AMU Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures cordially invites you to the guest lecture by Prof. Steffen Höder (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel), which will be held on Wednesday, 2 April 2025, at 1:15 p.m. in room 202A.
Lecture title: Language contact from a constructionist perspective: Key concepts of Diasystematic Construction Grammar.
Construction Grammar is generally considered to follow a bottom-up approach to linguistic analysis. Yet, ‘language’ is often (tacitly) treated as a self-evident, a priori category, and, consequently, constructions are usually assumed to belong to individual languages. While this view may be sufficient for analysing monolingual grammar at an abstract level, a different picture emerges when it comes to a usage-based perspective on multilingualism and language contact.
Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) is a usage-based constructionist approach to language contact situations that encompasses both synchronic multilingual practices and contact-related language change. Aiming at socio-cognitive realism, DCxG is built around the insight that multilingual speakers and communities organize their linguistic knowledge into one multilingual constructional network that reflects their linguistic repertoire in its entirety, and that they choose and combine constructions from this multilingual constructicon depending on the communicative context as well as structural and pragmatic properties of individual constructions. As a consequence, language-specificity is regarded as an optional property of individual constructions, i.e. language-specific ‘idioconstructions’ coexist with shared ‘diaconstructions’. In recent years, DCxG has been adopted by an increasing number of scholars working on different language contact situations and various contact phenomena.
The talk provides a brief general introduction into usage-based Construction Grammar and presents some key concepts and possible applications of DCxG.
More information about prof Steffen Höder can be found here