This study offers a Construction Grammar approach to the historical development and modern usage of future constructions in English, German, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish. On the basis of corpus data, constructions such as English be going to or German werden are analyzed as symbolic units that convey a range of temporal and modal meanings. A special focus lies on the main verbs that occur with these constructions. Statistical co-occurrence patterns between constructions and lexical items guide the semantic analyses in this study: It is argued that a construction that conventionally occurs with main verbs such as write or speak differs functionally from a construction that typically occurs with verbs such as rain or increase. The same approach is also applied historically: If a construction co-occurs with different main verbs at subsequent stages in time, this is seen as a sign of semantic change.
Quotes
“[…] a new approach to a well-studies phenomenon that offers many new insights into grammaticalization of future constructions. The combination of corpus linguistic methods and construction grammar theory thus is an approach that holds great potential for grammaticalization studies in general, and it can only be hoped that this approach is applied to many other phenomena in the near future.”
— Thomas Hoffmann, University of Regensburg, on eLanguage, July 2010
“[…] Its strength is undoubtedly grounded in a superb handling of corpus linguistics, the presentation of a well-founded point of departure, impressive proposals to account for the manny illuminating findings, and – last but not least – in Hilpert’s constant, nevertheless highly relevant appeal to the clustering of the synchronic and diachronic dimension of linguistic data.”
— Wolfgang Schulze, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, in Cognitive Linguistics, October 2010
“[…] valuable insights into the mechanism of grammatical change based on a new, promising method of linguistic analysis […] I hope that the methodology described in the book will become a standard tool for students of grammatical meaning and grammatical change.”
— Bernd Heine, Universität zu Köln, in Studies in Language Vil. 33:3 (2009).
“Situated at the crossroads of construction grammar, historical linguistics and comparative/contrastive linguistics, Hilpert’s monograph is especially noteworthy because it extends the range of research topics dealt with so far from synchronic, particularist studies (of primarily present-day English) to diachronic, comparative ones (of various Germanic languages) and thus adds important new facets to the agenda of cognitively oriented and empirically minded construction grammar as wel as to its existing inventory of corpus methods.”
— Beate Hampe, Erfurt University, in the Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics Vol. 7 (2009).