Germanic Future Constructions: A usage-based approach to language change

Constructional Approaches to Language #7

by Martin Hilpert

This study offers a Construction Grammar approach to the historical development and modern usage of future constructions in English, German, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish. On the basis of corpus data, constructions such as English "be going to" or German "werden" are analyzed as symbolic units that convey a range of temporal and modal meanings. A special focus lies on the main verbs that occur with these constructions. Statistical co-occurrence patterns between constructions and lexical items guide the semantic analyses in this study: It is argued that a construction that conventionally occurs with main verbs such as "write" or "speak" differs functionally from a construction that typically occurs with verbs such as "rain" or "increase." The same approach is also applied historically: If a construction co-occurs with different main verbs at subsequent stages in time, this is seen as a sign of semantic change.

205 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2008