Ten Lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar

In this book, Martin Hilpert lays out how Construction Grammar can be applied to the study of language change. In a series of ten lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar, the book presents the theoretical foundations, open questions, and methodological approaches that inform the constructional analysis of diachronic processes in language. The lectures address issues such as constructional networks, competition between constructions, shifts in collocational preferences, and differentiation and attraction in constructional change. The book features analyses that utilize modern corpus-linguistic methodologies and that draw on current theoretical discussions in usage-based linguistics. It is relevant for researchers and students in cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and historical linguistics.. Readership: The book is especially relevant for researchers and students in cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and historical linguistics

A distributional semantic approach to the periodization of change in the productivity of constructions

Abstract This paper describes a method to automatically identify stages of language change in diachronic corpus data, combining variability-based neighbour clustering, which offers objective and reproducible criteria for periodization, and distributional semantics as a representation of lexical meaning. This method partitions the history of a grammatical construction according to qualitative stages of productivity corresponding to different semantic sets of lexical items attested in it. Two case studies are presented. The first case study on the hell-construction (“Verb the hell out of NP”) shows that the semantic development of a construction does not always match that of its quantitative aspects, like token or type frequency. The second case study on the way-construction compares the results of the present method with those of collostructional analysis. It is shown that the former measures semantic changes and their chronology with greater precision. In sum, this method offers a promising approach to exploring semantic variation in the lexical fillers of constructions and to modelling constructional change.</jats:p

The Impact of Bounded Rationality on Equity-Linked Life Insurance and Technical Trading

This dissertation deals with the impact of investor behavior for life insurance and technical trading. The first part of this dissertation is concerned with equity-linked life insurance contracts, while the second part of this dissertation is analyses technical trading of stocks. Part I of this dissertation is split into two chapters. In Chapter One, I study the effect of secondary markets on equity-linked life insurance contracts with surrender guarantees for policyholders with bounded rationality. Many equity-linked life insurance products offer the possibility to surrender policies prematurely. Secondary markets for policies with surrender guarantees influence both policyholders and insurers. I show that secondary markets lead to a gap in policy value between insurer and policyholder. Insurers increase premiums to adjust for higher surrender rates of customers and optimized surrender behavior by investors acquiring the policies on secondary markets. Hence, the existence of secondary markets is not necessarily profitable for the primary policyholders. The result depends on the demand for and the supply of the contracts brought to the secondary markets. In Chapter Two, I study the effect of policyholder's risk preferences on equity-linked life insurance contracts with surrender guarantees. While the first chapter takes the reasons for bounded rationality as exogenous, in the second chapter I model the risk preferences of the policyholder explicitly. I value equity-linked life insurance contracts with surrender guarantee for boundedly rational policyholders with loss averse preferences as in Tversky and Kahneman (1991). Our policyholders' surrender behavior deviates from both the standard optimal stopping approach and expected utility implied surrender behavior in two ways: Firstly, the equity level for exercise changes as our policyholders surrender earlier if the underlying equity underperforms. Secondly, policyholders surrender to avoid the insurance becoming a loss, which reshapes the surrender area and creates surrender peaks if the surrender benefit reaches the policyholders' reference point. Part II of this dissertation is concerned with technical trading of stocks. Chapter Three studies technical analysis from the perspective of Cumulative Prospect Theory. Technical analysts, or chartists, aim at predicting future prices from past prices. Sometimes they draw resistance levels and Moving Average (MA) lines into stock price charts. I show that the widely employed MA cross-over rule is consistent with prospect theory preferences even when prices do not move in trends and when stock trading is unattractive to all rational expected utility maximizers. While chartists often argue that market participants being less than fully rational explains why technical analysis is profitable, this chapter shows that technical analysis may be attractive - even when not profitable - to investors who are less than fully rational

From hand-carved to computer-based: Noun-participle compounding and the upward strengthening hypothesis

This paper addresses the recent history of noun-participle compounding in English. This word formation process is illustrated by forms such as hand-carved or computer-based. Data from the COHA shows that over the last two-hundred years, such forms have undergone a substantial increase in type and token frequency. These quantitative changes motivate an exploration of the qualitative changes that have accompanied them. A diachronic analysis of the noun and participle types that are recruited into noun-participle compounds reveals that the word formation process has changed substantially with regard to its component parts. While the observable changes in noun-participle compounding match several defining criteria of grammaticalization, it is argued here that these developments are more usefully seen as a process of constructional change. To distinguish between those two, this paper develops an idea that is called the upward strengthening hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, grammaticalization happens when the activation of a node in a constructional network strengthens not only that node itself, but also a node that is situated at a higher, more abstract level of that network