Story of a construction: Statistical and distributional analysis of the development of the Italian gerundival construction

This study investigates the diachronic development of the Italian gerundival periphrases stare/andare/venire + gerund using a corpus-based approach. The productivity and semantic structure of these constructions are explored over eight centuries, based on data extracted from the Google Ngram Corpus. Combining insights from Construction Grammar and Distributional Semantics, the study tracks changes in verb-collocation patterns and constructs distributional semantic spaces to model shifts in meaning and usage. The findings reveal that constructional productivity is shaped by prior usage and analogical patterns, with each construction exhibiting different degrees of schematicity.