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While the study of language has been approached from a wide range of perspectives and theoretical assumptions, it is widely assumed that language structure can be reduced essentially to a fairly monolithic system of mental and linguistic activity. Some recent lines of psychological, linguistic, and neurolinguistic research suggest, however, that human cognitive behavior in general and linguistic discourse in particular exhibit a dualistic organization. In accordance with this research tradition, the present paper argues that there is a basic distinction between two domains of linguistic discourse and that this distinction shows a number of correlations with neural processing, more specifically with hemispheric lateralization of the human brain.

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Some recent lines of research suggest that there are two different domains of discourse processing where one is concerned with the form and meaning of sentences and their parts and the other with the organization of discourse beyond the sentence and the relationship between linguistic material and the extra-linguistic situation of discourse. One important mechanism relating the two domains to one another is provided by cooptation, a cognitive-communicative operation whereby pieces of discourse located in one domain are transferred to another domain. In the present paper, the nature of this operation is looked at in more detail based on the framework of Discourse Grammar (Kaltenböck et al. 2011, On thetical grammar.

Building on recent findings made in the framework of Construction Grammar, on the one hand, and within the framework on grammaticalization, on the other, the present paper is concerned with the development from lexical compounding to derivation. Compounding is presumably the most common source of derivational categories and this applies in particular to modifying (endocentric) compounds, which are the main subject of this paper. By looking at three cases of grammatical change in English, German, and the West African language Ewe it is argued that the two frameworks differ in their goals and in their approaches. Both frameworks search for regularities in grammatical change, but whereas Construction Grammar has a focus on constructional change, that is, change in the development of constructions, the central question asked by students of grammaticalization is how and why, e.g., lexical categories give rise to grammatical (or functional) categories.