In linguistics, construction grammar (often abbreviated CxG) is a family of theories within the field of cognitive and evolutionary linguistics. These posit that human language consists of constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic forms with functions or meanings. Constructions correspond to replicators or memes in memetics and other cultural replicator theories. Constructions can be individual words (aardvark, avocado), morphemes (anti-, -ing), fixed expressions and idioms (by and large, jog X's memory), and abstract grammatical rules such as the passive voice (The cat was hit by a car) or ditransitive (Mary gave Alex the ball). 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.
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 (The Xer, the Yer) with "slots" that can be filled by almost any comparative phrase (e.g. The more you think about it, the less you understand). 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 (e.g. drive X crazy), to fully abstract rules (e.g. subject–auxiliary inversion). 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.
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 (1988) paper on the English let alone construction was a second classic. These two papers propelled cognitive linguists into the study of CxG.
Grammatical construction
In construction grammar, like 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. 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 (called
"blends"). 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 [S V IO DO] 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 (from regular to
idiosyncratic): syntax > subcategorization frame > idiom > morphology > syntactic category > word/lexicon (these are the traditional terms; construction grammars use a different terminology).
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Shift towards usage-based model
All
four models are advocated by different construction grammarians, but
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 (for example, collostructional analysis).
Synonymy and monotony
As construction grammar is based on schemas and taxonomies, it does not operate with dynamic rules of derivation. Rather, it is monotonic.
Because construction grammar does not operate with surface
derivations from underlying structures, it adheres to functionalist
linguist Dwight Bolinger's principle of no synonymy, on which Adele Goldberg elaborates in her book.
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.
Some construction grammars
As
mentioned above, Construction grammar is a "family" of theories rather
than one unified theory. There are a number of formalized Construction
grammar frameworks. Some of these are:
Berkeley Construction Grammar
Berkeley
Construction Grammar (BCG: formerly also simply called Construction
Grammar in upper case) focuses on the formal aspects of constructions
and makes use of a unification-based framework for description of
syntax, not unlike head-driven phrase structure grammar. Its proponents/developers include Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay, Laura Michaelis, and to a certain extent Ivan Sag. Immanent within BCG works like Fillmore and Kay 1995 and Michaelis and Ruppenhofer 2001
is the notion that phrasal representations—embedding relations—should
not be used to represent combinatoric properties of lexemes or lexeme
classes. For example, BCG abandons the traditional practice of using
non-branching domination (NP over N' over N) to describe undetermined
nominals that function as NPs, instead introducing a determination
construction that requires ('asks for') a non-maximal nominal sister and
a lexical 'maximality' feature for which plural and mass nouns are
unmarked. BCG also offers a unification-based representation of
'argument structure' patterns as abstract verbal lexeme entries
('linking constructions'). These linking constructions include
transitive, oblique goal and passive constructions. These constructions
describe classes of verbs that combine with phrasal constructions like
the VP construction but contain no phrasal information in themselves.
Sign Based Construction Grammar
In
the mid-2000s, several of the developers of BCG, including Charles
Fillmore, Paul Kay, Ivan Sag and Laura Michaelis, collaborated in an
effort to improve the formal rigor of BCG and clarify its
representational conventions. The result was Sign Based Construction
Grammar (SBCG). SBCG
is based on a multiple-inheritance hierarchy of typed feature
structures. The most important type of feature structure in SBCG is the
sign, with subtypes word, lexeme and phrase. The inclusion of phrase
within the canon of signs marks a major departure from traditional
syntactic thinking. In SBCG, phrasal signs are licensed by
correspondence to the mother of some licit construct of the grammar. A
construct is a local tree with signs at its nodes. Combinatorial
constructions define classes of constructs. Lexical class constructions
describe combinatoric and other properties common to a group of lexemes.
Combinatorial constructions include both inflectional and derivational
constructions. SBCG is both formal and generative; while
cognitive-functional grammarians have often opposed their standards and
practices to those of formal, generative grammarians, there is in fact
no incompatibility between a formal, generative approach and a rich,
broad-coverage, functionally based grammar. It simply happens that many
formal, generative theories are descriptively inadequate grammars. SBCG
is generative in a way that prevailing syntax-centered theories are not:
its mechanisms are intended to represent all of the patterns of a given
language, including idiomatic ones; there is no 'core' grammar in SBCG.
SBCG a licensing-based theory, as opposed to one that freely generates
syntactic combinations and uses general principles to bar illicit ones: a
word, lexeme or phrase is well formed if and only if it is described by
a lexeme or construction. Recent SBCG works have expanded on the
lexicalist model of idiomatically combining expressions sketched out in
Sag 2012.
Goldbergian/Lakovian construction grammar
The type of construction grammar associated with linguists like Goldberg and Lakoff looks mainly at the external relations of constructions
and the structure of constructional networks. In terms of form and
function, this type of construction grammar puts psychological
plausibility as its highest desideratum. It emphasizes experimental
results and parallels with general cognitive psychology. It also draws
on certain principles of cognitive linguistics. In the Goldbergian
strand, constructions interact with each other in a network via four
inheritance relations: polysemy link, subpart link, metaphorical extension, and finally instance link.
Cognitive grammar
Sometimes, Ronald Langacker's cognitive grammar
framework is described as a type of construction grammar. Cognitive
grammar deals mainly with the semantic content of constructions, and its
central argument is that conceptual semantics is primary to the degree
that form mirrors, or is motivated by, content. Langacker argues that
even abstract grammatical units like part-of-speech classes are semantically motivated and involve certain conceptualizations.
Radical construction grammar
William A. Croft's radical construction grammar is designed for typological
purposes and takes into account cross-linguistic factors. It deals
mainly with the internal structure of constructions. Radical
construction grammar is totally non-reductionist,
and Croft argues that constructions are not derived from their parts,
but that the parts are derived from the constructions they appear in.
Thus, in radical construction grammar, constructions are likened to Gestalts.
Radical construction grammar rejects the idea that syntactic
categories, roles, and relations are universal and argues that they are
not only language-specific, but also construction specific. Thus, there
are no universals that make reference to formal categories, since formal
categories are language- and construction-specific. The only universals
are to be found in the patterns concerning the mapping of meaning onto
form. Radical construction grammar rejects the notion of syntactic
relations altogether and replaces them with semantic relations. Like
Goldbergian/Lakovian construction grammar and cognitive grammar, radical
construction grammar is closely related to cognitive linguistics, and
like cognitive grammar, radical construction grammar appears to be based
on the idea that form is semantically motivated.
Embodied construction grammar
Embodied construction grammar (ECG), which is being developed by the Neural Theory of Language (NTL)
group at ICSI, UC Berkeley, and the University of Hawaiʻi, particularly
including Benjamin Bergen and Nancy Chang, adopts the basic
constructionist definition of a grammatical construction, but emphasizes
the relation of constructional semantic content to embodiment and sensorimotor experiences. A central claim is that the content of all linguistic signs involves mental simulations and is ultimately dependent on basic image schemas of the kind advocated by Mark Johnson
and George Lakoff, and so ECG aligns itself with cognitive linguistics.
Like construction grammar, embodied construction grammar makes use of a
unification-based
model of representation. A non-technical introduction to the NTL theory
behind embodied construction grammar as well as the theory itself and a
variety of applications can be found in Jerome Feldman's From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language (MIT Press, 2006).
Fluid construction grammar
Fluid construction grammar (FCG) was designed by Luc Steels and his collaborators for doing experiments on the origins and evolution of language.
FCG is a fully operational and computationally implemented formalism
for construction grammars and proposes a uniform mechanism for parsing
and production. Moreover, it has been demonstrated through robotic
experiments that FCG grammars can be grounded in embodiment and
sensorimotor experiences. FCG integrates many notions from contemporary computational linguistics such as feature structures
and unification-based language processing. Constructions are considered
bidirectional and hence usable both for parsing and production.
Processing is flexible in the sense that it can even cope with partially
ungrammatical or incomplete sentences. FCG is called 'fluid' because it
acknowledges the premise that language users constantly change and
update their grammars. The research on FCG is conducted at Sony CSL Paris and the AI Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Others
In addition
there are several construction grammarians who operate within the
general framework of construction grammar without affiliating themselves
with any specific construction grammar program. There is a growing
interest in the diachronic aspect of grammatical constructions and thus in the importation of methods and ideas from grammaticalization studies. Another area of growing interest is the pragmatics of pragmatic constructions.
This is probably one of the reasons why the usage-based model is
gaining popularity among construction grammarians. Another area of
increasing interest among construction grammarians is that of language acquisition which is mainly due to Michael Tomasello's work. Mats Andrén coined the term multimodal constructions to account for constructions that incorporate both (conventionalized) gesture and speech.
