Conclusions

Summary

The final chapter draws together results of the analyses of the different chapters and synthesises findings: the analyses have shown that social and cultural change plays a very important role in language change. Investigations of individual cases supply clear evidence for a close connection between cultural change and MWE-change. Significantly, analyses have demonstrated that cultural motivation of linguistic change extends to types of MWE-change traditionally analysed as semantic, syntactic and morphological change, which suggests that language as a system, rather than merely language use, is more closely tied to the specifics of the culture of a speech community than has hitherto been acknowledged. The chapter closes with an outlook.