Cognitive Linguistics Croft & Cruse 10 An overview of construction grammars (part 1, through )

Grammatical representation: the anatomy of a construction Constructions are pairings of form and meaning – symbolic units Even the most general syntactic constructions have general rules of semantic interpretation. Meaning (= semantic structure) includes all conventionalized aspects of a construction’s function, including discourse and pragmatic functions The link to meaning is internal to a construction, syntactic structures are NOT independent of semantic structures, these are symbolic links

Grammatical representation: the anatomy of a construction, cont’d. Elements: parts of syntactic structure Components: parts of semantic structure Unit: a symbolic part (element + component) of a construction Semantic relations: between components Syntactic relations: between elements

Grammatical representation: the anatomy of a construction, cont’d. Two questions arise from construction grammar: –1) What is the status of the categories of the syntactic elements in construction grammar? –2) What sorts of syntactic relations are posited?

The organization of constructional knowledge Each construction is a node in a taxonomic network of constructions (remember radial categories? This is similar, except that it accommodates various levels of abstraction.) A given construction may have multiple parents. I didn’t sleep instantiates both Intransitive Verb and Negative constructions

The organization of constructional knowledge, cont’d. A construction typically provides only partial specification of the structure of an utterance Two more questions arise: –3) What sorts of relations are found between constructions? –4) How is information stored in the construction taxonomy?

10.2 Some current theories of construction grammar Different versions of the theory focus on different issues: –Construction Grammar (Fillmore/Kay) – syntactic relations and inheritance –Lakoff/Goldberg – categorization relations between constructions –Cognitive Grammar (Langacker) – semantic categories and relations –Radical Construction Grammar (Croft) – syntactic categories and universals We will ask questions 1)-4) concerning each version of the theory

Construction Grammar Similar to formalism of HPSG Uniform representation of all grammatical properties, formal and functional, as features with values, gathered in sets called feature structures Charles Fillmore Paul Kay

Construction Grammar, cont’d. Q&A: –1) What is the status of the categories of the syntactic elements in construction grammar? Reductionist model of syntactic structure made up of primitive atomic units –2) What sorts of syntactic relations are posited? Roles and relations (all are predicate-argument relations)

Construction Grammar, cont’d. Q&A: –3) What sorts of relations are found between constructions? –4) How is information stored in the construction taxonomy? (Answer to both:) Construction grammar is a complete inheritance model, in which information is represented only once, at the most schematic level, and a construction inherits the feature structures of its parent constructions