The study of linguistic units below the structural level of the word has not received very much attention within the Construction Grammar enterprise. Despite the principal commitment “to account for the entirety of each language” (Kay and Fillmore 1999: 1), studying the structure and meaning of syntactic units has thus far been the main research objective. Due to the influential work of Goldberg (1995, 2006), the focus within syntax has furthermore been on argument structure constructions, which represent linguistic generalizations that are much more abstract than constructions that specify information at the level of actual sounds. Analyses that apply Construction Grammar to lower levels of structural organization have only recently begun to emerge. For instance, Booij (2010) offers a comprehensive approach to morphological constructions that will be of particular concern to the discussion in Chapter 4. In the present chapter, it will be explored whether a constructional perspective is also fruitful for the analysis of change at the level of word-internal structure.

The specific phenomenon of linguistic organization that will be tackled in this chapter is allomorphy, that is, the variation between different realizations of the same morpheme (Plag 2003: 27). Typically, but not necessarily, the choice between two allomorphs depends on the phonological context. Framed in a constructional perspective, allomorphy can be understood as phonemic variation at the sound pole of a construction. To illustrate, a standard example for allomorphy in English is the variation between the realizations of the indefinite determiner, that is, [ə], [ən], and the emphatic variant [eI].