Constructions and Frames - Online First

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” (Fillmore 1989: 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 1994). 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.

Construction Grammar is a nomadic family of theoretical approaches whose members are constantly moving in various directions. The diversity in construction-based approaches is a clear sign of a thriving and tolerant research community, but it also risks muddying the waters, leading to potential confusion. In this paper, I argue that the main source of confusion about Construction Grammar stems from the community’s gradual evolution from the traditional view of languages as static, idealized entities (the “aggregate” perspective) to the view of language as a complex adaptive system (the “population” perspective). While the aggregate perspective abstracts away as much as possible from variation and language usage, the population perspective greatly emphasizes the dynamics of language and situated communicative interactions. This paper illustrates what it means to perform constructional analyses from the population perspective; and argues that Construction Grammar is particularly well-positioned to lead the way in this new kind of linguistics, indicating that our community has a bright future ahead.