Phonological schematicity in multilingual constructions: A diasystematic perspective on lexical form

Abstract

This article discusses the role of intra-word phonological schematicity in multilingual constructicons from a Diasystematic Construction Grammar perspective. It argues that, in particular with communities that use two or more typologically similar and/or closely related languages, many lexical elements (e.g. cognates) exhibit regular sound correspondences that can be analysed as consisting of different types of phonological schemas. In this view, there is a division of labour between schematic constructions that specify the words' referential meaning and others that specify their belonging to one of the “languages”, with language-specificity defined as a pragmatic property of constructions. The focus is on the question whether generalizations at this level of schematicity and abstraction are cognitively real and what can count as evidence for their existence from a usage-based perspective.