ABSTRACT
Changes to multifunctional, schematic grammatical patterns in language have been attested at the community level, but it is still unclear to what extent similar changes occur in individuals. This chapter addresses this gap through analysis of changes to the use of it-clefts in terms of information structure and communicative function at both the aggregate and individual level. Data come from a sample of the EMMA-corpus, comprising the writings of 50 individuals born in 17th-century England who had a long and prolific writing career. The emergence of a diverse range of new communicative strategies in the cleft is linked to individuals’ increasing rates of cleft usage throughout the 17th century and the establishment of an increasingly non-compositional high-level cleft schema. Individual variation found during this shift is linked to the life experiences of particular individuals, specifically their level of university education. Establishing the manner in which individuals motivate, incorporate, and propagate changes to highly schematic constructions such as clefts is a vital step towards an integration of both social and cognitive dimensions into a more comprehensive model of language change.
