Historical sociolinguistics meets Construction Grammar: the case of productivity in English

Construction Grammar (CxG) is a recent theory of language that focuses on what speakers must know to be able to use a language; this knowledge is expressed in terms of constructions, or form-meaning pairings, such as words or phrases. The aim of my HISCOP project is to extend CxG by drawing on historical sociolinguistics, which focuses on relationships between the individual, language and society throughout history. We will study the productivity of constructions in large historical text corpora from a sociolinguistic perspective. The purpose of the project is to increase the explanatory power of CxG, to learn more about linguistic phenomena in the field of productivity in the history of English, and to provide a more balanced picture of these phenomena by studying the language use of not only highly-educated men (as previous research has often done) but also women and the lower social ranks, who may turn out to lead linguistic change.