Dividing the Latin language into neat chronological periods will not work without severe reservations. Usages that may seem to be ‘early’ often turn out not to be confined to a particular period, or alternatively their attestations may be genre-related, that is characteristic of a genre that happens to survive mainly from an early period. As for ancient grammarians and commentators on the language, no single concept of what early Latin is may be extracted from their works. Early Latin, or the Latin of ueteres, was a different thing for different commentators. One could use ‘early Latin’ (arbitrarily) of the Latin of the period before about 100 BC, provided that one excludes from the category ‘early’ usages which, though they were current early, also remained current beyond that time. Latin is attested over many centuries, and it was definitely not static. There was not however an entity ‘early Latin’ in use until a convenient date, which then changed into ‘classical Latin’. Recovery of early phenomena requires careful analysis of the distribution, comparative evidence across periods and genres, and a distinction between usage and fashion.

Language is arguably the most important cultural tool that humans have ever invented. In this book, using English as our specific object of choice, we will look at the cognitive basis of language and discover how all aspects of it, from inventing new words to uttering full sentences, rest on one central cognitive unit: the construction. As we will see in this chapter, a core property of languages is that they are complex sign systems. I will first introduce the classic definition of words as linguistic signs, that is, as arbitrary pairings of form and meaning. Next, we shall see that even morphemes or abstract syntactic patterns are best analysed as form-meaning pairings. All of these different types of signs will be captured by the notion of the construction. Besides, instead of a strict dichotomy of words and rules, we will treat language as a system that ranges from simple word constructions to complex syntactic constructions. Finally, we will explore the basic assumptions shared by all approaches that consider the construction the basic notion of syntactic analysis (so-called Construction Grammars) and outline how these differ from Chomskyan Mainstream Generative Grammar.