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Article published In: Quo Vadis, Construction Grammar?
Edited by Hans C. Boas, Jaakko Leino and Benjamin Lyngfelt
[Constructions and Frames 16:2] 2024
► pp. 278–310

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Staying terminologically rigid, conceptually open and socially cohesive

How to make room for the next generation of construction grammarians

ORCiD logo with link | University of Colorado Boulder
Published online: 26 August 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.23012.mic
Abstract
When he introduced the framework now known as Construction Grammar, Charles Fillmore said: “Grammatical Construction Theory differs from […] other frameworks […] in its insistence that syntactic patterns are often tightly associated with interpretation instructions” ( (1989). Grammatical construction theory and the familiar dichotomies. In R. Dietrich & C. Graumann (Eds.), Language processing in social context (pp. 17–38). Elsevier Publishers. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: 17). Construction Grammarians view the patterns, the associations and the interpretive instructionsas a matter of linguistic convention-a fact not generally appreciated within the wider cognitive-functional community that embraces Construction Grammar, In CxG, we do not use general principles to explain the existence of the form-function pairs we encounter in a language, but rather treat those as the product of lexical and constructional licensing (Zwicky, A. (1994). Dealing out meaning: Fundamentals of syntactic constructions. Proceedings of the twentieth meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Societys, 20(1), 611–625. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). But emergentists and stipulators share one core belief: grammatical structure is inherently symbolic. Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) makes this insight formally explicit by treating constructions as licensors of signs-signs that are phrases, lexemes or words-and allowing for semantic and usage constraints to be directly associated with constructions. But practitioners of Construction Grammar might reasonably reject the SBCG formalism as incompatible with major foundations of constructional thinking: the top-down nature of constructional meaning, the idiomaticity continuum and the narrow scope of linguistic generalizations. My task in this article is to address this concern, illustrating a variety of applications.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Construction Grammar Coursebook
  • 3.Is Construction Grammar best considered a coherent theoretical framework or rather a flexible toolbox for linguistic analysis?
    • 3.1A format that fits the framework
    • 3.2Insights from words
    • 3.3Frequently asked questions
  • 4.What’s in a construction? What kind(s) of information is, and is not, included in a construction, and in a proper description of a construction?
  • 5.Sentence analysis
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

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Boas, Hans C., Jaakko Leino & Benjamin Lyngfelt
2024. Constructionist views on Construction Grammar. Constructions and Frames 16:2 ► pp. 169 ff. DOI logo
Goldberg, Adele E.
2024. Usage-based constructionist approaches and large language models. Constructions and Frames 16:2 ► pp. 220 ff. DOI logo
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2023. Grammaire agentielle cognitive de constructions. Signata 14 DOI logo

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