This squib considers some of the issues surrounding the growth and contractions of contentful schemas in the history of English, and the appearance of new word types. An outcome of recent research into language change from the perspective of construction grammar has been the clearer articulation of the relationship between expansion and contraction in both the ‘lexical' and ‘grammatical' domains. Assuming that (i) linguistic knowledge is knowledge of a network of conventionalized and entrenched symbolic pairings of form and meaning (Goldberg 2013), (ii) there is no essential difference between morphological constructions and syntactic constructions (Croft 2001; Booij 2010), and (iii) like syntactic strings, morphological expressions can be positioned on a continuum, ranging from substantive to schematic, I consider the constructional nature of schemas and word types in the history of English
