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1
Höder, Steffen. "Phonological elements and Diasystematic Construction Grammar." Reflections on Constructions across Grammars 6, no. 2 (December 31, 2014): 202–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/cf.6.2.04hod.
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Usage-based CxG approaches share the central assumption that any grammar has to be acquired and organised through input-based abstraction and categorisation. Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) is based on the idea that these processes are not sensitive to language boundaries. Multilingual input thus results in multilingual grammars which are conceived of as constructicons containing language-specific as well as language-unspecific constructions. Within such systems, phonological structures play an important part in the identification of schematic constructions. However, the status of phonology in DCxG, as in CxG in general, yet remains unclear. This paper presents some arguments for including phonological elements systematically in the construction-based analysis of (multilingual) constructional systems.
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Hunston, Susan. "Patterns, constructions, and applied linguistics." Constructions in Applied Linguistics 24, no. 3 (August 27, 2019): 324–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.00015.hun.
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Abstract This paper proposes an alignment between aspects of pattern grammar (Francis, 1993; Hunston & Francis, 2000) and construction grammar (Goldberg, 2006). Pattern Grammar describes the grammatical behaviour of individual words at a specific level of generality. The paper claims that grammar patterns and the groups of words identified as occurring with them can be used to propose candidate constructions. This claim is illustrated with verbs and with adjectives. The paper proposes that the term ‘construction’ be used to refer to a sub-set of instances of a grammar pattern, that sub-set identified by the occurrence of a limited set of node words. It also proposes that the Pattern Grammar reference resources that are already available be reconfigured as a constructicon. The paper discusses how constructions could be presented to (English) language teachers and learners and how a constructicon might be organised.
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Osborne,, Timothy, and Thomas Gross,. "Constructions are catenae: Construction Grammar meets Dependency Grammar." Cognitive Linguistics 23, no. 1 (February 2012): 165–216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cog-2012-0006.
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AbstractThe paper demonstrates that dependency-based syntax is in a strong position to produce principled and economical accounts of the syntax of constructs. The difficulty that constituency-based syntax has in this regard is that very many constructs fail to qualify as constituents. The point is evident with the box diagrams and attribute value matrices (AVMs) that some construction grammars (CxGs) use to formalize constructions; these schemata often represent fragments rather than constituents. In dependency-based syntax in contrast, constructions are catenae, whereby a catena is a chain of words linked together by dependencies. The catena is a novel but well-defined unit of syntax associated with dependency grammar (DG). The constructs of CxGs are more amenable to analyses in terms of the catenae of dependency-based syntax than to analyses in terms of the constituents of constituency-based syntax.
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Taylor, John R. "Why Construction Grammar is radical." Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 2 (December 31, 2004): 321–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/arcl.2.12tay.
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This article reviews some of the foundational assumptions of Croft'sRadical Construction Grammar. While constructions have featured prominently in much recent work in cognitive linguistics, Croft adopts the ‘radical’ view that constructions are the primary objects of linguistic analysis, with lexical and syntactic categories being defined with respect to the constructions in which they occur. This approach reverses the traditional view, according to which complex expressions are compositionally assembled through syntactic rules operating over items selected from the lexicon. The ubiquity of idioms, especially so-called constructional idioms, provides compelling evidence for the essential correctness of the radical constructional view. The possibility of a radical constructional approach to phonology is also discussed.
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DUNN, JONATHAN. "Computational learning of construction grammars." Language and Cognition 9, no. 2 (March 28, 2016): 254–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2016.7.
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abstractThis paper presents an algorithm for learning the construction grammar of a language from a large corpus. This grammar induction algorithm has two goals: first, to show that construction grammars are learnable without highly specified innate structure; second, to develop a model of which units do or do not constitute constructions in a given dataset. The basic task of construction grammar induction is to identify the minimum set of constructions that represents the language in question with maximum descriptive adequacy. These constructions must (1) generalize across an unspecified number of units while (2) containing mixed levels of representation internally (e.g., both item-specific and schematized representations), and (3) allowing for unfilled and partially filled slots. Additionally, these constructions may (4) contain recursive structure within a given slot that needs to be reduced in order to produce a sufficiently schematic representation. In other words, these constructions are multi-length, multi-level, possibly discontinuous co-occurrences which generalize across internal recursive structures. These co-occurrences are modeled using frequency and the ΔP measure of association, expanded in novel ways to cover multi-unit sequences. This work provides important new evidence for the learnability of construction grammars as well as a tool for the automated corpus analysis of constructions.
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Torres-Martínez, Sergio. "Applied Cognitive Construction Grammar: A usage-based approach to the teaching of phrasal verbs (and other constructions)." European Journal of Applied Linguistics 6, no. 2 (September 3, 2018): 279–314. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/eujal-2016-0012.
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AbstractThe current article presents a case for a constructionist turn in pedagogical grammar. To that end, the framework termed Applied CognitiveConstruction Grammars (ACCxG) is introduced as a means to arrive at a systematic characterization of linguistic constructions in general and of phrasal verbs (PVs) in particular. Hence, PVs are defined as motivated pairings of form and meaning (constructions) embedded in semantic networks in which metaphorical meanings are motivated by more basic ones. In order to illustrate this proposal, a classification of PVs (which is deemed to align with L2 learners’ robust category formation abilities) is introduced. Furthermore, the tenets of a constructionist task-based type of pedagogy are outlined as a proposal for further research in the field of pedagogical construction grammar.
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Trijp, Remi van. "Making good on a promise." Belgian Journal of Linguistics, Volume 34 (2020) 34 (December 31, 2020): 357–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00059.tri.
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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.
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Nolan, Brian. "Theoretical and computational considerations of linking constructions in Role and Reference Grammar." Review of Cognitive Linguistics 12, no. 2 (October 31, 2014): 410–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/rcl.12.2.06nol.
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This paper proposes a view of the linguistic construction in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) in which constructions are posited to be structured grammatical objects with a unique constructional signature that uniquely identifies them. We argue that the construction has an input and an output, and that it contains a local workspace in which the processing of the various lexical and grammatical rules applies, according to the constraints within the constructional object. In recent years there has been a growing recognition that the RRG account of constructions is an under-utilised resource that deserves a wider application to problems in cross-linguistic analysis (Nolan & Diedrichsen, 2013; Nolan & Periñán, 2014). As a functional grammar with strong claims of adequacy, RRG has however had several challenges from Construction Grammar (Butler & Martín Arista, 2009; Goldberg, 2006; Michaelis, 2006, 2010). This paper addresses a number of these challenges. In the view of constructions presented here, the linking over the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic interfaces resides in the body of the construction, and the construction interacts with the lexicon which provides lexical information relevant to the construction. The constructions reside in a construction repository. This model of constructions delivers a means to address the challenges posed to the RRG account of the role and place of constructions within a lexicalist functionalist model of grammar.
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Wasserscheidt, Philipp. "Construction Grammar: Basic Principles and Concepts." Ukrainian Linguistics, no. 49 (2019): 94–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/um/49(2019).94-116.
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The article provides an overview of Construction Grammar. First, a general survey of the basic principles and major strands of the grammatical theory is given. The main assumptions include the recognition that all linguistic knowledge is of the same type as knowledge in general and follows the same principles such as categorization, abstraction and generalization. In the second part, the presentation focuses on two important elements of construction grammar research: the concept of the construction as complex sign and the abandoning of the distinction between lexicon and grammar. Using examples from Ukrainian, the different relationships between constructions of different complexity and schematicity in the so-called constructicon – the common space of both lexical and grammatical knowledge – are described. It is shown, how abstract constructions offer slots for other elements and how these are constrained regarding form and meaning. In addition, the status of constructions as complex signs is assessed from the perspective of semantics and compositionality. It is highlighted that Construction Grammar rejects the assumption of compositionality and rather conceptualizes meaning as determined by the construction itself. At the same time, semantics is understood in an encyclopaedic sense, which renders the description of constructions highly detailed and language-specific.
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Boas, Hans C., Benjamin Lyngfelt, and Tiago Timponi Torrent. "Framing constructicography." Lexicographica 35, no. 1 (December 1, 2019): 41–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/lex-2019-0002.
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Abstract Constructicography can be defined as a blend between Construction Grammar and Practical Lexicography, which aims at developing constructicons: repositories of form and function pairings in a language. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of this emerging field by (i) tracking the origins of both Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar and the repercussions of their intertwined developments to Computational Lexicography and Constructicography; (ii) comparing the impacts of the different degrees of interconnection between constructicons and framenets and (iii) discussing the possible applications of these resources. Also, we argue that Constructicography, while obviously building on the accumulated knowledge compiled by numerous Construction Grammar approaches to language, also contributes to its mother theory, since the effort to build coherent formalized computational resources forces constructionist analysis to go beyond describing families of constructions into the enterprise of describing a coherent construction grammar of a language.
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Diewald, Gabriele, and Katja Politt. "Grammatical categories as paradigms in Construction Grammar." Belgian Journal of Linguistics, Volume 34 (2020) 34 (December 31, 2020): 42–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00033.die.
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Abstract This squib discusses the question whether Construction Grammar can account for the assumption of universal grammatical categories (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994) that are prone to language change, e.g. tense. Most publications in Construction Grammar tackle individual constructions, such as the way-construction (Jackendoff 1990). 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.
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Perek, Florent, and Amanda L. Patten. "Towards an English Constructicon using patterns and frames." Constructions in Applied Linguistics 24, no. 3 (August 27, 2019): 354–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.00016.per.
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Abstract Recent research in construction grammar has been marked by increasing efforts to create constructicons: detailed inventories of form-meaning pairs to describe the grammar of a given language, following the principles of construction grammar. This paper describes proposals for building a new constructicon of English, based on the combination of the COBUILD Grammar Patterns and the semantic frames of FrameNet. In this case study, the valency information from FrameNet was automatically matched to the verb patterns of COBUILD, in order to identify the frames that each pattern is associated with. We find that the automatic procedure must be complemented by a good deal of manual annotation. We examine the “V that” pattern in particular, illustrating how the frame information can be used to describe this pattern in terms of constructions.
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Gonzálvez-García, Francisco. "Maximizing the explanatory power of constructions in Cognitive Construction Grammar(s)." Belgian Journal of Linguistics, Volume 34 (2020) 34 (December 31, 2020): 110–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00039.gon.
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Abstract This paper suggests two possible ways in which cognitively-oriented constructionist approaches (Cognitive Construction Grammar, Radical Construction Grammar, and Embodied Construction Grammar) could enhance the explanatory power of constructions. First, the anatomy of a construction should spell out how the morphosyntactic realizations of arguments are specifically mapped onto their inherent semantico-pragmatic properties, while also including detailed information concerning illocutionary force, information structure, register, politeness, etc. Second, it is argued that coercion should be best understood as a continuum allowing for varying degrees of (in-)compatibility between the verb and the construction taken as a whole. Moreover, parameterization and linguistic cueing prove useful to handle the dynamic interaction of the morphosyntactic, semantico-pragmatic, and discourse-functional hallmarks of constructions, including those which invite metonymic inferencing.
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Noël, Dirk. "Diachronic construction grammar and grammaticalization theory." Functions of Language 14, no. 2 (December 7, 2007): 177–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/fol.14.2.04noe.
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Grammaticalization theorists are becoming increasingly aware of the relevance of constructions to their discipline, to the point that one of its leading exponents has recently defined grammaticalization as the creation of new constructions. This is precisely the problem which construction grammarians engaging in diachronic research are addressing — or one they should be addressing, because to date diachronic construction grammar has not really taken off as a discipline. The question arises of whether grammaticalization theory could simply be turned into the historical branch of construction grammar, or whether diachronic construction grammar has its own raison d’être as a separate discipline. Since grammaticalization theoretical practice is fairly narrowly focused on the change of extant constructions along a path towards the grammatical end of the meaning continuum, there is a need for a wider discipline that also concerns itself with the primary emergence of constructions. Though grammaticalization presupposes ‘constructionalization’, the two developments need to be kept apart because not all constructions go on to grammaticalize.
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Boas, Hans C. "The syntax–lexicon continuum in Construction Grammar." Framing 24 (December 10, 2010): 54–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/bjl.24.03boa.
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This paper offers an alternative analysis of Goldberg’s (1995) account of communication verbs appearing in the ditransitive construction. Based on a more finely-grained frame-semantic analysis of constructional phenomena, it is shown that generalizations over specific syntactic frames are possible at different levels of semantic abstraction. This, in turn, allows us to make across-the-board generalizations that hold not only between lexical units evoking the same frame, but also between lexical units belonging to different frames at different levels of abstraction. The resulting network of constructions combines Goldberg’s proposals regarding the status of abstract-schematic constructions with item-specific knowledge regarding the specific lexical units, with various midpoints in between. This approach has the advantage that there is no need for fusing lexical entries with abstract meaningful constructions, thereby avoiding some of the problems that arise due to the separation of syntax and the lexicon in some constructional approaches.
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Glynn, Dylan. "Constructions at the crossroads." Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 2 (December 31, 2004): 197–233. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/arcl.2.07gly.
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Construction Grammar focuses on the meaning encoded in the syntagmatic structures of language. However, syntagmatic meaning and coding interact in a complex way with paradigmatic structures such as lexis, metonymy, and metaphor. How can Construction Grammar capture the formal and semantic structure of entrenched schematic constructions while rigorously accounting for all these parameters? Based on the analysis of the conceptual domain of ‘stealing’ in English, this study demonstrates that through combining three different approaches to linguistic structure, the study of the semantic frame, the cognitive model, and the onomasiological lexical field, we can more properly appreciate and explain lexical, metaphoric, and constructional interplay.
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Park, Chongwon. "Metonymy in grammar." Functions of Language 20, no. 1 (May 13, 2013): 31–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/fol.20.1.02par.
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This article focuses on the conceptual structures of Korean Multiple Object Constructions (MOCs), which exhibit various types of meanings. I argue that these various meanings are systematically explained when we adopt the notion of reference point. I claim that the accusative-marked nominals in the constructions are metonymically connected; outer accusative-marked nominals function as reference points. More specifically, NP1, in the schematic configuration [NP-Nom [NP1-Acc [NP2-Acc [PRED]]]], functions as a reference point in relation to the complex verb [NP2-PRED], where NP1 provides access to the target. In other words, the function of Korean MOCs is to provide mental access to a target, similar to English possessive constructions. For example, since one natural mental path of access is by following a taxonomic hierarchy from general to specific, the metonymic meaning of the Type-Token construction arises. The same mechanism is then recursively applied to explain the case of multiply-occurring accusative-marked nominals. In order to provide technical analyses of my claim, Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar is adopted as a theoretical framework as it accurately captures the properties of the constructions without additional unnecessary mechanisms.
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Perek,, Florent. "Alternation-based generalizations are stored in the mental grammar: Evidence from a sorting task experiment." Cognitive Linguistics 23, no. 3 (August 28, 2012): 601–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cog-2012-0018.
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AbstractAccording to constructional approaches, grammar consists of an inventory of symbolic pairings of a syntactic form with an abstract meaning. Many of such so-called constructions can be perceived as having highly similar meanings: such pairs have been discussed under the name of alternations, especially in the domain of argument structure, for example the widely documented dative alternation (e.g. John gave Mary a book vs. John gave a book to Mary). This paper explores what status such pairs of constructions can be given in construction grammar, on the basis of a sorting task experiment.Construction grammar traditionally recognizes generalizations of a common syntactic form over semantically similar sentences, but the status of higher-level generalizations of a common meaning over syntactically different forms is rarely discussed. In our study, we devised a sorting task that subjects could resolve by relying on generalizations of either of these two kinds. We find that subjects rely on alternation-based generalizations more often than purely constructional ones in their sorting behavior. We suggest these results show that generalizations of a common meaning between formally different constructions are plausible categories stored by speakers and should be given more attention in construction grammar research.
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Lewandowski, Wojciech. "Constructions are not predictable but are motivated: evidence from the Spanish completive reflexive." Linguistics 59, no. 1 (January 1, 2021): 35–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0264.
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Abstract Many researchers seem to think that Construction Grammar posits the existence of only wholly idiosyncratic constructions. However, this misconception betrays a deep misunderstanding of the approach because it glosses over the fact that constructions rarely if ever emerge sui generis. Rather, Construction Grammar aims to balance the fact that some linguistic uses cannot be fully predicted from other well-established uses with the fact that extensions of a construction, while not predictable, are motivated by other senses in the constructional network. This paper illustrates this idea by providing an analysis of the Spanish completive reflexive marker se.
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Beuls, Katrien. "Inflectional patterns as constructions." Constructions and Frames 4, no. 2 (December 31, 2012): 231–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/cf.4.2.04beu.
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Although often a painful and prolonged process, conjugating verbs correctly is essential when you try to master a foreign language. Verbs that exhibit an irregular conjugation paradigm, however, are often the verbs that occur most frequently in a language. The nature of inflectional morphemes and the mechanism for conjugating verbs have been the topic of debate for 25 years now. This has led to many different accounts of the problem, both in the field of descriptive linguistics as well as in a range of modeling approaches. The field of Construction Grammar has recently witnessed the theoretical work on Construction Morphology by Geert Booij (2010), but there has been no computational implementation that could test the theory on a large scale. Using the framework of Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG), I investigate the grammar and morphological constructions that are needed to automatically conjugate the full paradigms of the 600 most frequently used verbs in Spanish. This paper reports a fully operational rule-based implementation of such a grammar and goes into the details of the constructions that support it. The results also show that morphological constructions are exemplary constructions since they combine two (or more) units (a stem and a suffix(es)) into a single meaningful unit (a conjugated verb form) that can be picked up by other discourse elements. Extensions towards embedding the conjugation constructions into a bigger grammar or automatically learning new morphological constructions remain the focus of future work.
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Meireles, Fernanda Aparecida Raposo. "Aspectos cognitivos e pragmáticos das construções condicionais contrafactuais." Cadernos de Estudos Lingüísticos 45 (September 19, 2011): 107–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.20396/cel.v45i0.8637021.
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This paper taker a sociocognitive approach on conditional counterfactual constructions in Brazilian Portuguese. Following work on Construction Grammar (Fillmore & Kay 1993, Goldberg1995), it is argued that tense and mood are related to contextually determined phenomena such as epistemic stance and epistemicdistance. The main argument is that past morphology is responsible for hypothetical or counterfactual interpretations. Moreover, this fact shows the interaction between verbs and constructions, confirming the Construction Grammar’s viewpoint.
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LANGACKER, RONALD W. "CONSTRUCTIONS IN COGNITIVE GRAMMAR." ENGLISH LINGUISTICS 20, no. 1 (2003): 41–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.9793/elsj1984.20.41.
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BOAS, HANS C. "Construction Grammar in the twenty-first century." English Language and Linguistics 11, no. 3 (November 2007): 569–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674307002390.
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Adele Goldberg, Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. vii + 280.Goldberg's new work ‘investigates the nature of our knowledge of language, how that knowledge is acquired by children, and how crosslinguistic and language-internal generalizations can be explained’. It builds on earlier research on Construction Grammar (CxG) by Fillmore (1986), Lakoff (1987), Fillmore, Kay & O'Connor (1988), and Goldberg (1995), among others. Since the mid-1990s constructions have become more and more popular as an alternative to Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist Program, but it was not until the new millennium that CxG reached a new level of interest that resulted in an ever-growing body of research (for an overview, see Fried & Östman 2004). Besides numerous articles and monographs, the increased interest in CxG is evidenced by a book series and an e-journal devoted to constructional research, as well as the bi-annual International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG). The publication of Goldberg (1995) inspired much constructional research over the past decade, most notably Croft's (2001) typologically oriented approach to CxG and Tomasello's (2003) constructional account of language acquisition.
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Torres-Martínez, Sergio. "Working out multiword verbs within an Applied Cognitive Construction Grammar framework." European Journal of Applied Linguistics 5, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 55–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/eujal-2016-0003.
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AbstractThis article presents a constructionist approach to the teaching of multiword verbs. To that end, I outline a pedagogical model, Applied Cognitive Construction Grammar (ACCxG), which is deemed to provide insight into a novel classification of multiword verbs as constructions (form-function pairings). The ACCxG framework integrates four cognitively-driven rationales, namely Focus on Form, Task-based Language Teaching, Data-driven Learning, and Paper-based Data-Driven Learning. It is argued that the syntax-semantics of multiword verbs can be better understood through recourse to their relation with syntactic constructions (Argument Structure Constructions). Endorsing this rationale entails, among other things, the recognition that the same general cognitive mechanisms intervening in the construction of our experience of the world are at play during the construction of linguistic knowledge.
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Lindström, Jan K. "On the place of turn and sequence in grammar." Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 24, no. 3 (September 1, 2014): 507–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/prag.24.3.04lin.
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This study elaborates the concept of a positionally sensitive grammar with respect to the sequentiality of turns and the turn constructional units in conversation. The linguistic object of the analysis is clausal constructions in Swedish that are initiated by the finite predicate verb: Polar questions, receipt questions (news receipts), conditional protases and pro-drop declaratives. These constructions share potentially the same syntactic surface pattern but are constrained by different sequential conditions of use. The study proposes an integrated interactional linguistic analysis which takes into account both syntactic and sequential aspects of turn construction. A grammatical attribute-value matrix, based on the framework of construction grammar (CxG), is introduced. The analysis shows that regularities of sequential organization may provide robust distinctive constructional features while a pure syntactic analysis remains less distinctive. The decisive constructional features are systematically captured by a notation designed for sequential and syntactic organization.
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Leuschner, Torsten. "Concessive conditionals as a family of constructions." Belgian Journal of Linguistics, Volume 34 (2020) 34 (December 31, 2020): 235–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00049.leu.
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Abstract This squib sketches an approach to concessive conditionals (CCs) from the perspective of Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001). 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.
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Shi, Yuzhi. "Rule and Construction: The Transitivity of Resultatives in English." Cognitive Semantics 6, no. 1 (March 19, 2020): 107–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/23526416-00502005.
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The resultative construction has been one of the focuses in exploring the interfaces between semantics and syntax. In the generativist tradition, constructions are regarded as the surface structures that are generated by a set of phrasal rules. In cognitive linguistics, especially the approach of construction grammar, constructions are viewed as the fixed pairings of forms and meanings that are regarded as symbolic like lexical items. This article argues that constructions are schemas determined by certain rules, and a set of subconstructions may be produced by a base construction. The article shows that the transitivity of the resultative construction is governed by the semantic relationship between the verb and the resultative phrase, which in turn determines concrete syntactic configurations. Grammar constructions consisting of two or more elements are essentially different from those atomic lexical items, a point distinguishing my analysis from construction grammar. Without the assumption of any underlying structures, unlike the generativist model, this article uncovers the surface rules that determine concrete constructions.
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KIM, JONG-BOK, and MARK DAVIES. "English what with absolute constructions: a Construction Grammar perspective." English Language and Linguistics 24, no. 4 (July 23, 2019): 637–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674319000169.
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There are several types of absolute constructions (acs) in English. Among these, this article investigates the so-called what-with ac, which has not received much attention in the study of English grammar. This article considers the grammatical properties of the construction from a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective, using much more representative and robust corpora than previous studies. Based on corpus data drawn from historical corpora such as COHA (Corpus of Historical American English, 400 million words), the article addresses questions about changes in the construction's syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. In addition, the article provides a Construction Grammar perspective, which supports previous research in arguing that the construction is undergoing the processes of grammatical constructionalization.
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Zhukovska, Victoria. "INTERPRETING DETACHED CONSTRUCTIONS WITH EXPLICIT SUBJECT THROUGH THE PRISM OF RELATED TERMS." Germanic Philology Journal of Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University, no. 831-832 (2021): 48–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.31861/gph2021.831-832.48-60.
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This article provides a comprehensive account of the English detached nonfinite and nonverbal constructions with the explicit subject within the framework of construction grammar. The study overviews the terms utilized in Western grammatical studies to nominate the investigated syntactic structures. Depending on the ontological and gnoseological assumptions of a particular linguistic approach, the analyzed terms highlight specific aspects of the syntactic structures under study (morphosyntactic features, syntactic functions, the subject’s case, coreference with the matrix clause, intonation and punctuation marking), and, therefore, cannot fully reveal the nature of the given syntactic phenomenon. The paper discusses the advantages of the term “detached nonfinite and nonverbal constructions with the explicit subject” for cognitive and quantitative operationalization and theoretical substantiation of the examined structures. The component construction is used in the interpretation of the cognitive construction grammar and defined as a noncompositional language sign, a complex pairing of form and meaning, where some aspects of the forms or the meanings cannot be derived from the form and the meaning of its components or from other existing constructions. In present-day English detached [aug/øaug[SubjNP] [PredNF/VL]] constructions constitute a taxonomic constructional network represented through a multiple hierarchy of adjunct clauses combined with the plane of detachment. The network of the analyzed constructions is developed around the constructional schema, represented by the construction of the highest degree of schematicity and abstraction (macro-construction). The features of the macro-construction are inherited by the constructions of a lower level – meso-constructions and individual micro-constructions and are reflected in the specific realized constructions – constructs.
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Kuzar, Ron. "Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure." Journal of Pragmatics 29, no. 3 (March 1998): 359–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0378-2166(97)81937-6.
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Negro Alousque, Isabel. "A Case for Construction Grammar: Wh-XVPY Constructions." English Studies 100, no. 2 (February 17, 2019): 206–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0013838x.2018.1545823.
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Janda, Laura A., Anna Endresen, Valentina Zhukova, Daria Mordashova, and Ekaterina Rakhilina. "How to build a constructicon in five years." Belgian Journal of Linguistics, Volume 34 (2020) 34 (December 31, 2020): 161–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00043.jan.
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Abstract We provide a practical step-by-step methodology of how to build a full-scale constructicon resource for a natural language, sharing our experience from the nearly completed project of the Russian Constructicon, an open-access searchable database of over 2,200 Russian constructions (https://site.uit.no/russian-constructicon/). The constructions are organized in families, clusters, and networks based on their semantic and syntactic properties, illustrated with corpus examples, and tagged for the CEFR level of language proficiency. The resource is designed for both researchers and L2 learners of Russian and offers the largest electronic database of constructions built for any language. We explain what makes the Russian Constructicon different from other constructicons, report on the major stages of our work, and share the methods used to systematically expand the inventory of constructions. Our objective is to encourage colleagues to build constructicon resources for additional natural languages, thus taking Construction Grammar to a new quantitative and qualitative level, facilitating cross-linguistic comparison.
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Aarts, Bas. "In defence of distributional analysis, pace Croft." Studies in Language 31, no. 2 (April 6, 2007): 431–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.31.2.06aar.
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In a number of publications (e.g. Croft 2001, 2004, 2006) Bill Croft has argued that distributional analysis as a methodology for setting up grammatical categories poses problems which can be avoided if constructions, not word classes, are grammatically primitive, and if categories are derived from constructions. He writes: The Radical Construction Grammar analysis of parts of speech does not have Aristotelian grammatical categories of the sort envisioned by Aarts for particular language grammars. There are categories for each construction and each constructional role in a language. These construction-specific categories will have sharp boundaries to the extent that there are sharp acceptability judgements of what can and cannot occur in the relevant constructional role. In this sense, the categories are Aristotelian. But they do not lead to a small set of mutually exclusive word classes, which is what Aarts assumes we must posit. Instead, there are overlapping categories of formatives representing their diverse distributional behavior — which is what a speaker actually knows about her language. (Croft 2006: 10–11) In this paper I will not be discussing the merits of Radical Construction Grammar, except to say that it is an interesting, challenging and exciting new approach to language. My aim here is more modest: I hope to show that distributional analysis is not as flawed as Croft suggests, and I will defend the distributional analyses discussed in Aarts (2004).
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TOMASELLO, MICHAEL. "The Return of Constructions." Journal of Child Language 25, no. 2 (June 1998): 431–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000998003493.
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Review essay on: Goldberg, A. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. University of Chicago Press (1995). Pp. xi+265.The cornerstone of traditional descriptive grammars is the construction: a recurrent pattern of linguistic elements that serves some well-defined communicative function. Prototypical constructions are sentence-level patterns such as, in English: the imperative, the ditransitive, the passive, the resultative, the yes–no question, and the cleft (each of which may have some subtypes). Also included in some theorists' definition of construction are components of sentences such as the prepositional phrase, the noun phrase, or the genitive noun phrase. Traditional constructions may have some specific words or morphemes associated with them (e.g. by in the full passive, 's in the genitive), but these are generally closed-class morphemes. Almost by definition, traditional constructions are relatively abstract patterns that apply across whole classes of open-class morphemes.One of the defining features of modern-day generative grammar is the absence of constructions. Chomsky (1981) hypothesized that grammatical structure comprises two primary levels: the level of principles and parameters, which is much more abstract than constructions and includes everything from the subjacency constraint to the empty category principle, and the level of the lexicon, which includes all of the concrete morphemes and words of a particular language. In this view, constructions represent a ‘middle level’ of analysis that is, in effect, an epiphenomenon resulting from the interaction of the two primary levels. One outcome of this theoretical move has been that generative linguists concerned with construction-level phenomena have had to fill the generative lexicon with ever richer types of linguistic information, especially for verbs (e.g. Bresnan, 1982; Jackendoff, 1990; Levin, 1995; Pinker, 1989).
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De Knop, Sabine. "From construction grammar to embodied construction practice." Constructions and Frames 12, no. 1 (July 29, 2020): 121–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/cf.00037.kno.
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Abstract In recent years, foreign language pedagogy has recognized the need to focus on larger meaningful sequences of words and on communicative goals. Construction grammar (CxG) has a number of assets to address these issues. First, with the postulate of meaningful schematic templates, CxG makes it possible to establish a structured inventory of abstract constructions. In this paper, this is illustrated by the inventory of German constructions with the preposition bis ‘up to, until’. Second, constructions, having a certain degree of schematicity, are particularly suitable to be practiced as whole sequences. Interactive activities based on ‘embodied teaching and learning’ can help foster the entrenchment of constructions.
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Müller, Stefan. "Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Sign-Based Construction Grammar, and Fluid Construction Grammar." Constructions and Frames 9, no. 1 (October 20, 2017): 139–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/cf.9.1.05mul.
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Abstract Van Trijp (2013, 2014) claims that Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) are fundamentally different from Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). He claims that the former approaches are generative ones while the latter is a cognitive-functional one. I argue that it is not legitimate to draw these distinctions on the basis of what is done in FCG. Van Trijp claims that there are differences in the scientific model, the linguistic approach, formalization, the way constructions are seen, and in terms of processing. This paper discusses all these alleged differences. Van Trijp also claims that his cognitive-functional approach is superior in terms of completeness, explanatory adequacy, and theoretical parsimony. In order to facilitate a discussion and comparison, I introduce the reader to basic assumptions made in FCG and the analyses suggested by Van Trijp: I first deal with the representations that are used in FCG, talk about argument structure constructions, the combination operations fusion and merging that are used in FCG, I than discuss the analysis of nonlocal dependencies and show that the suggested FCG analysis is not explanatorily adequate since it is not descriptively adequate and that a full formalization of approaches with discontinuous constituents is not more parsimonious than existing HPSG analyses either. After the discussion of specific analyses, I then provide a detailed comparison of FCG and SBCG/HPSG and discuss questions like the competence/performance distinction, mathematical formalization vs. computer implementation, fuzziness and fluidity in grammars, and permissiveness of theories. I conclude that HPSG, SBCG, and FCG belong to the same family of theories and that all claims to the contrary are unjustified.
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Soares da Silva, Augusto. "Gramática, cognição e sociedade: para uma gramática de significados, usos e variações." Revista da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, no. 5 (November 21, 2019): 17–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.26334/2183-9077/rapln5ano2019a2.
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This study aims to highlight the relationship between grammar, cognition and society, identifying cognitive and social processes applied to grammatical constructions in Portuguese and their correlations. First, we will characterize certain cognitive operations that play an important role in grammar and that make it an efficient conceptual structuring and communication system: construal (our ability to view, conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways); objectivity vs. subjectivity (the construal of a scene as detached or not from the conceptualizer); prominence (the focusing of attention on some aspects of a situation); mental spaces (packages of encyclopedic knowledge built and evoked in the current discourse); and inferences about the speaker’s intended meanings. Then, we will show how these cognitive operations (which are common to language and other cognitive faculties, such as perception, attention, and memory) are configured and conditioned by sociocultural factors and communicative efficiency processes – hence the importance of intersubjectivity and cultural conceptualization, and the need for systematically including intralinguistic variation in grammar. The answer to the question of the correlation between cognitive processes and social processes in grammar is based on the cognitive science notion of social cognition and on multivariate and sociocognitive grammar models. A usage-based grammar implies a deconstruction of the linguistic system in favor of a view of language in its inevitable variability as a complex dynamic system and the construction of a multifactorial grammar model that may adequately unravel, through multivariate quantitative methods, the interplay between conceptual, structural and social factors. Finally, we will illustrate these principles of a grammar of meanings, uses and variations (in contrast with traditional perspective of a grammar of forms, structures and rules) with three studies on constructional variation in Portuguese. They are part of our sociocognitive and sociolectometrical research into convergence and divergence between European and Brazilian Portuguese: se constructions (reflexive, reciprocal, middle, anticausative, passive, impersonal) and the null se constructions; prepositional relative constructions and their chopping and resumptive counterparts; and the alternation between inflected and uninflected infinitival constructions.
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SAG, IVAN A. "English relative clause constructions." Journal of Linguistics 33, no. 2 (September 1997): 431–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002222679700652x.
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This paper sketches a grammar of English relative clause constructions (including infinitival and reduced relatives) based on the notions of construction type and type constraints. Generalizations about dependency relations and clausal functions are factored into distinct dimensions contributing constraints to specific construction types in a multiple inheritance type hierarchy. The grammar presented here provides an account of extraction, pied piping and relative clause ‘stacking’ without appeal to transformational operations, transderivational competition, or invisible (‘empty’) categories of any kind.
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Welke, Klaus. "Konstruktionsgrammatik: Konstruktionen ohne Grammatik?" Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 48, no. 2 (August 27, 2020): 389–423. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/zgl-2020-2006.
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AbstractStarting out from a critical questioning of Construction Grammar’s basic tenets I am advocating a version of Construction Grammar that should be primarily understood as based on the patterns evinced by grammatical operations. This approach aims for a theory of rule-governed operations over constructions and not for a theory of idiomaticity and non-(or restricted) compositionality.
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Van Eecke, Paul, and Katrien Beuls. "Exploring the Creative Potential of Computational Construction Grammar." Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 66, no. 3 (September 25, 2018): 341–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2018-0029.
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AbstractComputational construction grammar aims to provide concrete processing models that operationalise construction grammar accounts of the different aspects of language. This paper discusses the computational mechanisms that allow construction grammar models to exhibit, to a certain extent, the creativity and inventiveness that is observed in human language use. It addresses two main types of language-related creativity. The first type concerns the ‘free combination of constructions,’ which gives rise to the open-endedness of language. The second type concerns the ‘appropriate violation of usual constraints’ that permits language users to go beyond what is possible when adhering to the usual constraints of the language, and be truly creative by relaxing these constraints and by introducing novel constructions. All mechanisms and examples discussed in this paper are fully operationalised and implemented in Fluid Construction Grammar.
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BERGS, ALEXANDER. "Expressions of futurity in contemporary English: a Construction Grammar perspective." English Language and Linguistics 14, no. 2 (June 2, 2010): 217–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674310000067.
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This article describes and analyses five different ways of expressing futurity in English (shall/will, be going to, be to, the simple present and the present progressive) in a Construction Grammar framework. It suggests that the different expressions can be captured as an onomasiologically motivated family of constructions in which the single constructions are differentiated by complex co- and contextual configurations. The latter can be elegantly captured in a Construction Grammar framework since constructions by definition can include pragmatic features. Also, this article claims that constructions may be equipped with an additional ‘context slot’, in which co- and contextual information can be stored. In a final section, this article turns to the issue of tense as a grammatical phenomenon and its genesis in grammaticalisation processes. It is suggested that a Construction Grammar account can make the age-old debate about a future tense in English redundant. Instead, it complements studies in grammaticalisation and opens up some interesting perspectives on parallel developments in the onto- and phylogenesis of constructions.
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Culicover, Peter W., Ray Jackendoff, and Jenny Audring. "Multiword Constructions in the Grammar." Topics in Cognitive Science 9, no. 3 (March 7, 2017): 552–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/tops.12255.
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Verhagen, Arie. "The conception of constructions as complex signs." Constructions and Frames 1, no. 1 (June 11, 2009): 119–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/cf.1.1.06ver.
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Generally, construction based approaches to grammar consider constructions to be pairings of form and meaning and thus as a kind of signs, not essentially distinct from words and other lexical items. Granting this commonality, Langacker (2005) criticizes other varieties of constructional approaches for using the notion ‘grammatical form’, and for not reducing the properties of grammar to the more fundamental and minimal notions of sound, meaning, and symbolic links between these two. While such a reduction is definitely worth pursuing, if only for reasons of general scientific interest, the abstract forms postulated in Cognitive Grammar (schematic sound patterns) are so general that they represent ‘any sound’, which threatens the very basis for the assumption that constructions are a kind of signs. I will argue that a usage-based view of sign-formation (Keller 1998), allows us to understand how the recognition of an element as belonging to a particular class of elementary signs can come to function as a signal for a specific linguistic environment (a construction), and produce a level of structure (categories of more elementary signs and relations between them) intermediate between sound and meaning that has its own (emergent) properties, which can still be reduced to more basic phenomena of processing and language use.
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van Trijp, Remi. "A comparison between Fluid Construction Grammar and Sign-Based Construction Grammar." Constructions and Frames 5, no. 1 (August 5, 2013): 88–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/cf.5.1.04van.
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Construction Grammar has reached a stage of maturity where many researchers are looking for an explicit formal grounding of their work. Recently, there have been exciting developments to cater for this demand, most notably in Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) and Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). Unfortunately, like playing a music instrument, the formalisms used by SBCG and FCG take time and effort to master, and linguists who are unfamiliar with them may not always appreciate the far-reaching theoretical consequences of adopting this or that approach. This paper undresses SBCG and FCG to their bare essentials, and offers a linguist-friendly comparison that looks at how both approaches define constructions, linguistic knowledge and language processing.
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Valenzuela, Javier, Joseph Hilferty, and Mar Garachana-Camarero. "On the reality of constructions." Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 3 (October 31, 2005): 201–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/arcl.3.11val.
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In the present paper, we adduce further evidence for the reality of grammatical constructions by focusing on a highly idiosyncratic configuration from Spanish, which we call the reduplicative-topic construction. This construction is a productive syntactic pattern that functions as a “constructional hedge”. The grammatical behaviors of this construction cannot be captured by syntactocentric approaches to grammar. Instead, co-ocurring multiple constraints must be taken into account, including phonological (intonation and rhythm), morphosyntactic and semantic factors. The thrust of our argument is that only a constructional approach can explain the facts needed to characterize this grammatical pattern. We conclude the paper by considering the implications of the constructional approach to syntax for linguistic theory.
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Wasserscheidt, Philipp. "Explaining Code-Switching. Matrix Language Models vs. Bilingual Construction Grammar." Književni jezik, no. 31 (December 2020): 57–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.33669/kj2020-31-04.
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This paper challenges the concept of matrix, base or basic language used in many descriptions and models of insertional code-switching. It proposes an account based on Construction Grammar and usage-based principles. At the heart of the paper is a discussion of four problematic issues of matrix-language approaches: the unitary conception of the notion of language, the generalization that syntactic frames mirror languages, the missing independent evidence for a matrix language and the narrow scope of the models that employ this term. The proposed approach of Bilingual Construction Grammar instead operates with a more complex, usage-based concept of language affiliation and places constructions in the centre of speech production. It thus avoids too coarse global predictions in favour of construction-specific predictions. This way, the matrix-language effect can be reinterpreted as by-product of constructional processing. Instead of using the term matrix language it is thus more appropriate to speak of matrix constructions.
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Brône, Geert, and Elisabeth Zima. "Towards a dialogic construction grammar: Ad hoc routines and resonance activation." Cognitive Linguistics 25, no. 3 (August 1, 2014): 457–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cog-2014-0027.
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AbstractIn this paper, we take a Construction Grammar approach to Du Bois' concept of resonance activation. We suggest that the structural mapping relations between juxtaposed utterances in discourse, described in terms of diagraphs in dialogic syntax, can acquire the status of ad hoc constructions or locally entrenched form-meaning pairings within the boundaries of an ongoing conversation. We argue that the local emergence of these ad hoc constructions involves the same cognitive mechanism described for the abstraction of conventional grammatical constructions from usage patterns. Accordingly, we propose to broaden the scope of Construction Grammar to include not only symbolic units that are conventionalized in a larger speech community, but also a dimension of online syntax, i.e. the emergence of grammatical patterns at the micro-level of a single conversation. Drawing on dialogic data from political talk shows and parliamentary debates, we illustrate the spectrum of these ad hoc constructional routines and show their local productivity, which we take as an indication of their (micro-)entrenchment within a given conversation.
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Hubers, Ferdy, Thijs Trompenaars, Sebastian Collin, Kees De Schepper, and Helen De Hoop. "Hypercorrection as a By-product of Education." Applied Linguistics 41, no. 4 (February 5, 2019): 552–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/applin/amz001.
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AbstractPrescriptive grammar rules are taught in education, generally to ban the use of certain frequently encountered constructions in everyday language. This may lead to hypercorrection, meaning that the prescribed form in one construction is extended to another one in which it is in fact prohibited by prescriptive grammar. We discuss two such cases in Dutch: the hypercorrect use of the comparative particle dan ‘than’ in equative constructions, and the hypercorrect use of the accusative pronoun hen ‘them’ for a dative object. In two experiments, high school students of three educational levels were tested on their use of these hypercorrect forms (nexp1 = 162, nexp2 = 159). Our results indicate an overall large amount of hypercorrection across all levels of education, including pre-university level students who otherwise perform better in constructions targeted by prescriptive grammar rules. We conclude that while teaching prescriptive grammar rules to high school students seems to increase their use of correct forms in certain constructions, this comes at a cost of hypercorrection in others.
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SRINIVAS, B. "Explanation-based learning and finite state transducers: applications to parsing lexicalized tree adjoining grammars." Natural Language Engineering 2, no. 4 (December 1996): 367–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1351324997001642.
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There are currently two philosophies for building grammars and parsers: hand-crafted, wide coverage grammars; and statistically induced grammars and parsers. Aside from the methodological differences in grammar construction, the linguistic knowledge which is overt in the rules of handcrafted grammars is hidden in the statistics derived by probabilistic methods, which means that generalizations are also hidden and the full training process must be repeated for each domain. Although handcrafted wide coverage grammars are portable, they can be made more efficient when applied to limited domains, if it is recognized that language in limited domains is usually well constrained and certain linguistic constructions are more frequent than others. We view a domain-independent grammar as a repository of portable grammatical structures whose combinations are to be specialized for a given domain. We use Explanation-Based Learning (EBL) to identify the relevant subset of a handcrafted general purpose grammar (XTAG) needed to parse in a given domain (ATIS). We exploit the key properties of Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammars to view parsing in a limited domain as finite state transduction from strings to their dependency structures.
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Schneider, Nathan. "Computational Cognitive Morphosemantics: Modeling Morphological Compositionality in Hebrew Verbs with Embodied Construction Grammar." Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 36, no. 1 (August 24, 2010): 353. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/bls.v36i1.3923.
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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:This paper brings together the theoretical framework of construction grammar and studies of verbs in Modern Hebrew to furnish an analysis integrating the form and meaning components of morphological structure. In doing so, this work employs and extends Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG; Bergen and Chang 2005), a computational formalism developed to study grammar from a cognitive linguistic perspective. In developing a formal analysis of Hebrew verbs (section 3), I adapt ECG—until now a lexical/syntactic/semantic formalism—to account for the compositionality of morphological constructions, accommodating idiosyncrasy while encoding generalizations at multiple levels. Similar to syntactic constructions, morpheme constructions are related in an inheritance network, and can be productively composed to form words. With the expanded version of ECG, constructions can readily encode nonconcatenative root-and-pattern morphology and associated (compositional or noncompositional) semantics, cleanly integrated with syntactic constructions. This formal, cognitive study should pave the way for computational models of morphological learning and processing in Hebrew and other languages.