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While existing literature on cause frequently cites the negative meaning associated with that lexeme, i.e. the fact that cause tends to appear with a negative outcome, e.g. cause an accident, really no scholar has studied in any detail the historical development of the phenomenon. In order to address this missing line of scholarship concerning the diachronic development of, what we refer to here as, a semantic prosody, this paper presents a fine-grained historical study of the development of the negative semantic associations of cause by comparing tokens from the Early Modern English period to those from Present-day English. We are able to conclude that the semantic prosody involved with cause is an emergent diachronic phenomenon. In addition, we are also able to argue that it is at the level of construction that such a prosodic pattern operates. Following from the notion that the semantic prosody is a construction-level phenomenon, we offer an exemplar-based model to motivate certain of the diachronic and synchronic facts.

This chapter investigates the emergence of a new English phrasal-prepositional verb, look up about, which is found predominantly in online discourse and is largely synonymous with “to google”. It is argued that the verb emerged as the result of a reanalysis of a source syntagm that eroded an internal constituency boundary and resulted in a new lexical item. In order to understand how reanalysis took place in the lexicalization of look up about, usage-based processes such as chunking and holistic and heuristic-based processing are examined, and Bybee’s (2002) Linear Fusion Hypothesis is also invoked to explain how this multi-word expression has entered the lexicon of many users.

Drawing on mindset, belonging, and equity scholarship, a journaling assignment was developed as a low-stakes, writing-to-learn, formative assessment instructional tool for engaging students with content, normalizing mistakes, and supporting students during remotely scheduled online instruction for introductory linguistic analysis courses. Anecdotal data from student evaluations and instructor impressions suggest that journals provide high impact learning opportunities.

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