traditionally these constructions are analysed as tough-constructions. They can be divided into two semantically and syntactically distinct types, viz.… read more
