Interactional frames and grammatical constructions

Abstract

Construction grammarians analyze grammar in terms of conventional pairings of form and meaning (Fillmore et al. 1988; Goldberg 1995, 2006) that are largely limited to the sentence (Lambrecht 1994, 2004). Recently, construction grammarians have moved beyond sentential boundaries to consider grammatical structures in terms of interaction and discourse (Fried and Östman 2005; Fischer 2010; Fried 2010a, 2010b). Following Fleischman (1990), we argue that interactive frames are key to linking the concerns of grammarians with those of anthropological linguists, sociolinguists, and text linguists who call for richer analyses of the communicative context (Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz 2011; Park and Takanashi 2011). A frames-based approach to grammatical description situates language within a communicative context that includes factors such as the backgrounds of the speakers and hearers and the frames within which each participant places the interaction. Such contextualized descriptions demonstrate how interactive frames and grammatical constructions are implicated in the interpersonal function of language and the dynamics of meaning making.