Degrammaticalization has been characterized as a composite change involving gains in morphosyntactic autonomy or phonetic and/or semantic substance. Such a definition is suggestive of a change (or set of changes) which may profitably be explored from a construction grammar perspective. In this article, we consider two cases of…

A familiar assumption in much linguistic semantics is that meanings are to be identified conceptually as, or as subparts of, the conceptual representations deployed in general cognitive processes. However, this assumption has increasingly come into question as a result of developments in the study of cognition both within and outside linguistics.…

Subjectification, as the diachronic facet of subjectivity, has raised in the last two decades a number of interesting questions in grammaticalization and semantic change theory. In this paper I shall reflect on the nature and construal of subjectification, focusing on the question, formulated by Traugott (2010a, p. 58), "whether it is possible to…

This paper aims at highlighting the syntactic and semantic variation of the Swedish verb "lata" "let" from both a synchronic and diachronic point of view. On the basis of corpus data containing Old and Modern Swedish texts from the 13th to the 19th centuries, the syntactic and semantic development of the verb is investigated within the framework…

Throughout its long history, the project of a science of grammar has always been an inherently philosophical one, in which the study of grammar was taken to have special epistemological significance. I ask why 20th and 21st century inquiry into Universal Grammar (UG) has largely lost this dimension, a fact that I argue is partially responsible for…

In this paper, we try to see how insights from morphology and grammaticalisation can be combined. Two approaches to the semantics of inflectional affixes are contrasted. According to one, affixes have no meaning, according to another, affixes have meaning just like lexical items. Given insights from grammaticalisation, a middle way, associated…

The aim of this paper is to challenge the generally accepted claim in descriptive and theoretical linguistics that English anaphoric proforms replace constituents (semantic or syntactic units) in underlying representation. On the basis of authentic examples, it is shown that the anaphoric use of the predicative proforms "one" and "do so", the…

This article inquires into the nature of "attributive" prepositional phrases from a Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) perspective. On the basis of the observation that such prepositional phrases can easily be separated from their host noun phrases by extraposition or extraction, it is argued that they do not belong to the noun phrase…

This article explores the relationship between intuition, introspection and the observation of naturally occurring utterances in linguistic inquiry. Its focus is on the problems that this relationship poses in cognitive approaches to semantics and case theory within the framework of Cognitive Grammar. Given the increasing commitment of linguistics…

Body parts have played an important role in the development of theories describing grammaticalization processes (Heine and Kuteva, 2002, pp. 62-63 and 165-171). Within Uralic linguistics, this particular area of study has not yet received a great deal of attention, although the agglutinative character of most of these languages is known to have…

The aim of this paper is to compare the treatment of syntactic functions, and more particularly those traditionally labelled as Subject and Object, in Functional Discourse Grammar and Role and Reference Grammar. Relevant aspects of the overall structure of the two theories are briefly described. The concept of alignment between levels of the…

In Russian infinitives of impersonal verbs have a peculiar distribution: they are not acceptable in most syntactic contexts, but there are also syntactic contexts in which they are perfectly acceptable. Based on a qualitative analysis of data from corpora, the Internet and an acceptability survey, it is argued that the restrictions on impersonals…

In this paper, the patterns of semantic extensions of allative markers are compared with those of ablative markers from a cognitive-typological perspective. Despite the symmetry the two notions appear to exhibit semantically, goal and source exhibit asymmetry and the prevalence of the former over the latter can be seen in a wide range of…

Rob MacLaury's Vantage Theory, VT, models the way in which a cognizer constructs, recalls, uses, and modifies a category in terms of point of view or vantage. Alongside of VT, there is place for the kind of semantic specification found in the lexicon. VT2 [Allan, Keith, 2002. "Vantage theory, VT2, and number." "Language Sciences" 24(5-6), 679-703…

Scientific discourse is characterized by multi-semiotic construction and the resultant semantic expansions. To date, there remains a lack of analytical methods to explicate the multiplicative nature of meaning. Drawing on the theories of systemic functional linguistics, this article examines the meaning-making processes across language and…