Diversity, discourse, diachrony: A converging evidence methodology for grammar emergence

How grammar emerges is one of the most fascinating questions that linguistics faces. How grammar emerges from usage, and in particular from spontaneous speech, is not just fascinating but also challenging. Not only because of the inherent complexity of spoken language, but also because evidence from spoken data is harder to collect and to analyse, in both intra-linguistic and typological perspective. The aim of this paper is to show how an integrated methodology, combining Discourse analysis with cross-linguistic Diversity and/or Diachrony (what we will call here “3D” methodology), may lead to a unified account that is highly beneficial to capture the mechanisms of grammar emergence. After providing the theoretical background for a converging evidence methodology and highlighting the advantages of a Construction Grammar approach for dealing with the emergence of grammar, we will discuss three case studies that exemplify our point in slightly different but integrated ways, namely: (i) disjunctive and non-exhaustive connectives; (ii) pseudo-coordination; and (iii) repetition and reduplication, addressed here as two manifestations of the same phenomenon, viz. replication. These three case-studies are kept together by the fact of being ‘staged’ within a linguistic pattern that is typically associated with spontaneous speech, namely lists. Indeed, lists are eventually regarded as a privileged locus of grammaticalization, or, more in general, ‘constructionalization’, intended as the process that establishes new form-meaning pairings.