Lecture 1 - Ten Lectures on a Diachronic Constructionalist Approach to Discourse Structuring Markers

To date little work has been done on pragmatics within cognitive linguistics, especially from a historical perspective. The ten lectures give the first systematic account of how pragmatics can be incorporated into cognitive linguistics using a Diachronic Construction Grammar perspective. I combine detailed study of the historical development of Discourse Structuring Markers like all the same, after all and by the way and propose ways in which to model them. A number of topics are addressed including what a usage based approach to language change is, differences between innovation and change, how to think about analogy and networks, how combinations of Discourse Structuring Markers like now then became a unit, and whether clause-initial and -final positions are constructions.

Refinements of Diachronic Construction Grammar are proposed and tested.

Does a speaker’s knowledge of language include how to use after all, all the same, or by the way? I argue that it does, and present a coherent cognitive perspective on the histories of important but understudied components of language use, Discourse Structuring Markers. These guide test interpretation. Did you know that but once meant ‘on the outside of’ something, and that after all used to mean very different things in different positions and often still does? Don’t trust the dictionaries on this one! How did such meanings arise and in what contexts?