Some (critical) questions for diachronic construction grammar

The paper critically reviews a recent volume on Diachronic Construction Grammar. It is argued that a more convincing case for the diachronic construction grammar approach could have been made by more explicitly comparing it to other approaches to historical linguistics, and that a number of central notions, such as “constructionalization”, are not applied consistently throughout the volume. In addition, an analysis of the constructionalization of English be going to presented in the volume is examined and shown not to be supported by the Early Modern English data.