ABSTRACT
The view of language change that is emerging from recent studies is that change is gradual and takes place in small increments during usage events, as language users apply cognitive processes to the task of communicating with one another. The very notion that cognitive or psycholinguistic processes are involved in language change highlights the factors operative during usage events – factors affecting the speaker and listener in communicative situations. This chapter discusses the known cognitive processes that operate on linguistic meaning and form to shape language in an ongoing, dynamic way. A self-organising dynamic can help drive language change, but also accounts for language stability in the short term, since conservative linguistic variants perpetuate themselves as well. The many studies of semantic change in grammaticalisation over the last few decades have highlighted the role of inference-making as a way that new meanings can be imbued in grammaticalising constructions.
