Summary of Part II

This short chapter provides a summary of Part II of the book. It highlights the multidimensional contingency of conventionalized utterance types and suggests a pseudo-technical formula for describing how the conventionality of utterance types is a function of onomasiological, semasiological, and syntagmatic conformity within a community depending on cotext and context. In addition, the chapter recapitulates how the conventionalization processes of usualization and diffusion contribute to establishing, sustaining, and adapting conventionalized utterance types. The diverse forms of interaction between the two processes control and modulate to what extent different parts of the linguistic system remain quite uniform and stable or are subject to linguistic variation and change.