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Part of
Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics
Edited by Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita Auer
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 7] 2017
► pp. 217–237

Historical sociolinguistics and construction grammar

From mutual challenges to mutual benefits

This paper makes the case that Historical Sociolinguistics holds critical implications for Construction Grammar, which in return can contribute ideas to the study of sociolinguistic change. The relation of these approaches is discussed from two angles. On the one hand, there are theoretical and methodological divergences that translate into mutual challenges. On the other hand, there are common goals and assumptions that make it worthwhile to combine the perspectives. The advantages and limitations of such a combined approach are illustrated on the basis of a corpus-based study of an idiomatic schema that is referred to as the sarcastic much? construction in this paper.

Keywords: Historical Sociolinguistics, Construction Grammar, knowledge of language, language use, informational maximalism, variation, dynamicity, dialogical constructions, varieties of English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Mutual challenges
  • 3.Mutual benefits
  • 4.An example analysis: sarcastic much?
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.7.09hil
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