1887
Volume 9, Issue 1
  • ISSN 2213-8722
  • E-ISSN: 2213-8730
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Abstract

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of the (speaker-level) ‘cognitive how’ of (language-level) constructional attrition, defined as a systemic decrease in the occurrence of a construction in the history of a language. Presenting and analysing data from an historical idiolectal corpus on the frequency development in individual speakers’ use of a partially schematic construction instantiated by such types as and , it offers a first attempt to measure whether a general decline in the frequency of this construction can also be observed to be an internal development during a speaker’s lifespan. The results confirm this to be the case in a sizeable group of speakers and the paper provides an initial insight into how this may contribute to a genuinely cognitive account of the speaker-external development.

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2022-05-30
2025-04-24
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