Nigel Vincent

Paradigms, periphrases and pronominal inflection: a feature based account

How to model the relation between inflection and syntax has been a perennial topic of debate. Broadly speaking, there have been two general classes of solution. The first assimilates morphology to syntax, drawing on the descriptive categories and constructs appropriate to the latter — zeros/empty categories, movement rules, X-bar projections, etc — to characterise the former. Examples of this approach range from classic Item-and-Arrangement Morphology to Baker’s Incorporation model (Baker 1988) to Minimalism (Chomsky 1993; Halle and Marantz 1993:166–70). The second strategy sees the two domains as related but independent and does not require that the same set of theoretical devices be used to characterise both. This view is reflected in the traditional word-and-paradigm (WP) approach and in its modern reworking by scholars such as Matthews (1972) and Anderson (1992).

On Constructing a Theory of Grammatical Change

The last few decades have seen the growth of a community of linguists who, though diverse in their beliefs and assumptions about other aspects of linguistics, nevertheless share a commitment to the construction as the basic unit of linguistic analysis. In construction grammar (henceforth CxG), as this family of approaches is known, ‘construction’ is understood – beyond its pretheoretical sense – as a conventionalized pairing of form and meaning (Booij 2010: 11; Sag 2012: 97; cf. also Goldberg 2006: 5). Varieties of CxG have been deployed in domains as diverse as sentence production (Bencini & Goldberg 2001; Bencini 2013), child language acquisition (Cameron-Faulkner et al. 2003; Diessel 2013), computational linguistics (papers in Steels 2012), and the theory of long-distance dependencies (Sag 2010). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, another of these domains is diachronic linguistics. CxG has been used in modelling grammaticalization (No€el 2007; Trousdale 2008; and much subsequent research); in addition, proponents of CxG have argued that it lends itself well to the modelling of actualization due to its conception of linguistic structure as a network of related constructions (de Smet 2012), and that it is well suited to the task of syntactic reconstruction (Barðdal & Eyþ orsson 2012). Despite this flurry of interest in historical CxG, there was until recently no book-length treatment of the implications of this grammatical architecture in diachrony, comparable in scope for instance to Lightfoot (1979) for the generative Extended Standard Theory of the time. The volume under review (henceforth T&T) is an attempt to fill this gap: the authors focus on ‘developing ways to think about the creation of and the nature of changes in constructions’ (p. 1), where a construction is understood as a pairing of form and meaning, essentially a Saussurean sign (p. 4). The work is therefore pioneering in terms of its scope and angle, a welcome attempt to provide an overarching framework for diachronic work in CxG. The authors have clearly set themselves an ambitious task. The first chapter of the book sets the stage by introducing the basic notions of CxG and its most influential variants, including the key elements that T&T themselves adopt: here the