Diachronic construction grammar and grammaticalization theory

Grammaticalization theorists are becoming increasingly aware of the relevance of constructions to their discipline, to the point that one of its leading exponents has recently defined grammaticalization as the creation of new constructions. This is precisely the problem which construction grammarians engaging in diachronic research are addressing - or one they should be addressing, because to date diachronic construction grammar has not really taken off as a discipline. The question arises of whether grammaticalization theory could simply be turned into the historical branch of construction grammar, or whether diachronic construction grammar has its own raison d'être as a separate discipline. Since grammaticalization theoretical practice is fairly narrowly focused on the change of extant constructions along a path towards the grammatical end of the meaning continuum, there is a need for a wider discipline that also concerns itself with the primary emergence of constructions. Though grammaticalization presupposes 'constructionalization, the two developments need to be kept apart because not all constructions go on to grammaticalize. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.preprin

Is economics a science? Findings and estimates in scientific and economic texts

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Superconductivity in domains with corners

We study the two-dimensional Ginzburg-Landau functional in a domain with corners for exterior magnetic field strengths near the critical field where the transition from the superconducting to the normal state occurs. We discuss and clarify the definition of this field and obtain a complete asymptotic expansion for it in the large $\kappa$ regime. Furthermore, we discuss nucleation of superconductivity at the boundary

Stellar Populations in the Outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud: No Outer Edge Yet

We report the detection of intermediate-age and old stars belonging to the SMC at 6.5 kpc from the SMC center in the southern direction. We show, from the analysis of three high quality 34\arcmin $\times$ 33\arcmin CMDs, that the age composition of the stellar population is similar at galactocentric distances of $\thicksim$4.7 kpc, $\thicksim$5.6 kpc, and $\thicksim$6.5 kpc. The surface brightness profile of the SMC follows an exponential law, with no evidence of truncation, all the way out to 6.5 kpc. These results, taken together, suggest that the SMC `disk' population is dominating over a possible old Milky Way-like stellar halo, and that the SMC may be significantly larger than previously thought.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters. High resolution figures are available at ftp://ftp.iac.es/out/noe

Believe-type raising-to-object and raising-to-subject verbs in English and Dutch: A contrastive investigation in diachronic construction grammar

The so-called 'raising-to-subject' pattern that verbs of the type believe can occur in is usually treated as the passive alternative for the so-called 'raising-to-object' pattern. In addition to broadening the empirical basis for the opposite claim that the English and Dutch raising-to-subject (or 'nominative and infinitive') patterns have a special functionality which is different from that of the passive construction, this paper specifically examines the stronger proposition that this has always been the case. It empirically investigates whether this proposition holds equally well for English and Dutch through a comparison of the frequencies of believe-type raising-to-object and raising-to-subject patterns in two diachronic corpora. The methodology makes use of Distinctive Collexeme Analysis. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.postprin

Revisiting be supposed to from a diachronic constructionist perspective

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Raising: Dutch between English and German

As a complement to C. B. van Haeringen's classic comparative study (1956) that positioned the grammar of Dutch in between the grammars of English and German, this study compares the productivity of three kinds of "raising" patterns in these languages: Object-to-Subject, Subject-to-Object, and Subject-to-Subject raising. It establishes the extent to which Dutch, as well as English and German, have evolved from the old West Germanic starting point these languages are assumed to have shared in this area of grammar. The results are a test case for Hawkins' (1986) case syncretism account of the difference in "explicit-ness" between the grammars of English and German. © Society for Germanic Linguistics 2011.published_or_final_versio