On abruptness and gradualness in language change

This chapter presents an overview of issues regarding abruptness and gradualness in grammatical (excluding phonological) change. Particularly, the discussion looks at three different (but in my view, increasingly connected) broad ways of thinking about the organisation of language, and at research on abrupt and gradual change in those three ‘models’. The first approach covers, in general terms, formal phrase-structure syntax in the generative tradition. The second looks at usage-based constructional approaches. The third is a formal, but usage-based, dependency model known as Word Grammar (see e.g. Hudson 2007). Formal approaches to syntactic change (see e.g. Roberts and Roussou 2003) are briefly considered first, before the focus shifts to usage-based constructional models of language (see e.g. Bybee 2010), i.e. on the interrelation of changes in form and changes in meaning. The place of quantitative approaches to change (particularly in variationist sociolinguistic accounts) is also briefly discussed. The final part of the discussion looks at the modelling of change in Word Grammar (e.g. Hudson 2007, Gisborne 2017). The thread that runs through these discussions is the concept of grammaticalization, looking at how grammaticalization may be understood in different ways in different theoretical frameworks.