Alexander Bergs

Expressions of futurity in contemporary English: a Construction Grammar perspective

This article describes and analyses five different ways of expressing futurity in English ( shall/will, be going to, be to , the simple present and the present progressive) in a Construction Grammar framework. It suggests that the different expressions can be captured as an onomasiologically motivated family of constructions in which the single constructions are differentiated by complex co- and contextual configurations. The latter can be elegantly captured in a Construction Grammar framework since constructions by definition can include pragmatic features. Also, this article claims that constructions may be equipped with an additional ‘context slot’, in which co- and contextual information can be stored. In a final section, this article turns to the issue of tense as a grammatical phenomenon and its genesis in grammaticalisation processes. It is suggested that a Construction Grammar account can make the age-old debate about a future tense in English redundant. Instead, it complements studies in grammaticalisation and opens up some interesting perspectives on parallel developments in the onto- and phylogenesis of constructions.

The Verb Phrase in English: I was just reading this article – on the expression of recentness and the English past progressive

Due to its poly-functional nature there has been an unbroken fascination with the English progressive construction and the various meanings associated with it. The motivations of these different meanings and their historical developments have found ample attention in the literature on the English verb phrase. Apparently, there is not just one straightforward form-function mapping for the progressive. It not only functions to express various notions of imperfective aspectuality, which are typically given to be temporariness, i.e. duration and limited duration, as well as incompleteness, etc., but it is also employed as a marker of non-aspectual pragmatic or subjective meanings, as for example in the signaling of politeness and discontent. 2,3

Construction Grammar as Cognitive Structuralism: the interaction of constructional networks and processing in the diachronic evolution of English comparative correlatives

Following the Uniformitarian Principle, the Performance–Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis (PGCH; Hawkins 2004 ) predicts a directionality in language change: if the same content can be expressed by two competing structures and one of these is easier to process (see Hawkins 1999 , 2004 ), then the simpler structure will be preferred in performance. Consequently, it will be used more often with a greater range of different lexical items, which increases its type frequency and ultimately leads to it being more cognitively entrenched than its alternative (see Hawkins 2004 : 6). As an analysis of the diachronic evolution of the family of English comparative correlative constructions (the more iconic cause–before–effect C1C2 construction the more you eat, the fatter you get vs the less iconic effect–before–cause C2C1 construction you get the fatter, the more you eat ) shows, however, the PGCH only played a secondary role in the genesis of this set of constructions. In this article, I will present a usage-based constructionist approach that allows researchers to reinterpret the classical Structuralist notion of gaps in the system as gaps in the mental constructional network. This type of Cognitive Structuralist analysis accounts for the presence of the less iconic C2C1 structure (and the absence of the more iconic C1C2 structure) in OE, the genesis of C1C2 structures at the end of the OE period as well as the processing effects predicted by the PGCH once both the C1C2 and the C2C1 constructions were in competition during the ME period.

Special issue on cognitive approaches to the history of English: introduction

What do we know about the past? For at least some languages, we have textual (or archaeological) evidence from various periods – beyond that, there is only reconstruction. But even when we have some textual evidence, what does it tell us? The answer to this question crucially depends on the way we approach the question: we can treat texts as decontextualized, linguistic evidence, as Neogrammarian or Structuralist studies have done (see McMahon 1994: 17–32). Such an approach already allows us to discover important generalizations about the linguistic state of affairs of a particular language or historical period. Using decontextualized historical evidence, for example, we can already ascertain with a high degree of certainty that in Old English voiced and voiceless fricatives were allophones, rather than phonemes, that there was no do-periphrasis in Middle English, and that in Early Modern English there was some variability between third-person singular present tense {-s} and {-th} – just as we know that present-day Japanese and Korean use postpositions, rather than prepositions. However, any language is obviously much more than just a simple collection of plain texts. Languages are means of communication that individual speakers (and writers) possess to interact with other members of a speech community. From a synchronic point of view, the (spoken and written) texts produced by the speakers of a speech community, of course, remain an interesting object of inquiry, as modern corpus linguistic research shows. Yet, in addition to this, modern sociolinguistic research, on the one hand, and psychoand cognitive linguistic research, on the other hand, have shown that additional important scientific insights about language can be gleaned by investigating the social stratification of language as well as the processing and language use of the individual speaker, respectively.