A Radical Construction Grammar approach to construction split in the diachrony of the spatial particles of Ancient Greek

Abstract

Within the context of a Radical Construction Grammar approach to grammaticalization, this paper presents construction split as a model of the diachrony of spatial particle constructions from Proto-Indo-European to Ancient Greek, accounting for the behaviour of Greek preposition and prefix constructions. The paper discusses some theoretical preliminaries for the RCG approach and for long-term construction developments, with special reference to phenomena in Ancient Greek. An argument is made for central tenets of RCG: there is no structure external to language-specific constructions; language change is fundamentally a matter of degree and ultimately dependent on the pragmatics of discourse; constructions are defined in terms of cues. This is framed in a conceptual discussion on the complementarity of grammaticalization and construction perspectives.