Constructional Approaches to Language

Category change, broadly defined as the shift from one word class to another, is often studied as part of other changes, such as grammaticalization or lexicalization, but not in its own right. This volume offers a survey of different types of category change and their properties, e.g. abrupt versus gradual changes, morphological versus syntactic changes, or context-independent versus context-sensitive changes. The purpose of this collection of papers is to explore the concepts of linguistic category and category change from the perspective of Construction Grammar. Using data from a variety of languages, the authors address a number of themes that are central to current theorizing about category change, such as the question of whether or not categories should be considered discrete entities, how new categories arise, or whether category change can be considered as the emergence of a new construction, i.e. a new form-meaning pairing. The novel approach advanced in this volume will be of interest to historical linguists as well as to general linguists working on the nature of linguistic categories.

Aphasia is the most common acquired language disorder in adults, resulting from brain damage, usually stroke. This book firstly explains how aphasia research and clinical practice remain heavily influenced by rule-based, generative theory, and summarizes key shortcomings with this approach. Crucially, it demonstrates how an alternative — the constructivist, usage-based approach — can provide a more plausible theoretical perspective for characterizing language in aphasia. After detailing rigorous transcription and segmentation methods, it presents constructivist, usage-based analyses of spontaneous speech from people with various aphasia ‘types’, challenging a clear-cut distinction between lexis and grammar, emphasizing the need to consider whole-form storage and frequency effects beyond single words, and indicating that individuals fall along a continuum of spoken language capability rather than differing categorically by aphasia ‘type’. It provides original insight into aphasia — with wide-reaching implications for clinical practice —, while equally highlighting how the study of aphasia is important for the development of Cognitive Linguistics.

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.

This volume presents eight studies of linguistic phenomena in Nordic languages (notably Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) from a construction grammar perspective. The contributions both deepen and widen the focus of construction grammar applied to Nordic languages by dealing with a variety of topics, such as the constructional network, pseudo-coordination, additional language learning and emerging multilingualism, prototypical semantics in argument structure constructions, and domain-specific discourse and language behavior. The volume showcases the vibrant research activity within part of the construction grammar community dealing with Nordic languages, contributing to the knowledge about the structure, use and learning of these languages, as well as to the field of construction grammar as a whole.

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.

The book Constructions in French is the first collected volume to focus on French syntax from a constructionist perspective. It has been written with two kinds of readers in mind: for readers interested in the relationship between the French linguistic tradition and cognitive linguistics, and for readers who would like to examine how constructional analysis can be applied to a variety of French language phenomena. The eleven papers illustrate the insights generated by combining lexicalist and constructionist approaches, focusing on syntax as a dynamic system and using corpus data from a variety of speech genres. The contributions provide new findings about French usage trends (in linguistics and in psycholinguistics), including insights into new, nonstandard and little studied constructions.

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.