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2 - Context in Historical Linguistics

from Part I - Language in Context: A Sociohistorical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 November 2023

By
Elizabeth Traugott
Edited by
Jesús Romero-Trillo
Jesús Romero-Trillo
Affiliation:
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
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Summary

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.

Keywords

ActualizationAmbiguityAnalogyChangeDiachronic Construction GrammarGrammaticalizationPolysemyPragmatic inferences
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context , pp. 49 - 70
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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