Revisiting Language Variation and Change: Looking at Metalinguistic Categories Through a Usage-Based Lens

Dear Colleagues,

Analyses of language variation and change predominate within usage-based frameworks and contribute crucially to an understanding of the emergence and evolution of linguistic structure. Such works have afforded us key insights into the relationships between language, usage and cognition (Bybee 2010). Yet, most usage-based linguists approach their research questions relying upon linguistic constructs (linguistic units, word classes, grammatical categories, grammatical relations and constructions) identified and described prior to the advent of usage-based linguistics. The purpose of this special issue is to gather bottom-up usage-based approaches to language that critically examine how the metalanguage we have inherited from traditional and structuralist approaches to language contributes to our knowledge of processes of language variation and change. We invite papers that employ a usage-based and/or variationist framework and that address one or more of the following questions:

• How can we account for traditional linguistic categories and constructions from a usage-based perspective? How do linguistic categories and constructions emerge from local usage-patterns (Thompson 2019)?
• How can fine-grained analyses from a usage-based perspective contribute to a deeper knowledge of traditional linguistic categories and constructions? Are these categories adequate enough to account for emergent grammars? Do usage-based approaches suggest that some of these categories actually subsume usage-patterns and constructions that are, in fact, quite different (Carvalho, Orozco and Shin eds. 2015 and works therein)?
• How does the study of usage-patterns allow us to view uniformly linguistic categories and constructions that have been traditionally described as binary opposites (Torres Cacoullos and Travis 2019)?
• Can other forces and/or categories account for processes of language variation and change more effectively than the traditional metalinguistic categories (Brown and Raymond 2012)? What other categories and/or constructions can be identified by usage-based approaches that have not been described in other linguistic frameworks (Hopper 2002; Rivas 2016)?
• What insights do we gain from considering exemplar models against stored abstractions in usage-based approaches to first, second, and heritage language acquisition and learning (e.g., Tomasello 2009, Ambridge 2018, Wulff & Ellis 2018)?

References

Ambridge, B. (2018). Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition. First Language, 0142723719869731.

Brown, E. L., & Raymond, W. D. (2012). How discourse context shapes the lexicon: Explaining the distribution of Spanish f-/h‑words. Diachronica, 29(2), 139-161.

Bybee, J. (2010). Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge University Press.

Carvalho, A. M., Orozco, R., & Shin, N. L. (Eds.). (2015). Subject pronoun expression in Spanish: A cross-dialectal perspective. Georgetown University Press.

Hopper, P. J. (2002). Hendiadys and auxiliation in English. Complex sentences in grammar and discourse: essays in honor of Sandra A. Thompson. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 145-173.

Rivas, J. (2016). Verb–object compounds with Spanish dar ‘give’: an emergent gustar ‘like’-type construction. Word, 62(1), 1-21.

Thompson, S. A. (2019). Understanding ‘clause’as an emergent ‘unit’in everyday conversation. Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language”, 43(2), 254-280.

Tomasello, M. (2009). Constructing a language. A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Torres Cacoullos, R. & Travis, C. E. (2019). Variationist typology: Shared probabilistic constraints across (non-) null subject languages. Linguistics, 57(3), 653-692.

Wulff, S., & Ellis, N. C. (2018). Usage-based approaches to second language acquisition (Vol. 54, pp. 37-56). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Dr. Esther L. Brown
Dr. Javier Rivas
Guest Editors

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• constructions
• grammatical categories
• grammatical relations
• language variation
• language change
• linguistic units
• usage-based linguistics
• variationist analyses
• word classes