第十届国际构式语法大会（ICCG10）将于2018年7月于法国巴黎举行（参见：会讯 | 第10届国际构式语法大会第一轮征稿）。在接下来几期推送中，我们将回顾2016年在巴西举行的第九届国际构式语法大会（ICCG9）的大会发言视频。第三期推送Martin Hilpert的大会发言：Three open questions in Diachronic Construction Grammar, 英文摘要如下：
One such question concerns the status of constructions as mental representations of linguistic structure. Construction Grammar aims to describe speakers’ knowledge of language, and there have been exciting advances in usage-based constructional approaches that have linked frequencies from corpus data to the notion of entrenchment and other aspects of linguistic knowledge. Despite these advances, it is clear that historical corpora give us only a very rough idea of language use in the past. It is therefore an open question how confidently we can make statements about the linguistic knowledge of earlier generations of speakers, and whether this is actually the main goal of diachronic Construction Grammar.
A second interesting issue is the phenomenon that Traugott and Trousdale (2013) call constructionalization, i.e. the creation of a new node in the speaker’s mental network of constructions. With historical corpus data, it is of course possible to detect novelties in language use and to determine approximate dates for their emergence and spread. However, the concept of constructionalization itself could be criticized for evoking the Sorites paradox, i.e. the question how many grains of sand it takes to make a heap. Just after how many constructional changes exactly do we have a construction that counts as a new node? The term, as defined, asks us to think of a discrete threshold. Whether such a threshold exists is an open question.
The third question that I would like to address does not just concern diachronic Construction Grammar, but the field as a whole. It appears to be a largely unquestioned consensus that linguistic knowledge is to be modeled as an associative network in which there are nodes, i.e. constructions, and links between those constructions. Recently, Schmid (2016) has argued for a view in which knowledge of language exclusively takes the format of associations, which effectively reduces constructions to links between form and meaning. This proposal is not primarily motivated by theoretical parsimony, but rather by the aim of describing linguistic knowledge in inherently dynamic terms. It is clear that this idea has profound implications for the constructional study of language change, some of which I will try to explore.
It is clear that I cannot promise final, or even preliminary answers to these questions. It might even turn out that they are the wrong questions to ask in the first place. What I hope to do though is to start a discussion that will stimulate new and exciting research in diachronic Construction Grammar.