Chapter published in:
Grammaticalization meets Construction Grammar
Edited by Evie Coussé, Peter Andersson and Joel Olofsson
[Constructional Approaches to Language 21] 2018
► pp. 277–311

A Radical Construction Grammar approach to construction split in the diachrony of the spatial particles of Ancient Greek

Some theoretical preliminaries

| Uppsala University
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.
Keywords: Radical Construction Grammar, grammaticalization, utterance selection, construction split, Articulatory Phonology, Ancient Greek, spatial particles
Published online: 23 May 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.21.c10
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