Modality and Diachronic Construction Grammar

This paper examines koto imperatives (e.g., tōku-o mite unten-suru koto! ‘drive looking far ahead!’) in Japanese. With internal reconstruction, it is shown that koto imperatives not only underwent a process of pragmatic strengthening resulting in a new sense of modality, but also inherited the syntactic schema of the prototypical modal (raising-to-subject) construction. Given this new meaning associated with new syntax, it is proposed that koto imperatives are an instance of constructionalizatio