A Radical Construction Grammar approach to construction split in the diachrony of the spatial particles of Ancient Greek
Some theoretical preliminaries
Within the context of a Radical Construction Grammar approach to grammaticalization, this paper presents construction split as a model of the diachrony of spatial particle constructions from Proto-Indo-European to Ancient Greek, accounting for the behaviour of Greek preposition and prefix constructions. The paper discusses some theoretical preliminaries for the RCG approach and for long-term construction developments, with special reference to phenomena in Ancient Greek. An argument is made for central tenets of RCG: there is no structure external to language-specific constructions; language change is fundamentally a matter of degree and ultimately dependent on the pragmatics of discourse; constructions are defined in terms of cues. This is framed in a conceptual discussion on the complementarity of grammaticalization and construction perspectives.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.A RCG approach to the units of grammatical change
- 2.1Utterances as constructions, constructions as cues
- 2.2Deconstructing syntactic relations: Adjacency, agreement, linear order
- 3.Construction split
- 3.1Preliminaries
- 3.2Some phonological underpinnings of grammaticalization
- 3.3A grammaticalization mechanism for split
- 3.4Split of adpositions and affixes
- 4.
The diachrony of the spatial particle constructions in Ancient Greek
- 4.1Spatial particles in Proto-Indo-European
- 4.2Construction developments in Ancient Greek
- 4.3Grammaticalization of aspectuality in discourse
- 5.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
References
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