The chapter argues that theories of grammaticalization as an independent unidirectional development of a lexical item into a functional item are misleading. Adopting a uniformitarian perspective, he submits that change involves three interrelated factors: The first, the process of recombination, refers to an innate human cognitive capacity which allows speaker/signer-learners (SL) to select specific linguistic features and recombine them into new syntactic variants. The second represents the feature pool of the variants to which SLs are exposed through contact; they are subject to the process of competition and selection. The third, commonly referred to as grammaticalization, has to do with population factors which may favor or hinder the spread of specific variants across a speech community.

Contrary to this approach based on universal multilingualism and contact as cornerstones of acquisition and change (Aboh 2015, 2020), classic examples of grammaticalization are particularly misleading because they aggregate different populations of different SL profiles as if they involved homogeneous monolingual or monomodal communities living in identical ecologies. Likewise, commonly used notions such as language-internal vs. contact-induced change become obsolete because they conceive of contact as the exceptional case. The author shows that language change is always the result of contact.

This chapter provides an overview of the developments in syntax in the history of English. There is a long–term typological drift, with the language moving from synthetic to analytic, with functions that were earlier expressed in the morphology increasingly coming to be expressed by free morphemes. The main word order developments are the loss of Object–Verb orders in Early Middle English, and the loss of V2/V3 word order in the fifteenth century, leading to strict SVO order in which information–structural status was mapped onto syntactic function, with subjects as the only unmarked way to express ‘given’ information and objects as the only unmarked way for ‘new’ information. A number of ‘escape hatches’ develop to compensate for the loss of options for the flow of information in the clause: word order alternations such as the dative alternation or the particle alternation in phrasal verbs, cross-linguistically rare passives, ‘stretched verb’ constructions and clefts.

This chapter focuses on foundational grammatical concepts, first discussing the basic difference between content and function lexical categories before moving on to morphological language type, grammaticalization, and inflectional marking. The information investigated in this and the next four chapters is so interconnected that the material, as it is presented, is a bit like a spiral. One section will introduce you to a specific concept with a handful of other concepts and then a later section will return to that initial concept while discussing other related concepts. This material will continue to be presented using a spiraling method, linking the major grammatical concepts of this and the next four chapters. The grammatical decisions you will make at the end of this chapter focus on how much grammatical information is packaged within a single word unit and how constituents beyond the subject, object, and verb are typically ordered in clauses.

Chapter 2 reviews previous literature on the evolution of composite predicates and discusses the relevance of these studies for the present investigation. While the present study is more interested in the semantic and syntactic changes that the CPs go through than in the question of whether they go down the path of grammaticalization or lexicalization, Section 2.1 briefly reviews how the evolution of the CPs has previously been classified as either type of development, with a only a few studies suggesting a combination of the two theories (Section 2.1). Next, I report on what previous research (on CPs) has to say on the notions of ’idiomatization’ (and its limitations) and ’specialization’ (Section 2.2). It is the latter concept that is the most relevant one for the present study. The chapter is rounded off by a review of how the NP status of the complements (e.g. use in make use of) may change over time (Section 2.3).

This chapter reviews the relation between gesture and the natural signed languages of deaf communities. Signs were for centuries considered to be unanalyzable depictive gestures. Modern linguistic research has demonstrated that signs are composed of meaningless parts, equivalent to spoken language phonemes, that are combined to form meaningful signs. The chapter discusses a system called homesign used where a deaf child with hearing parents is not exposed to signed languages during language acquisition. Two ways in which gesture may become incorporated into a signed language through the historical process of grammaticalization are described. In the first, gestures are incorporated into a signed language as lexical signs, which go on to develop grammatical meaning. In the second, ways in which the sign is produced, its manner of movement, and certain facial displays, are incorporated not as lexical signs but as prosody or intonation, which may develop grammatical meaning. Finally, the chapter critically examines a new view in which certain signs are considered to be fusions of sign and gesture and proposes a cognitive linguistic analysis based in the theory of cognitive grammar.

The chapter introduces the material used for the study, that is, the Old Bailey Corpus (OBC) as well as the Old Bailey Online resource and the Proceedings that the OBC has been based on. The analytical frameworks adopted are also discussed, comprising the corpuslinguistic approach, and the historical sociopragmatics, the language variation and change, and the grammaticalization and pragmatic-semantic change frameworks. Attention is also paid to the late modern courtroom and to the issues of relevance to the study of past spoken interaction based on written records.

In this chapter, we first sketch a number of assumptions underlying diachronic research in order to understand how researchers sketch the emergence of discourse connectives (and discourse markers) in language. We then review the discussion about the theoretical framework underlying the diachronic evolution of discourse connectives, that is, in which conceptual terms this linguistic process is best accounted for, grammaticalization or pragmaticalization. We then turn to a general description of the evolution from clause combining strategies to coordinating and subordinating connectives. Different case studies are presented in order to illustrate typical and less typical cases of language change in the area of connectives: the semantic evolution from temporal meaning to concessive meaning of French cependant (‘yet’), the peculiar semantic evolution from cause to contrast of Italian però (‘but’) (5.3.2), and a diachronic account of the synchronic polysemy of French alors.

Chapter 8 presents a new empirical study to illustrate how CL insights can help inform L2 teaching and learning of Chinese modal verbs. It offers a study that compared the effectiveness of a newly designed CL-based instructional method with that of the traditional instruction used in a mainstream Chinese textbook in the United States. The proposed CL-based instruction taps learners’ analytical abilities to see connections between the root and extended meanings of modal verbs as well as the subtle distinctions among them. The chapter suggests sample focus-on-form communicative tasks that simulate real-life scenarios. By following up these tasks with CL-based explicit explanation, teachers of Chinese can ensure long-term retention and automation in L2 acquisition of modal verbs.

Historical linguists investigate those contexts that are considered to be most relevant to language change, given the theoretical approach adopted and the phenomena to be investigated. The topic of this chapter is usage-based perspectives on language-internal change, especially as conceptualized in the frameworks of research on grammaticalization, semantic-pragmatic change, and diachronic construction grammar. Contexts may be immediate, local “co-texts” or wider linguistic discourse contexts. Contexts tend to be wide and discursive as change begins to occur and local after it has occurred. I discuss the roles in enabling change of ambiguity, of pragmatic inferencing, and of “assemblies of discursive uses” such as have been proposed in work on constructionalization. With respect to contexts for “actualization,” the step-by-step language-internal spread (or loss) of a change that has occurred, focus is on host-class expansion and on the often analogy-driven changes across contexts, especially as revealed in corpus work.

Chapter 3 explores the characteristics of pragmatic markers and focuses on both their function during a particular period and their development over time. Diachronically, pragmatic markers develop from content words, phrases, or clauses that gradually acquire a distinctive syntactic form and discourse-pragmatic functions and follow various pathways, from adverb > conjunction > pragmatic marker, from sentence-internal adverb > sentential adverb > pragmatic marker, from main clause > ambiguous clause > parenthetical, from adverbial or imperative clause > pragmatic marker. A number of examples of such pathways are provided, where it is shown that the historical data may be messy and require nuanced interpretation. For clausal pragmatic markers, the “matrix clause hypothesis” is critically examined. The process of language change that best accounts for the development of pragmatic markers, including lexicalization, pragmaticalization, grammaticalization, and cooptation, is still a matter of debate, though the majority view is that if “grammar” is broadly understood, pragmatic markers are best seen as undergoing grammaticalization (decategorialization, desemanticization).

Chapter 8 reveals that languages change over time, with new variants developing and others going obsolete. This chapter aims, firstly, at giving the reader insights into the phenomenon of language change, which has resulted in a wide variety of languages spread throughout our planet that can be grouped into language many families that will be surveyed. We will ask why languages change and provide examples of changes that affect different parts of the grammar, with special attention to grammaticalization. We stress that languages are not getting better or worse as a result of these changes. While we see that under the right circumstances a language can “split” and develop into two or more different languages, attention is also paid to the fact that languages can go extinct. With that general background, we can ask whether the study of language change has resulted in an argument that could support the Innateness Hypothesis for language. To this end, we will ask whether there are certain properties of languages that are immune to change and if so, whether this can be explained if we assume that these properties are anchored in the innate system?

This chapter discusses the close interconnection between developments (1960-2000) in historical and universal-typological linguistics, in three general areas:

1. 1. methodology and practice of reconstruction, with debates about comparative reconstruction and typological feasibility; establishment and reconstruction of distant genetic relationships; relation to cross-linguistic variation.

2. 2. expression and interpretation of language universals: implicational universals and typological hierarchies; semantic maps, relating language-specific forms to universal semantic categories; representativeness: sampling methodology, distinction of linguistically motivated vs. accidental distributions; validity (strength) of universals; discussion about whether the only valid universals map function and form, resting on cognitive principles (iconicity, economy); interpretation of synchronic universals as by-products of diachronic principles, or as constraints on possible or (later) probable pathways of diachronic change or reconstruction (e.g., due to instability or low frequency of a given state), or as lying in the mechanisms of language change.

3. 3. grammaticalization: first developments (1970s), intensified interest (1980s) and ‘real boom’ (1990s); phonological, morpho-syntactic, and semantic/pragmatic dimensions; co-evolution of meaning and form (Parallel Paths Hypothesis (PPH)); universal (reduced number of) pathways of diachronic change relating to various aspects of grammar; significant tool in reconstruction; much debate about, e.g., the unidirectionality of change, and the part played by ‘structural reanalysis’.