Construction Grammar(s)

Abstract

This fourth chapter offers an overview of the basic tenets of Construction Grammar(s), which postulates that the basic unit of grammar is the construction, a free-standing theoretical assembly of one form and one meaning or function. Constructions are assumed to be stored as symbolic units alongside lexical items. Phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical information, representing the structural pole of the construction, combines with semantic, pragmatic and discursive properties, i.e., the functional pole. Construction Grammar(s) rejects the separation between lexis and grammar because the knowledge of the lexicon and the knowledge of syntactic rules is not clear-cut, as idioms well exemplify, and it instead proposes a constructional continuum, which enhances a description of the idiosyncratic behaviour of idiomatic expressions ranging from fixed strings to more flexible stretches of language, and may accommodate different words and different grammatical patterns. Construction Grammar(s) encompasses a range of models, defined a ‘family of Construction Grammars’, which share some basic assumptions; at the same time, each of them contributes peculiarities about specific linguistic phenomena. This chapter is meant to outline the most representative constructional models following a chronological path, and to pin down similarities and differences across them. The Lexical Constructional Model will be singled out as a more complete theoretical framework of meaning construction able to account for all levels of linguistic description: it is in fact able to provide full treatment of argument structure constructions at the level of core grammar as well as of implicature, illocutions and discourse at the higher levels of its overall constructional architecture.