Constructions and Frames - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2026

Two structurally unrelated constructions can affect each other’s realization through a process that has been called constructional contamination. According to this effect, lexemes participating in a grammatical alternation will deviate in their stochastic preference for an alternant if they appear frequently in a contaminating construction that is formally similar to the alternant in question. In the present article, we evaluate whether such contamination effects can also be found between two constructions in Dutch which share the same form, including the verb krijgen ‘to get’ and a past participle, but have distinct meanings (a “receptive” vs. a “resultative” meaning), and, if so, whether these effects occur in both directions. We zoom in on word order differences: if krijgen and the participle appear in a verb cluster, both word orders are possible in the receptive krijgen-construction, while, for the resultative krijgen-construction, the order with krijgen preceding the participle is reported to be ungrammatical in the grammatical literature but is not altogether absent from real-language corpora. Logistic regression analyses, based on data culled from the SoNaR-corpus, show that the word order in both constructions is indeed affected by constructional contamination, thus showing that this phenomenon can be bidirectional. Additionally, we demonstrate that these contamination effects differ between two national varieties of Dutch, viz. Belgian vs. Netherlandic Dutch, and we argue that contamination can sometimes also result in a disambiguating reflex. These results suggest that subtle differences in the organization of the constructional network can result in (partly) different contamination effects.

Construction Grammar proposes an integrative model of linguistic knowledge, but the status of phonology has long been a black box in the framework. In this article, I consider the question of whether phonemes are constructions. I argue that phonemes are entrenched and conventionalised units emergent from usage, that they are clearly form-function pairs, and that their sensitivity to meaning seems less sporadic than previously assumed. This leads me to argue that assessing the constructionhood of phonemes requires a clear distinction between linguistic function and meaning, as well as a careful consideration of the social meaning of constructions.

The present paper explores the network of language-related knowledge about multimodal, stance-related uses of Tell me about it (TMAI) with a particular focus on the co-verbal use of raised eyebrows. Employing a k-prototype analysis, the paper shows that stance-related uses of TMAI form five multimodal clusters. Three of these will be analyzed in more detail regarding their speakers’ use of raised eyebrows. Based on these qualitative analyses, the paper argues that knowledge about TMAI and raised eyebrows is structured as a nested network of uni- and multimodal constructions and, therefore, that a broader definition of the term construction is warranted.

Formal rhetorical figures (schemes) have been largely neglected by Construction Grammar (CxG). The losses of this omission are substantial. Like metaphors, schemes leverage general-purpose neurocognitive principles and evoke communicative functions. They give utterances salience and memorability, making them highly compatible with usage-based models, and they align form with function. Their association with ludic functions also makes them of considerable interest to creativity-of-everyday-language linguists. Focusing on inverse-repetition figures (exemplified by “all for one and one for all”) and a few collocate figures, this paper argues for integrating rhetorical schemes much more fully into CxG.