Overview

The volume brings together contributions by scholars working in different theoretical frameworks interested in systematic explanation of language change and the interrelation between current linguistic theories and modern analytical tools and methodology; the integrative basis of all work included in the volume is the special focus on phenomena at the interface of semantics and syntax and the implications of corpus-based, quantitative analyses for researching diachrony. The issues addressed in the 13 papers include the following: explanations of change in the interface of semantics and syntax; universal constraints and principles of language change (e.g., economy, reanalysis, analogy) and the possibility of predicting language change; constructional approaches to change and their relation to corpus-based research; language contact as an explanation of change and approaches to historical bilingualism and language contact, all on the basis of empirical corpus findings; the challenges of creating diachronic corpora and the question of how quantitative linguistics and diachronic corpora inform explanations of language change variation.

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Author Information

Nikolaos Lavidas is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. His research interests lie in the areas of language change, historical linguistics, syntax-semantics interface, argument structure, (historical) language contact and historical corpora. He is the author of Transitivity Alternations in Diachrony. Changes in Argument Structure and Voice Morphology (C-S-P, 2009) and of The Diachrony of Written Language Contact. A Contrastive Approach (Brill, 2021). Kiki Nikiforidou is Professor of Linguistics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. Her research interests lie in the areas of construction grammar, cognitive semantics, grammaticalization, and lexicography. Her current research focuses on the relationship of grammar to discourse and grammatical approaches to genre. She has recently co-edited the volume Advances in Frame Semantics (Benjamins, 2013) and the special issue ""On the Interaction of Constructions with Register and Genre"" (Benjamins 2015); she is currently co-editing The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar (to appear in 2024).

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