Abstrakt
The talk addresses some of the newly raised issues in sorting out the relationship between Construction Grammar, grammatical change, and grammaticalization, including the merit of possibly differentiating between 'constructional change' and 'constructionalization' as distinct types of change involving constructions. The goal is to clarify these concepts, spelling out more clearly and precisely the role of constructions in grammatical reorganization.
Arguing that emphasis on the constructional dimension should not lead us away from examining and identifying also the micro-changes that often involve the internal features of a construction, the investigation leads to a (preliminary) typology of changes that all consist in form-function re-alignment of various kinds, including at least the following possibilities: shifts in constructional affiliation of an item which may have previously belonged to a different construction; the tightening of collocational preferences into a more schematic combination; feature-based micro-changes inside an existing construction, giving rise to a new configuration of features.