Allostructions revisited

Abstract

An important recent innovation in Construction Grammar (CxG) has been to assume the existence of a general underspecified construction underlying two or more alternating constructions, which themselves are considered to be formally and functionally related allostructions of the general construction. Despite this novel proposal, the meaning side of the general construction has either been neglected or couched in a single-layered view of meaning that does not adequately distinguish semantics from pragmatics. Building on state-of-the-art developments at the semantics-pragmatics interface, this article proposes an account whereby the distinction between the meaning of the general construction and the meaning of the allostructions aligns with the distinction between encoded (semantic) and inferred (pragmatic) meaning. We argue in favor of an allostructional account for two grammatical alternations which have previously been treated as an epiphenomenon of two underlying independent constructions: the German ditransitive alternation and the English genitive alternation. While demonstrating the fruitfulness of an allostructional analysis for these two new cases, we also provide critical observations about the wider applicability of allostructional analyses. In particular, we argue that an allostructional analysis proves to be trivial for Lambrechtian ‘allosentences’.