Issues in diachronic construction morphology

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in Diachronic Construction Grammar (DCxG), a cognitive approach to language change that is concerned with how form-meaning pairings, of various degrees of abstraction and complexity, come to be conventionalised, adapted and lost in a linguistic community. Recently, there has been particular interest in the ways in which constructions are organised in networks (see, e.g., the articles in Barðdal et al. 2015; Sommerer & Smirnova 2020), as well as in the concept of paradigms as clusters of complex words that share the same base, or that are related by inflectional or derivational affixes (Diewald 2020; Diewald & Politt 2022). Within the constructionist approach, morphological change is however relatively understudied, in spite of advances in (synchronic) Construction Morphology (CxM, e.g., Booij 2010), and despite the focus on morphology in grammaticalisation studies, which formed the basis of much earlier work in DCxG. Moreover, work in Diachronic Construction Morphology is largely focused on English and on other Germanic languages, such as Dutch and German (e.g., Eitelmann, Haugland & Haumann 2020; Kempf & Hartmann 2018; Norde & Van Goethem 2018), which makes the typological basis of the framework rather shallow (but see Croft 2020 for a typological perspective on CxG).