Constructions

• Published in: Constructions (Düsseldorf, Germany)
• Main Author: Schonefeld, Doris
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.01.2006
• ISSN: 1860-2010; 1860-2010

An introduction to essays in a special volume of Constructions titled "Constructions All Over: Case Studies and Theoretical Implications" provides succinct summaries of each contributor's findings & clarifies the notion of construction by reviewing the use of the term in the frameworks of American structuralism, generative grammar, corpus linguistics, & construction grammar; within construction grammar, the views developed by Charles J. Fillmore, Ronald W. Langacker, Adele Goldberg, & William Croft are explicated in turn. It is noted that, with the elimination of X-bar theory in the minimalist program of Noam Chomsky (1995), the structuralist concept of constructions as functional groups of linguistic units is distributed between the lexicon & the interpretive component & has no theoretical standing in grammar. A least common denominator for the notion of constructions among the four construction grammarians under study consists in an understanding of constructions as (1) symbolic units linking a form & a meaning & (2) units related to one another in networks via abstraction, instantiation, & extension, not derivation; a view of constructions as necessarily composite & usually not fully compositional in interpretation is accepted by certain construction grammarians & rejected by others, including Goldberg, who view all pairs of form & meaning as constructions. Tables, References. J. Hitchcock