Constructions and frames as interpretive clues

Drawing attention to a rather neglected domain in Construction Grammar analyses, this paper examines the multi-layered nature of speakers’ linguistic knowledge and its manifestation in the emergence of new linguistic structure. In particular, I show that the emergence of certain discourse-sensitive grammatical patterns can be systematically captured by appealing to an intricate interaction between fairly abstract constructional meanings based on metonymic transfer, lexical meanings of words (‘semantic’ frames), and particular discourse-pragmatic functions (‘discourse’ frames, understood as pragmatically grounded schematizations of communicative and discourse-structure conventions). It is the knowledge of all three dimensions that aids speakers in their interpretive tasks. The theoretical issues are demonstrated on a subset of discourse-functional and modal uses of the word jestli ‘if/whether’ in conversational Czech, as attested in the Czech National Corpus.