The most important results concern the interaction between lifespan and generational change, as exemplified in the history of 'be going to'. The original meaning of 'go', still very much around, is ‘move towards a goal’. When combined with a purpose, as in I’m going (to the market) to buy meat, motion recedes in the background. In the seventeenth century, increase in such backgrounding led to a new structure in which 'be going to do X' holistically expresses a future intention or plan, and go no longer refers to motion. Results further show that innovators at first do not fulfil the full potential of this new generalization, but accommodate to their more conservative elder peers. Conversely, elder peers adopt some innovative behavior, but are increasingly hampered by their habits as they age. What is interesting about grammatical patterns is that they exist below the level of awareness and there are few incentives for adopting them. The dynamics of their adoption, therefore, provides a picture of how easily we continue to adopt new patterns semi-spontaneously. Likelihood of adoption is for instance correlated with the functional distance between novel and original use. Next to the emergence of new structures, where both uses are already known to language users, and the change only affects the respective frequency of their use, no clear age restrictions have been found.
On a more general level, the project has shown that there is no such thing as the average language user, and interindividual differences are bigger than commonly assumed. Apart from differences attributable to style and personality, the results also corroborate past research in observing a relation between innovative behavior and social networks: urban life (in our data primarily living in London) promotes change and innovation more, as there is more exposure to a greater variety of linguistic behaviors.
Next to the scientific results, the project produced a number of more widely useful tools/methodologies. First the 90 million word corpus Early Modern Multiloquent Authors (EMMA) was compiled, consisting of the collected works of 50 prolific authors. With its unprecedented per individual sample size, EMMA can be used for in-depth longitudinal analysis of linguistic behavior in individual language users. EMMA is currently being used by more than 50 researchers from 19 different countries. The project also developed a method to trace the emergence and development of novel grammatical patterns quantitatively (Petré & Van de Velde 2018). Finally, to facilitate linguistic analysis, an innovative query and annotation tool was developed alongside with the corpus, called Cosycat (Collaborative Synchronized Corpus Annotation Tool), with improved synchronization between researchers’ analytical work as compared to alternative annotation tools.
In terms of dissemination, results were presented at 64 international conferences, and were published in 18 internationally peer-reviewed publications. In 2018, an international workshop was organized in Paris, with a subsequent special issue of the top journal 'Cognitive Linguistics' devoted to the project's core research questions, and in 2021, the 11th edition of the International Conference on Construction Grammar was organized with the help of the project around three of its core topics.
