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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. 235–247

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Concessive conditionals as a family of constructions

 | Ghent University
Published online: 28 May 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00049.leu
Abstract
This squib sketches an approach to concessive conditionals (CCs) from the perspective of Radical Construction Grammar (Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). It brings earlier functional-typological work on CCs to bear on language-particular constructionist analyses of CCs, using the notions of ‘family (of constructions)’ and ‘prototype’ as the bridge. After suggesting how these notions can be applied to CCs under a functional-typological approach, the structure of the CC sub-constructicon in German is discussed, and directions for future research are offered to round the squib off.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Concessive Conditionals: ‘Family’ and Family Resemblances
  • 3.CCs and prototypes: A typological perspective
  • 4.Concessive conditionals in the constructicon: The view from German
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • References
References (31)
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