Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Morphology; Typology

Call Deadline: 04-Apr-2022

Call for Papers:

Diachronic Construction Morphology
Special Issue, to appear in Constructions and Frames

Guest Editors:
Muriel Norde (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Graeme Trousdale (University of Edinburgh)

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in Diachronic Construction Grammar (DCxG), a cognitive approach to language change that is concerned with how form-meaning pairings, of various degrees of abstraction, come to be conventionalised, adapted and lost in a linguistic community. Recently, there has been particular interest in the ways in which constructions are organised in networks (see, e.g., the papers in Barðdal et al. 2015, Sommerer & Smirnova 2015 or Diewald & Politt 2022). Within this approach, morphological change is relatively understudied, in spite of advances in (synchronic) Construction Morphology (e.g. Booij 2010), and despite the focus on morphology in grammaticalization studies, which formed the basis of much earlier work in DCxG.

In a Special Issue in Constructions and Frames, we aim to explore how Diachronic Construction Morphology (DCxM) can best provide a framework for understanding morphological change. We are particularly interested in understanding parallels between morphological change and change elsewhere in the constructicon (e.g. in changes to argument structure constructions [Zehentner and Traugott 2020], or the development of future constructions [Hilpert 2008]), and in similarities and differences between inflectional and derivational change from a constructional perspective. We invite both theoretically and empirically oriented papers that focus on changes in morphology in a broad sense (encompassing both inflection and word formation), either in a single language or in more than one. As we aim for a typologically diverse volume, contributions on non-Indo-European languages are particularly welcome. Research questions include, but are by no means limited to the following:

– How can morphological change be understood as changes in constructional networks, e.g. network expansion (new constructions or schemas), network reduction (loss) or network realignment (e.g. reorganisation of inflectional classes)?
– What is the role of productivity in changes to morphological constructions?
– How does DCxM provide a suitable framework to account for (secondary) grammaticalization and degrammaticalization?
– How do usage-based constructionist approaches to morphological change relate to accounts of change in other frameworks?
– How does DCxM accommodate changes in typologically diverse languages?

Complementary workshop:
As a complement to this Special Issue, we will organise a “discontinuous workshop”, i.e. a series of online meetings in which we discuss each other’s drafts, to take place between September and November 2022. Details of this workshop will be announced upon acceptance of the abstracts.

Submission procedure:
If you are interested at presenting your work at the discontinuous workshop and subsequently submitting the full paper for the Special Issue, please send an abstract of 1000 words (excluding references) to muriel.nordehu-berlin.de, and Graeme.Trousdaleed.ac.uk by April 4, 2022. Notification will be given by the end of April. The deadline for submission of the full paper (8,000 words, including references, tables and graphs) is December 1, 2022. Each paper will be reviewed by two anonymous reviewers. The special issue of Constructions and Frames is scheduled to appear in the second half of 2023.

Important dates:
Deadline for abstract submission: April 4, 2022
Notification of acceptance: April 29, 2022
Discontinuous Workshop: from September to November 2022
Deadline for manuscripts: December 1, 2022
Special Issue publication: Second half of 2023