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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. 357–370

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Making good on a promise

Multidimensional constructions

 | Sony Computer Science Laboratories Paris, France
Published online: 28 May 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00059.tri
Abstract
Construction Grammar was founded on the promise of maximal empirical coverage without compromising on formal precision. Its main claim is that all linguistic knowledge can be represented as constructions, similar to the notion of constructions from traditional grammars. As such, Construction Grammar may finally reconcile the needs of descriptive and theoretical linguistics by establishing a common ground between them. Unfortunately, while the construction grammar community has developed a sophisticated understanding of what a construction is supposed to be, many critics still believe that a construction is simply a new jacket for traditional linguistic analyses and therefore inherits all of the problems of those analyses. The goal of this article is to refute such criticisms by showing how constructions can be formalized as open-ended and multidimensional linguistic representations that make no prior assumptions about the structure of a language. While this article’s proposal can be simply written down in a pen-and-paper style, it verifies the validity of its approach through a computational implementation of German field topology in Fluid Construction Grammar.
Article outline
  • 1.The promise of construction grammar
  • 2.A new jacket for mainstream analyses?
  • 3.Open-Ended and multidimensional constructions
  • 4.How does it work? An example from German field topology
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
References (34)
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van Trijp, Remi
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2025. Moving Past Slot-Fillers: Balancing English Argument Structure with Fluid Construction Grammar. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 73:3 ► pp. 261 ff. DOI logo
van Trijp, Remi
2025. Different Constructional Approaches in Practice. In The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar, ► pp. 249 ff. DOI logo
Ungerer, Tobias & Stefan Hartmann
2023. Constructionist Approaches, DOI logo
Ungerer, Tobias
2022. Extending structural priming to test constructional relations: Some comments and suggestions. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 10:1 ► pp. 159 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2023. Structural Priming in the Grammatical Network [Constructional Approaches to Language, 35], DOI logo

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