On the basis of data retrieved from the Corpus of Historical American English, this paper provides a multivariate analysis of diachronic change in collocations of the sequence a bunch of followed by a noun in the Late Modern and contemporary English periods. Our results show that (1) the partitive semantics shifts in the period from the 1910s to the 1960s from the original dominant meaning ‘bundle’ to ‘group,’ while the quantifier function/‘large quantity’ meaning of bunch becomes more entrenched from the 1970s onwards, though the three meanings continue to co-exist in the contemporary language; and (2) there exist statistically significant correlations between semantic, pragmatic, and discourse properties of the noun collocates in the partitive and quantifier constructions. While much work on diachronic construction grammar is concerned with the question of how new constructions come into being, the present article complements such research by providing a detailed account of the nature of persistence of the earlier partitive construction and the embedding and gradual entrenchment of the newer quantifier construction. It therefore addresses the consequences of “constructionalization” on a source construction, and the nature of frequency effects in “post-constructionalization” changes.

中文翻译：

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一组名词历时变化的多元分析：一个结构式语法说明

本文基于从美国历史英语语料库中检索到的数据，对近代晚期和当代英语中的 a 串后接名词序列搭配的历时变化进行了多变量分析。我们的研究结果表明：（1）1910 年代到 1960 年代的部分语义从最初的主导意义“捆绑”转变为“群体”，而束的量词功能/“大量”意义变得更加根深蒂固。 1970年代以后，虽然这三种含义在当代语言中继续共存；(2) 部分和量词结构中名词搭配的语义、语用和语篇属性之间存在统计学上显着的相关性。虽然关于历时构式语法的许多工作都与新构式如何形成的问题有关，但本文通过详细说明早期部分构式的持久性以及新构式的嵌入和逐渐巩固的性质，对此类研究进行了补充。量词构造。因此，它解决了“构造化”对源构造的影响，以及“构造后”变化中频率效应的性质。