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Article published In: The Wealth and Breadth of Construction-Based Research:
Edited by Timothy Colleman, Frank Brisard, Astrid De Wit, Renata Enghels, Nikos Koutsoukos, Tanja Mortelmans and María Sol Sansiñena
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 34] 2020
► pp. 42–51

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Grammatical categories as paradigms in Construction Grammar

 | Leibniz Universität Hannover
 | Leibniz Universität Hannover
Published online: 28 May 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00033.die
Abstract
This squib discusses the question whether Construction Grammar can account for the assumption of universal grammatical categories (Bybee, Joan L., Revere D. Perkins and William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) that are prone to language change, e.g. tense. Most publications in Construction Grammar tackle individual constructions, such as the way-construction (Jackendoff, Ray. 1990. Semantic Structures. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). But it remains unclear how grammatical categories as a universal phenomenon can be described in constructionist terms. We propose that there is a way to (a) describe grammatical categories, which per definition are encoded paradigmatically, as constructions themselves and (b) to thereby strengthen the assumption of a set of universal grammatical categories.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Grammatical functions and grammatical categories
  • 3.What’s (in) a paradigm?
  • 4.Bridging the gap: Paradigms and constructions
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (30)
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