Construction grammar
Construction grammar is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human language. Constructions include words, morphemes, fixed expressions and idioms, and abstract grammatical rules such as the passive voice or the ditransitive. Any linguistic pattern is considered to be a construction as long as some aspect of its form or its meaning cannot be predicted from its component parts, or from other constructions that are recognized to exist. In construction grammar, every utterance is understood to be a combination of multiple different constructions, which together specify its precise meaning and form.
Advocates of construction grammar argue that language and culture are not designed by people, but are 'emergent' or automatically constructed in a process which is comparable to natural selection in species or the formation of natural constructions such as nests made by social insects. Constructions correspond to replicators or memes in memetics and other cultural replicator theories. Construction grammar is associated with concepts from cognitive linguistics that aim to show in various ways how human rational and creative behaviour is automatic and not planned.
History
Construction grammar was first developed in the 1980s by linguists such as Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay, and George Lakoff, in order to analyze idioms and fixed expressions. Lakoff's 1977 paper "Linguistic Gestalts" put forward an early version of CxG, arguing that the meaning of an expression was not simply a function of the meanings of its parts. Instead, he suggested, constructions themselves must have meanings.Another early study was "There-Constructions," which appeared as Case Study 3 in George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. It argued that the meaning of the whole was not a function of the meanings of the parts, that odd grammatical properties of Deictic There-constructions followed from the pragmatic meaning of the construction, and that variations on the central construction could be seen as simple extensions using form-meaning pairs of the central construction.
Fillmore et al.'s paper on the English let alone construction was a second classic. These two papers propelled cognitive linguists into the study of CxG. Since the late 1990s there has been a shift towards a general preference for the usage-based model. The shift towards the usage-based approach in construction grammar has inspired the development of several corpus-based methodologies of constructional analysis.
Concepts
One of the most distinctive features of CxG is its use of multi-word expressions and phrasal patterns as the building blocks of syntactic analysis. One example is the Correlative Conditional construction, found in the proverbial expression The bigger they come, the harder they fall. Construction grammarians point out that this is not merely a fixed phrase; the Correlative Conditional is a general pattern with "slots" that can be filled by almost any comparative phrase. Advocates of CxG argue these kinds of idiosyncratic patterns are more common than is often recognized, and that they are best understood as multi-word, partially filled constructions.Construction grammar rejects the idea that there is a sharp dichotomy between lexical items, which are arbitrary and specific, and grammatical rules, which are completely general. Instead, CxG posits that there are linguistic patterns at every level of generality and specificity: from individual words, to partially filled constructions, to fully abstract rules. All of these patterns are recognized as constructions.
In contrast to theories that posit an innate universal grammar for all languages, construction grammar holds that speakers learn constructions inductively as they are exposed to them, using general cognitive processes. It is argued that children pay close attention to each utterance they hear, and gradually make generalizations based on the utterances they have heard. Because constructions are learned, they are expected to vary considerably across different languages.
Grammatical construction
In construction grammar, as in general semiotics, the grammatical construction is a pairing of form and content. The formal aspect of a construction is typically described as a syntactic template, but the form covers more than just syntax, as it also involves phonological aspects, such as prosody and intonation, sometimes in the form of prosodic constructions. The content covers semantic as well as pragmatic meaning.The semantic meaning of a grammatical construction is made up of conceptual structures postulated in cognitive semantics: image-schemas, frames, conceptual metaphors, conceptual metonymies, prototypes of various kinds, mental spaces, and bindings across these. Pragmatics just becomes the cognitive semantics of communication—the modern version of the old Ross-Lakoff performative hypothesis from the 1960s.
The form and content are symbolically linked in the sense advocated by Langacker.
Thus a construction is treated like a sign in which all structural aspects are integrated parts and not distributed over different modules as they are in the componential model. Consequentially, not only constructions that are lexically fixed, like many idioms, but also more abstract ones like argument structure schemata, are pairings of form and conventionalized meaning. For instance, the ditransitive schema is said to express semantic content X CAUSES Y TO RECEIVE Z, just like kill means X CAUSES Y TO DIE.
In construction grammar, a grammatical construction, regardless of its formal or semantic complexity and make up, is a pairing of form and meaning. Thus words and word classes may be regarded as instances of constructions. Indeed, construction grammarians argue that all pairings of form and meaning are constructions, including phrase structures, idioms, words and even morphemes.
Syntax–lexicon continuum
Unlike the componential model, construction grammar denies any strict distinction between the two and proposes a syntax–lexicon continuum. The argument goes that words and complex constructions are both pairs of form and meaning and differ only in internal symbolic complexity. Instead of being discrete modules and thus subject to very different processes they form the extremes of a continuum : syntax > subcategorization frame > idiom > morphology > syntactic category > word/lexicon.Grammar as an inventory of constructions
In construction grammar, the grammar of a language is made up of taxonomic networks of families of constructions, which are based on the same principles as those of the conceptual categories known from cognitive linguistics, such as inheritance, prototypicality, extensions, and multiple parenting.Four different models are proposed in relation to how information is stored in the taxonomies:
- Full-entry model
- :In the full-entry model information is stored redundantly at all relevant levels in the taxonomy, which means that it operates, if at all, with minimal generalization.
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- Usage-based model
- :The usage-based model is based on inductive learning, meaning that linguistic knowledge is acquired in a bottom-up manner through use. It allows for redundancy and generalizations, because the language user generalizes over recurring experiences of use.
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- Default inheritance model
- :According to the default inheritance model, each network has a default central form-meaning pairing from which all instances inherit their features. It thus operates with a fairly high level of generalization, but does also allow for some redundancy in that it recognizes extensions of different types.
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- Complete inheritance model
- :In the complete inheritance model, information is stored only once at the most superordinate level of the network. Instances at all other levels inherit features from the superordinate item. The complete inheritance does not allow for redundancy in the networks.
Principle of no synonymy
This means that construction grammarians argue, for instance, that active and passive versions of the same proposition are not derived from an underlying structure, but are instances of two different constructions. As constructions are pairings of form and meaning, active and passive versions of the same proposition are not synonymous, but display differences in content: in this case the pragmatic content.