Corpus linguistics meets historical linguistics and construction grammar: how far have we come, and where do we go from here?

Abstract

This paper aims to give an overview of corpus-based research that investigates processes of language change from the theoretical perspective of Construction Grammar. Starting in the early 2000s, a dynamic community of researchers has come together in order to contribute to this effort. Among the different lines of work that have characterized this enterprise, this paper discusses the respective roles of qualitative approaches, diachronic collostructional analysis, multivariate techniques, distributional semantic models, and analyses of network structure. The paper tries to contextualize these approaches and to offer pointers for future research.