LFG and historical linguistics

This chapter looks at the opportunities and perspectives that LFG offers for the study of language change, surveying existing LFG approaches within historical linguistics and providing examples of sample phenomena. We discuss how reanalysis, a major driver of language change, can be accounted for elegantly within LFG's parallel architecture thanks to its crucial separation of form from function and, moreover, how different types of reanalysis can be understood, whether they involve rebracketing, recategorization, or changes at the lexical level commonly discussed in terms of grammaticalization. As we also discuss, LFG's fundamental design principles and resulting flexibility of c-structure allow for complex, nuanced accounts of word order change. Furthermore, we survey the opportunities that LFG offers for exploring the complex relationship between variation and change, and in particular frequency effects and gradual change which proceeds via competition. Finally, we signpost future possibilities for work in this relatively underexplored but promising area.