Blurb:

The chapter by Mackenzie puts forward an innovative analysis of alternations within the framework of FDG (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008). The author analyses the implications of recent work on priming in dialogue for a re-interpretation of FDG as a dialogic model, “in which there is a balance between the creativity of the individual speaker and her participation in a mutually aligned interaction” (p. 47). The notion of morphosyntactic alternation is claimed to be applicable only when there is connectedness without a corresponding semantic or pragmatic effect between the alternants. Examination of an extract from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English reveals how this relatedness becomes visible in dialogue in the operation of priming.