Abstract Diachronic studies have played an increasingly important role in recent Cognitive Linguistics. This introductory paper provides overview of some major lines research this field, starting with the inherently panchronic approach that characterizes most flavors usage-based theory from Grammar to complex adaptive systems approaches. In particular, “constructionist turn” and “quantitative L...

Diachronic semantics has long been the stepchild of Spanish (and Romance) historical linguistics. Although many studies have examined (often in searching detail) the semantic evolution of individual lexical items, Hispanists have ignored broader patterns of semantic change and the relevant theoretical and methodological issues posed by this phenomenon. Working within the framework of cognitive ...

Most dictionaries containing phraseological information are restricted to a synchronic perspective. Diachronic information on structural, semantic, and pragmatic change over time has to be reconstructed by a time-consuming consultation of various dictionaries providing only punctual insights. In the OLdPhras, project we construct an online dictionary for diachronic phraseology in German from ca...

Game-theory has found broad application in modeling pragmatic reasoning in cases of common and conflicting interests. Here we extend these considerations to diachronic patterns of language use. We use evolutionary game theory to characterize the effect of conflicting interests on linguistic signaling in a population over time. We show how sufficiently large conflicts of interest give rise to pa...

Philosophical accounts of the constitution relation have been explicated in terms of synchronic relations between higherand lower-level entities. Such accounts, I argue, are temporally austere or impoverished, and are consequently unable to make sense of the diachronic and dynamic character of constitution in dynamical systems generally and dynamically extended cognitive processes in particular...

Current theories place very mild constraints on possible diachronic changes, something at odds with the trivial observation that actual ‘‘language change’’ represents a tiny fraction of the variation made a priori available by Universal Grammar. Much recent work in diachronic syntax has actually been guided by the aim of describing changes (e.g., parameter resetting), rather than by concerns of...

Postmodernism is a very ambiguous term. It attracted many researchers from different fields of knowledge in the late 1960s. This article explains intertextuality as a critical means to derive its concepts and components in order to understand the hidden layers of meaning in postmodern pluralist ideology. Variable thoughts of postmodern architecture have been divided into two categories—Hi...

A careful investigation of synchronic patterns of linguistic variation with underlying linguistic features can lead to important insights into the comprehension of diachronic phonetic processes. In this paper, we showed that the method of spectral partitioning of bipartite graphs applied to synchronic dialectal data can effectively and reliably be used to investigate diachronic processes, thus ...