Constructional Approaches to Language

Causation and reasoning are different but related types of relationships. Both causal relations and reasoning processes may be expressed with one and the same connective word in some languages: English speakers use because and Japanese speakers use kara. How then are causation and reasoning processes related to and different from each other? How do we construe and encode them? How is because different from other conjunctions with similar meanings?

To account for these and related empirical questions, this book presents an integrated analysis in accordance with the original principles of Construction Grammar. In particular, the book shows that the analysis proposed is compatible with our general knowledge about causation and reasoning and that it is valid for English and Japanese. The proposed analysis is also comprehensively applicable to a variety of related phenomena, ranging from the just because X doesn’t mean Y construction to the innovative and less known because X construction.

In constructionist theory, a constructicon is an inventory of constructions making up the full set of linguistic units in a language. In applied practice, it is a set of construction descriptions – a “dictionary of constructions”. The development of constructicons in the latter sense typically means combining principles of both construction grammar and lexicography, and is probably best characterized as a blend between the two traditions. We call this blend constructicography.
The present volume is a comprehensive introduction to the emerging field of constructicography. After a general introduction follow six chapters presenting constructicon projects for English, German, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Swedish, respectively, often in relation to a framenet of the language. In addition, there is a chapter addressing the interplay between linguistics and language technology in constructicon development, and a final chapter exploring the prospects for interlingual constructicography.
This is the first major publication devoted to constructicon development and it should be particularly relevant for those interested in construction grammar, frame semantics, lexicography, the relation between grammar and lexicon, or linguistically informed language technology.

The notion ‘construction’ has become indispensable in present-day linguistics and in language studies in general. This volume extends the traditional domain of Construction Grammar (CxG) in several directions, all with a cognitive basis. Addressing a number of issues (such as coercion, discourse patterning, language change), the contributions show how CxG must be part and parcel of cognitively oriented studies of language, including language universals. The volume also gives informative accounts of how the notion ‘construction’ is developed in approaches that are conceptually close to, and relatively compatible with, CxG: Conceptual Semantics, Word Grammar, Cognitive Grammar, Embodied Construction Grammar, and Radical Construction Grammar.

The last three decades have seen the emergence of Construction Grammar as a major research paradigm in linguistics. At the same time, very few researchers have taken a constructionist perspective on language contact phenomena. This volume brings together, for the first time, a broad range of original contributions providing insights into language contact phenomena from a constructionist perspective. Focusing primarily on Germanic languages, the papers in this volume demonstrate how the notion of construction can be fruitfully applied to investigate how a range of different language contact phenomena can be systematically analyzed from the perspectives of both form and meaning.

This collection of original articles focuses on the function, role, and structure of linguistic and extralinguistic “context(s)” in relation to the notion of “constructions” and in construction grammar. It thus takes up and brings together two equally complex concepts of linguistics, which both encompass structural as well as pragmatic and discourse-oriented aspects. Although both notions – contexts as well as constructions – have been under intense discussion in linguistics during the last decades with a wide span of research interests, integrative studies of these aspects have been largely missing.
The eight papers presented in this volume explore the possibilities and risks of integrating context(s) into particular constructions and construction grammar in general. Topics range from particular language and construction-specific problems such as the "polysemy" of modal verbs in relation to context-sensitive constructions, to general technical analyses and proposals, including proposals for formalizing contextual features in constructional representations.
The volume will be of interest to scholars and advanced undergraduates interested in linguistic theory in general and in constructional, pragmatic and discourse-analytic approaches in particular.

This volume brings together empirical Construction Grammar studies to (i) promote cross-fertilization between researchers interested in constructional approaches on various languages, and (ii) further the growing trend towards empirically rigorous research that takes seriously a commitment not only to usage-based theories, but also to usage-based methodologies. Accordingly, the chapters in this volume comprise a range of studies not based on synchronic contemporary English but include Dutch, old English, Italian, and Spanish. This volume also features studies from a wider range of statistical sophistication: some chapters use more traditional frequency- and attestation-based approaches, some chapters use inferential statistical techniques to explore lexically specific preferences and patterns in constructional slots, and some chapters use multifactorial hypothesis-testing techniques or multivariate exploratory tools to discover patterns in corpus data that a mere eye-balling or simple statistical tools would not uncover.

Construction Grammar as a framework offers a new perspective on traditional historical questions in diachronic linguistics and language change: how do new constructions arise, how should competition in diachronic variation be accounted for, how do constructions fall into disuse, and how do constructions change in general, formally and/or semantically, and with what implications for the language system as a whole? This volume offers a broad introduction to the confluence of Construction Grammar and historical syntax, and also detailed case studies of various instances of syntactic change modeled within Construction Grammar. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar as a theory is particularly well suited for modeling historical changes in morphosyntax, and it also documents challenging new phenomena that require a theoretical account within any competing framework of syntactic change.

While verb classes are a mainstay of linguistic research, the field lacks consensus on precisely what constitutes a verb class. This book presents a novel approach to verb classes, employing a bottom-up, corpus-based methodology and combining key insights from Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar, and Valency Grammar.

On this approach, verb classes are formulated at varying granularity levels to adequately capture both the shared semantic and syntactic properties unifying verbs of a class and the idiosyncratic properties unique to individual verbs. In-depth analyses based on this approach shed light on the interrelations between verbs, frame-semantics, and constructions, and on the semantic richness and network organization of grammatical constructions.

This approach is extended to a comparison of Change and Theft verbs, revealing unexpected lexical and syntactic differences across semantically distinct classes. Finally, a range of contrastive (German–English) analyses demonstrate how verb classes can inform the cross-linguistic comparison of verbs and constructions.

This book examines in detail the acceptability status of sentences in the following five English constructions, and elucidates the syntactic, semantic, and functional requirements that the constructions must satisfy in order to be appropriately used: There-Construction, (One’s) Way Construction, Cognate Object Construction, Pseudo-Passive Construction, and Extraposition from Subject NPs. It has been argued in the frameworks of Chomskyan generative grammar, relational grammar, conceptual semantics and other syntactic theories that the acceptability of sentences in these constructions can be accounted for by the unergative–unaccusative distinction of intransitive verbs. However, this book shows through a wide range of sentences that none of these constructions is sensitive to this distinction. For each construction, it shows that acceptability status is determined by a given sentence's semantic function as it interacts with syntactic constraints (which are independent of the unergative–unaccusative distinction), and with functional constraints that apply to it in its discourse context.