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Usage-based perspectives on diachronic morphology: A mixed-methods approach towards English ing-nominals

  • Lauren Fonteyn and Stefan Hartmann EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: August 5, 2016
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 2 Issue 1

Abstract

This paper illustrates how different methodological approaches can be combined to reveal complex patterns of constructional variation and change in the diachronic development of English ing-nominals. More specifically, we argue that approaching the data from a schema-based (rather than morpheme-based) perspective shows that nominal gerunds in English, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, have undergone a semantic drift towards more “nouny” construal variants. This hypothesis is supported not only by raw frequency counts, but also by association measures and by a detailed analysis of hapax legomena.

Keywords: word-formation change; usage-based linguistics; collostructional analysis; historical linguistics; corpus linguistics

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Martin Hilpert and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments and suggestions on a previous draft of this paper. Remaining errors are of course ours.

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Received: 2016-5-19
Accepted: 2016-5-30
Published Online: 2016-8-5
Published in Print: 2016-12-1

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2016-0057
Keywords for this article
word-formation change; usage-based linguistics; collostructional analysis; historical linguistics; corpus linguistics

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Editorial
  2. Editorial
  3. Phonetics & Phonology
  4. Phonotactic c(l)ues to Bantu noun class disambiguation
  5. Articulatory correlates of metrical structure: Studying jaw displacement patterns
  6. Language Acquisition & Language Learning
  7. Statistics and semantics in the acquisition of Spanish word order: Testing two accounts of the retreat from locative overgeneralization errors
  8. Historical Linguistics
  9. Tangut, Gyalrongic, Kiranti and the nature of person indexation in Sino-Tibetan/Trans-Himalayan
  10. Usage-based perspectives on diachronic morphology: A mixed-methods approach towards English ing-nominals
  11. Morphology & Syntax
  12. What we talk about when we talk about biolinguistics
  13. Structure vs. use in heritage language
  14. Sociolinguistics & Anthropological Linguistics
  15. An evaluation of noise on LPC-based vowel formant estimates: Implications for sociolinguistic data collection
  16. Cognitive Linguistics
  17. Fluid construction grammar as a biological system
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