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Grammatical change has been claimed to happen in the course of transmission of grammatical knowledge from one generation to the next. The locus of change is thus the language learning child, and change is the result of grammatical reanalysis, i.e. when children fail to reconstruct the grammar of the previous generation in at least one point. Yet this should never affect core properties of grammars (paradox of grammatical change), for both the primary linguistic data (PLD) and the acquisition mechanisms are hypothesized to be constrained by UG. In fact, children acquiring a first languages (L1) typically attain full competence, thus attesting the robustness of the LAD. The question then is whether there exist conditions under which the LAD might fail. It has been argued that decreasing frequency of occurrence of a grammatical property, structural ambiguity of a construction, or the presence of more than one grammatical system in the linguistic environment of the learner (language contact) are possible causes of transmission failure. In this chapter, it is argued that neither of them is a sufficient cause of transmission failure in L1 development. Rather, change is only likely to happen if the triggering cues are contained in the PLD; cf. chapters 5, 6.

Especially since the mid 20^th century, Newfoundland English has experienced considerable change, much of which appears to involve weakening or even loss of local speech features, and greater alignment with supralocal (typically, North American) norms. This chapter begins by contextualising language change relative to (largely negative) insider and outsider attitudes to Newfoundland dialects. Using illustrative examples, the chapter documents the social and stylistic patterns associated with ongoing phonetic and grammatical change. Despite fairly rapid intergenerational decline in the use of some local features, others are shown to be more robust: they display obvious style shifting, in that they tend to be avoided by younger speakers in formal, though not in casual, speech styles. Rapid change is also in evidence at the levels of vocabulary and discourse. Loss of traditional lexicon is countered by the borrowing of lexical innovations from outside the province, along with such “trendy” discourse features as quotative be like, and the prosodic features of creaky voice and high rising intonation in statements.

This chapter gives a minimalist analysis of the development of clausal negation in Welsh. It attests the familiar Jespersen's Cycle with negation: The Modern Welsh negative marker ddim descends from the Middle Welsh noun dim ‘thing’, which co-occurred as a minimizer with the original negative particle ny(t) before eventually replacing it. The chapter takes on the important question of the apparent gradualness of these developments, always a challenge to acquisition-based accounts of grammatical change. It argues that the ‘cycle’ in fact decomposes into a series of stages, with the crucial stages being those where some children reanalyze dim as an adverb, then as a polarity adverb, and finally as the bearer of the uninterpretable [Neg] feature in the clause. The switch in the locus of this feature brings a distinctively minimalist flavour to the analysis of an important diachronic pattern.

The introduction to the volume lays out its conceptual, theoretical and empirical background. It highlights how grammatical change has been a major area of interest within French linguistics, but that standard French is too often the exclusive empirical focus, while insights from comparative Gallo-Romance data tend to be lacking. Sociolinguistic theory has traditionally formed a modest part of linguistic research on both historical and contemporary French, but the introduction highlights a renewed interest in variationist sociolinguistics, issues of language contact, and the status of minority languages with France. The introduction concludes with an overview of Smith’s contribution to linguistics and summaries of the chapters that together form the volume.

This chapter considers languages that exhibit so-called grammatical function changing morphology, and how they can be taken into account in very simple and direct fashion in the proposed approach without assuming either special rules that change the function of noun phrases or extensive processes of syntactic incorporation. It first examines applicative constructions of the sort proposed by Baker (1988) by means of Preposition Incorporation before extending the proposed theory to a wider range of data. The chapter then looks at another general property of applicativization processes known as Marantz’s Generalization, which states that applicative objects behave syntactically like direct objects. It also discusses symmetrical vs. asymmetrical languages, the phenomenon of Possessor Raising, antipassive construction, and causativization.

This chapter lays out the general problem of explaining the form of grammars, and relates this problem to that of characterizing grammatical complexity. Following much recent work, it takes the view that reduction of complexity is a driving explanatory force whose effects can be seen in change and in variation. The chapter sketches out the general perspective taken in the book on universals, conceptual structure, constructions, complexity and change and variation, and how they are related.

This chapter tracks several of the major changes in English and German word order and accounts for them in terms of constructional change as formulated in Chapter 3. It argues that the changes are relatively simple in constructional terms, although the superficial results are quite dramatic. Topics include clause-initial position, V2, VP-initial and VP-final verb position, the loss of V2 and case marking in English, and verb clusters in Continental West Germanic.

This chapter shows the broader applicability of the constructional approach. It looks at three well-documented developments in English that do not fall into the category of ‘core phenomena’ as understood in Chapter 3, reflexivity, do-support and preposition stranding. These changes are not as central to the expressive function of language as argument structure, operator/scope, and similar phenomena. The chapter argues that these phenomena provide additional evidence that the constructional approach is well-suited for providing genuine explanations for language change and variation.