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Construction Grammar explains how knowledge of language is organized in speakers' minds. The central and radical claim of Construction Grammar is that linguistic knowledge can be fully described as knowledge of constructions, which are defined as symbolic units that connect a linguistic form with meaning.
In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in grammatical constructionsunits of grammar representing formmeaning correspondences. The movement in which Construction Grammar, as developed by Charles Fillmore and Paul Kay, has played a significant role, has arisen in part as aresponse to the Chomskyan modular approach, which treats grammatical constructions as epiphenomenal, dismantling their component features and attributing these to general principles of grammar. This volume is the first collection to focus on grammatical constructions per se, and is dedicated to Charles Fillmore in recognition of his leadership in the field. The papers all reflect or elaborate on his work, which shows how lexicon, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics interact in givingconstructions their individual holistic characters as basic units of grammar. Several approaches to constructions are represented here, dealing with topics that range from idiomatized constructions to traditional forms such as conditionals, relative clauses, and benefactive constructions. A unifying thread is the shared conviction that close examination of the nature ofgrammatical constructions, with particular emphasis on their idiosyncrasies and on the complex interrelationships among their forms, functions, meanings, and uses in ordinary speech and writing, provides a rich foundation upon which to build a theory of cognition, memory, and grammar.
This study deals with interactional processes in conversational discourse, and the way they may get 'syntacticized' into grammatical constructions. It investigates the link between discourse function and syntactic form, and the ways in which grammatical form is a reflection on communicative function, through examining the communicative functions of Left-Dislocation in English. The investigation is corpus-based, and focuses on spontaneous conversation, but other discourse types are also taken into account. The overall perspective is resolutely empirical, and preconceptions about the possible functions of Left-Dislocation are avoided. Contents 1. Theoretical preliminaries; 2. Referent-introduction (1): interaction; 3. Referent-introduction (2): recoverability; 4. Referent-introduction (3): topicality; 5. Other functions of LD; 6. Prosodic aspects of LD; 7. LD in other discourse types; 8. A broader perspecitive; 9. General conclusion; Notes, Appendices, References, Subject and author indices.
Drawing on work in linguistics, language acquisition, and computer science, Adele E. Goldberg proposes that grammatical constructions play a central role in the relation between the form and meaning of simple sentences. She demonstrates that the syntactic patterns associated with simple sentences are imbued with meaning—that the constructions themselves carry meaning independently of the words in a sentence. Goldberg provides a comprehensive account of the relation between verbs and constructions, offering ways to relate verb and constructional meaning, and to capture relations among constructions and generalizations over constructions. Prototypes, frame semantics, and metaphor are shown to play crucial roles. In addition, Goldberg presents specific analyses of several constructions, including the ditransitive and the resultative constructions, revealing systematic semantic generalizations. Through a comparison with other current approaches to argument structure phenomena, this book narrows the gap between generative and cognitive theories of language.
Based mostly on papers presented at the First International Conference on Construction Grammar, 2001.
This volume brings into focus the conceptual roots of the notion ‘grammatical construction’ as the theoretical entity that constitutes the backbone of Construction Grammar, a unique grammatical model in which grammatical constructions have the status of elementary building blocks of human language. By exploring the analytic potential and applicability of this notion, the contributions illustrate some of the fundamental concerns of constructional research. These include issues of sentence structure in a model that rejects the autonomy of syntax; the contribution of Frame Semantics in establishing the relationship between syntactic patterning and the lexical meaning of verbs; and the challenge of capturing the dynamic and variable nature of grammatical structure in a systematic way. All the authors share a commitment to studying grammar in its use, which gives the book a rich empirical dimension that draws on authentic data from typologically diverse languages.
Construction grammar (CxG) is a framework for syntactic analysis that takes constructions - pairings of form and meaning that range from the highly idiomatic to the very general - to be the building blocks of sentence meaning. Offering the first comprehensive introduction to CxG to focus on both English words and the constructions that combine them, this textbook shows students not only what the analyses of particular structures are, but also how and why those analyses are constructed, with each chapter taking the student step-by-step through the reasoning processes that yield the best description of a data set. It offers a wealth of illustrative examples and exercises, largely based on real language data, making it ideal for both self-study and classroom use. Written in an accessible and engaging way, this textbook will open up this increasingly popular linguistic framework to anyone interested in the grammatical patterns of English.
There is a growing awareness of the significance of constructions in grammar in the world’s languages. To date there has not been a single volume that addresses the issues of constructions within a functional Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) account. The book is a collection of articles that will serve the scholarly community as a reference work on the role, place and significance of constructions within this functional model of grammar. As a result, this volume represents the first instance of cross-linguistic comparison of these important discourse and syntax-related phenomena. The articles cover a variety of typologically different languages including German, Irish, Spanish, French, Japanese, Yaqui, Tepehua (Totonacan), Persian, and English, and they offer new data on the role of constructions, within the RRG theory, in these languages. Further, this volume contributes towards providing a comprehensive overview of grammatical constructions which are central to our understanding of how human languages function, in a functional linguistics perspective. This scholarly work is grounded in a functionally oriented model that makes strong claims of descriptive and typological adequacy. The book will represent a valuable step forward in linguistics research as it applies the RRG theoretical framework to the analyses of constructions.