English Comparative Correlatives: Diachronic and Synchronic Variation at the Lexicon–Syntax Interface, by Thomas Hoffmann, addresses the question of how general and abstract speakers’ mental representations need to be in order to allow grammatical creativity by investigating one specific construction, English comparative correlatives (CCs). Drawing on authentic corpus data and adopting a usage-based Construction Grammar approach, this book shows how input frequency and domain-general cognitive principles affect the complex mental network of constructions that underlies speakers’ linguistic behavior. Based on the investigation, Hoffmann proposes a cognitively grounded Structuralist view of language change and argues that all the mental representations of the various CC constructions are stored in taxonomic networks.

The book comprises seven chapters. The introductory chapter presents the background of research on English CCs. Hoffmann points out that previous studies (e.g., McCawley, Reference McCawley1988; Borsley, Reference Borsley2004a, Reference Borsley and Müller2004b) focused largely on the similarities between the CC constructions and some other constructions, and that previous scholars (e.g., Culicover & Jackendoff, Reference Culicover and Jackendoff1999; den Dikken, Reference den Dikken2005; Sag, Reference Sag2010) tried to account for the use of English CCs in terms of maximally abstract representations based on introspective data. By contrast, this study adopts a usage-based approach to investigate the entrenched English CC network within the framework of Construction Grammar. After providing the theoretical framework and methodology, the author discusses the research questions and hypothesis and lays out the structure of the book.

In Chapter Two, Hoffmann presents an overview of previous studies on English CCs from three perspectives: typological, synchronic, and diachronic. He first takes a typological approach and investigates cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the use of CC constructions across a wide variety of languages. The results show that CCs do not always exhibit an obligatory hypotactic relationship between C1(e.g., the more you practice) and C2 (e.g., the better you’ll become) as proposed by den Dikken (Reference den Dikken2005). Regarding the syntactic and semantic properties of English CCs, Hoffman addresses them by reviewing previous synchronic analyses. The exploration focuses on whether the configurations of the CC constructions are paratactic or hypotactic, what other features and characteristics Present-day English CCs possess, and how abstract and specific native speakers’ mental representations of CCs are. The last part of the chapter discusses the diachronic evolution of the CC constructions from Old English to Present-day English. In short, this chapter offers insightful cross-linguistic generalizations regarding the use of CC constructions and a clear description of the diachronic changes that have shaped the present-day properties of the English CC constructions.

In Chapter 3, Hoffmann presents diachronic corpus-based studies on the evolution of English CC from Old English to Modern English. In Old English, the formal and semantic links in C₁C₂ constructions were examined. The results show that hypotactic proportional comparatives appeared at the end of the Old English period via analogization, in which C₁ was clearly marked as a subordinate clause and C₂ acted as the main clause. Then, the author employs a quantitative approach to examine the evolution of C₁C₂ constructions from Middle English to Modern English, focusing on the two hypotactic properties of the CCs, namely that-complementizer in C1 and verb–subject word order in C₂. The results reveal that C₁C₂ CCs evolve from an originally hypotactic to a more paratactic structure during the actualization process. This study raises important questions about the role of processing constraints and cognitive constructional networks in linguistic change. It also highlights the important role of cognitive constructional networks in the creation of new syntactic structures. The history of CCs confirms the view that syntactic constructions are stored in a cognitive network whose structure can lead to the grammaticalization of a new construction via analogization.

Chapter 4 provides a corpus-based analysis of synchronic behaviors of the CCs in Standard British and American English using three main data sources: the Brown Corpora family, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and the British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). The Brown Corpora family dataset is used to test the association of various categorical variables, including VARIETY, FILLER TYPE, THAT-COMPLEMENTIZER, SUBJECT–AUXILIARY INVERSION, DELETION, and YEAR, and to investigate the specific lexical filler collocations across C₁ and C₂. COCA is involved to investigate the potential interaction effects of the variables in CCs. The results indicate that English CCs exhibit a great number of associations across variables in C₁ and C₂, which cannot be modeled by a single constructional template. The ICE-GB Corpus is employed to study the distinct intonational contours of the CC constructions. The findings from these corpus studies indicate that the CC constructions have undergone considerable linguistic change from being largely hypotactic to being much more paratactic. The statistical analyses reveal several partly schematic and partly substantive constructional templates for CCs in addition to their abstract constructional template.

Chapter 5 provides a contrastive study of the syntactic properties of CCs in Standard German and Standard English, with the aim to identify how many properties are language-specific and which characteristics of English CCs might actually be attributable to general cognitive principles. The author conducted a qualitative analysis of Non-canonical CC constructions and a quantitative analysis of Canonical CC constructions. The results show that both English and German prefer the canonical C₁C₂ constructions over the alternative C₂C₁ constructions, but the major differences lie in the degree of entrenchment of various CC constructions in the taxonomic networks rather than in the internal structures of the constructions. In addition, both languages exhibit similar types of CC micro-, meso-, and macro-constructions, but English relies more on stored, partly substantive, partly schematic meso-constructions and German has a more productive abstract macro-construction. The results from this study provide evidence to show that CCs cannot be accounted for by maximally abstract mental representations.

Chapter 6 focuses on analyzing synchronic variations of the English CCs across many different Post-Colonial Englishes (PCEs). In order to disentangle general cognitive constraints that shape the English CCs from variety-specific linguistic phenomena, Hoffmann conducts a corpus-based study on the CCs in twelve varieties of English involving a constructionist analysis based on Schneider’s Dynamic Model (Schneider, Reference Schneider2007). He argues that the interface between lexicon and grammar is at the meso-constructional level, at which innovations should first occur. The corpus data demonstrate that cognitive principles such as iconicity have the expected results in all PCE varieties: the preference of C₁C₂ over C₂C₁ CCs and the strong tendency for paratactic marking of C₁ and C₂. The major differences across the varieties mainly occur at the meso-constructional level, and the changes at this level can be both quantitative and qualitative in nature. This chapter demonstrates how a Construction Grammar approach provides a cognitive explanation for the structural linguistic innovations in PCEs.

In the last chapter, Chapter 7, Hoffmann argues that the various CC tokens that speakers are exposed to do not always automatically lead to maximally abstract mental generalizations, but might lead to partly schematic and partly substantive generalizations. He concludes that all mental representations of the various CC constructions are stored in taxonomic networks. Furthermore, in discussing the directions of future developments in the field, he contends that “future constructional research must move beyond the analysis of single constructions and must take into account the full network of related constructions” (p. 238).

This book is well written and cogently argued throughout. It contributes significantly to the study of Construction Grammar both methodologically and theoretically.

Methodologically, in contrast to previous introspective analyses (e.g., Culicover & Jackendoff, Reference Culicover and Jackendoff1999; Sag, Reference Sag2010), this study adopts a usage-based approach to analyze the English CC constructions from different perspectives and using a variety of corpus data and effective statistical tests. Perspective-wise, the study investigates English CCs from a diachronic perspective (Chapter 3), and a synchronic perspective (Chapter 4), as well as a typological perspective (Chapters 5 and 6). As a result, the study presents a comprehensive and coherent account of diachronic evolution as well as the synchronic variations of the English CCs within the framework of Construction Grammar. In terms of data, this study examines not only Standard English (including Standard British and American English), but also a closely related language, German, and many other varieties of English around the world. The data from English varieties have made it possible to distinguish variety-specific features from those general ones, and to examine the extent to which mental representations of the CC constructions are shared across varieties. Such important information could not be gained with only Standard English data. Regarding data analysis, corpus data were subjected to a hierarchical configural frequency analysis (HCFA) whenever the association of two or more variables were investigated (e.g., Chapters 3, 5, and 6). In addition to HCFA analyses, Gries’ covarying collexeme analysis was used to identify specific lexical filler collocations across C₁ and C₂ (e.g., Chapter 4). These statistical analyses help to uncover the sub-schemas of the CC construction across varieties, which in turn provide clear evidence against a reductionist analysis of constructions and support a usage-based view that the CC constructions form a complex network. This study has clearly showcased the effectiveness of corpus-based approaches to Construction Grammar studies and also the trend of Cognitive Linguistics having become a more empirical enterprise with an increasing emphasis on quantitative data analyses.

Theoretically, this study has made two important contributions to our understanding of the schematicity and generality of the mental representations of constructions. First, it has yielded important insights into the question of how general and abstract speakers’ mental representations have to be to allow grammatical innovations. The right level of granularity of constructional schematicity remains a central issue in all Construction Grammar approaches. Previously, most linguistic research advocated a reductionist approach that aimed for a maximally schematic and economic analysis of CC constructions (e.g., Culicover & Jackendoff, Reference Culicover and Jackendoff1999; Sag, Reference Sag2010). In contrast, this study exhibits a non-reductionist approach and its results have clearly shown that the various types of English CCs cannot be captured by a single, maximally abstract macro-construction and that speakers seem to have entrenched various meso-constructions. Based on the data analyses, the book also demonstrates that taxonomic storage is not economic with only the most abstract generalization (‘macro-construction’) being entrenched because intermediate, partly schematic, and partly substantive constructions (‘meso-constructions’) also play an important role in the taxonomic constructional network. All the aforementioned analyses and results allow Hoffmann to conclude that the mental representation of language is not simply a list of constructions but a rich, taxonomic network of constructions.

Second, this study has uncovered how domain-general processes shape the constructional networks of all varieties. Specifically, Standard English, Standard German, and PCEs all favor iconic CC constructions (in which the protasis clause C₁ precedes the apodosis clause C₂) over CC’ constructions (in which the apodosis C₂ is placed before the protasis C₁). The diachronic study in Chapter 3 also reveals that processing factors affect the whole network of constructions rather than certain individual constructions. Processing factors lead to the frequent use of a new construction once it has emerged, but the main force of linguistic change that accounts for the creation of the new grammatical construction is analogization. These results help confirm the general predictions based on Hawkins’ Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis (Reference Hawkins2004) that the simpler structure will be preferred in performance if the same content can be expressed by two competing structures and one of these is easier to process than the other. Moreover, the results reveal the important role that the cognitive constructional network plays in the creation of new syntactic structures. In other words, this study advocates a cognitively grounded Structuralist view of language change (p. 238), which provides further support for Hoffmann and Trousdale’s (Reference Hoffmann and Trousdale2011) argument that the Construction Grammar notion of constructional networks can be seen as a cognitive reinterpretation of Structuralist approaches to language change.

Despite its strengths, this monograph might have one minor issue relating to abbreviations. There are too many abbreviations in the book, some of which appear to be very confusing (e.g., English CCs and English CC constructions). The frequent use of abbreviations may cause some confusions for the readers and hence disrupt the flow of reading.

To sum up, this book provides a thorough and informative corpus-based cognitive investigation of English Comparative Correlatives. It presents many insightful findings about English CC constructions specifically and constructions in general. Furthermore, as noted above, this book expertly showcases the effectiveness of corpus linguistic methods in both diachronic and synchronic research on constructions, offering directions for future studies on language variation and change. It is a valuable addition to the existing literature on Cognitive Linguistics and historical linguistics in general and Construction Grammar in particular. It constitutes essential reading for researchers interested in these areas and as such it is highly recommended.