Why Construction Grammar is radical

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.