Introduction
Syntactic change will be treated here as consisting of changes in syntactic constructions, including the creation of new constructions and changes in constructions once they come into existence. The term construction will be used here both in its very traditional use, where one speaks of “the passive construction” or a “relative clause construction” and also in the way it is currently used in syntactic analysis by linguists such as Goldberg, for whom a construction is a form–meaning relation (Goldberg 1995, 2006). For Goldberg, words and morphemes as well as phrases and syntactic patterns are form–meaning mappings, but in this chapter, we will consider syntactic patterns that are conventionalized. Such patterns have slots or positions within them that can be filled by a range of different words or morphemes and are thus schematic. So, for example, a prepositional phrase is a construction consisting of a preposition and an NP object. Both positions are schematic in the sense that many different items can occur in each slot. The preposition slot, say in English, is schematic since any preposition can occur in it. The NP slot is even more schematic because the range of possible NPs in English is enormous. Viewing a construction as a form–meaning mapping means that we take constructions to convey an overall meaning that goes beyond just the meaning taken from the words and morphemes that comprise them.
The phenomena treated under syntactic change are intertwined with grammaticalization in two ways. First, many constructions have specific grammatical morphemes in them and they have developed by the process of grammaticalization. Thus, all the prepositions found in English (in, to, of, behind, below, after, and so on) have undergone grammaticalization giving rise to new preposition constructions. When a unit or set of units changes category, we can speak of syntactic change. For instance, if a verb in construction with another verb becomes an auxiliary, not only has grammaticalization taken place, but syntactic change has also occurred. Second, the creation of new constructions is driven by some of the same processes that drive grammaticalization: chunking, category expansion, generalization, and inferencing. Thus many of the themes of this chapter are familiar from the last two chapters.