Review of Sommerer & Smirnova (2020): Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar.

"Constructions" are here defined in the wide sense typical of Construction Grammar approaches, encompassing linguistic units at different levels of complexity (from morphemes to clausal patterns) and schematicity (from fully specified to abstract underspecified units). The benefactive alternation, illustrated in (5), describes the ability of a particular class of verbs to occur in both a double-object construction (DOC) and a prepositional object construction (POC) with the preposition I for i . In "Constructionalization, Constructional Competition and Constructional Death", Lotte Sommerer argues that even though the emergence and disappearance of constructions are often intricately connected, constructional "death" has so far gained little attention in Diachronic Construction Grammar. Meanwhile, the author also discusses previous evidence (e.g., [7]) that many new verbs came to be used with the I way i -construction during the same period, suggesting that the schematicity of the construction and the productivity of its verb slot may not be entirely independent. [Extracted from the article]