Construction Grammar and its application to English

Constructions, 2023

In this short think-piece, I propose a definition of the term construction for general linguistics and I relate it to the earlier literature. The term construction has a general meaning that was not defined in the earlier literature, but several specific definitions were proposed in work by construction grammarians. Here I point out that construction grammarians actually tend to use the general meaning, even though it is widely known that “construction in the sense of construction grammar” has been defined in more specific senses. I propose that the novel senses are perhaps better expressed by novel terms (such as “inventorial item”), and that the primary insight about the continuity of word knowledge and constructional knowledge is best expressed by using a different term (such as “inventorium”) to cover all “stored pieces of structure”.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Cognitive Linguistics.

This entry investigates the concept of the syntax-lexicon continuum in Construction Grammar. This concept challenges the traditional Generative Grammar distinction between lexicon and syntax, proposing instead that these two components are interconnected. The paper emphasizes the importance of phrasemes, such as idioms and constructional idioms, due to their frequency and relevance in language. The study highlights the theoretical and practical implications of this continuum, particularly in language description, language teaching and natural language processing, arguing that the continuum provides a more integrated understanding of linguistic competence and revealing the deep interconnections between meaning and form in language. It concludes with new research perspectives, underscoring the significance of this continuum for a comprehensive linguistic theory.

СУЧАСНА ФІЛОЛОГІЧНА НАУКА: АКТУАЛЬНІ ПИТАННЯ ТА ВЕКТОРИ РОЗВИТКУ, 2021

The review presents the most prominent issues of convergence and divergence within each model, focusing, inter alia, on a universal status of linguistic constructions, their quantity and types, issues of constructional compositionality and semantics, reliance on language use data, and specificity of notation systems. The presented study has demonstrated that construction grammar is a thriving field of grammatical theorizing. Over the past two decades, the framework has become part of the mainstream linguistics, a sophisticated linguistic theory based on a solid cognitive and functional basis, with welldeveloped theoretical and methodological principles. By filling in the gaps in both traditional and formalist descriptions of language, construction grammar blurs the boundaries between vocabulary and grammar, semantics and pragmatics, meaning and use and represents language as a holistic organism. The holistic approach to language units aptly reflects the reality of mental activity, based on uniform cognitive mechanisms and carried out on a single language substrate. All of linguistic knowledge is a network of form-meaning pairsconstructions and nothing else in addition M. Hilpert (2021, p. 6) Сучасна філологічна наука: актуальні питання та вектори розвитку

Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2015

2012

Nordic Journal of Linguistics 36(3): 381-387., 2013

to appear in: Barbara Dancygier, ed. The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 2017

Draft chapter to appear in: Barbara Dancygier, ed. The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. For a long time, constructions played an important role in traditional grammar. During the 20 th century, however, focus in Mainstream Generative Grammar shifted to a universal mentalistic view of language that relegated constructions to the status of mere epiphenomena. The present chapter outlines the historical renaissance of constructions in cognitive linguistics. It discusses various major linguistic phenomena that led some researchers to claim that form-meaning pairings, i.e. constructions, are, in fact, the fundamental units of the human language capacity – a view of language that is now known as Construction Grammar. The various Construction Grammar approaches, their shared assumptions as well as differences are then the topic of the next chapter.

Sign Based Construction Grammar, 2012

Few published articles in Construction Grammar (CxG) actually talk about the theory, and fewer still about its formal and logical foundations. This information vacuum has allowed misconceptions about CxG to thrive, including the claim that it is designed only to model minor idiomatic phenomena. In this chapter, I try to remedy this situation by laying out the case for CxG, or, more specifically, the formal version of CxG known as Sign- Based Construction Grammar (SBCG; Sag this volume, 2010). In doing so, I will touch on four major topics: foundations, functionality, facts and falsehoods. In describing the foundations of CxG, I will explain what it means to adopt a licensing-based view of syntax rather than one based on negative constraints (Zwicky 1994, Malouf 2003). The focus on functionality arises from the recognition that working syntacticians need a robust and elegant formalism. I will argue that SBCG provides such a formalism, by describing three benefits that it offers to practitioners of construction-based syntax: it is localist, it allows for variable-grain description and it captures shared properties of constructions without requiring stipulations about constructional inheritance relations. The facts include three major lines of evidence for construction- based syntax: the constructional basis of meaning composition, the role of constructions in the licensing of complements and the interleaving of core and periphery during production. Finally, I will attempt to counter six entrenched falsehoods about CxG: that it is nonrigorous, that it does not offer generalizations, that it is a theory of linguistic marginalia, that it is opposed to compositional semantics, that it is not constrained and that it does not provide a universal framework for syntax.

An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe, 2015

The notion 'construction' that plays a central role in Construction Grammar, is an indispensable notion for the analysis of word formation patterns. In the study of word formation, we investigate the systematic correspondences between form and meaning at the word level. Constructional schemas provide an adequate format for expressing these systematic correspondences. Moreover, they are part of a hierarchical lexicon in which both complex words and morphological patterns of various levels of abstraction can be specified. An important advantage of the Construction Morphology approach is that it can express the relevant similarities between morphological and phrasal lexical expressions, and the paradigmatic relations between morphological and phrasal schemas. Thus, lexical knowledge is characterized as a complicated network between words and phrasal expressions at a range of levels of abstractions, varying between individual words and completely abstract patterns.

Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 2020

This squib provides a theoretical discussion on the use of the terms semantics and pragmatics in Construction Grammar. In the literature, the difference between semantics and pragmatics is often conceptualized either in terms of conventionality or in terms of truth-conditionality (Huang 2014, 299). It will be shown that, even though constructionists claim that there is no semantics-pragmatics distinction, both these underlying concepts are central to the study of constructions. Therefore, the aim is twofold. First, in keeping with Cappelle (2017), it will be argued that constructionists should make more explicit the distinction between the two types of (encoded) meaning. Second, it will be shown that constructionists need to be more terminologically consistent and agree on how to use the terms semantics and pragmatics. Following Depraetere (2019), I will argue that the terms semantics and pragmatics are most explanatory when defined in truth-conditional terms. In this way, finer-grained understanding of the meaning of constructions can be achieved.