Constructionist Approaches
Past, Present, Future

A comprehensive overview of Construction Grammar approaches to language.

Tobias Ungerer (Author), Stefan Hartmann (Author)

9781009308731, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 July 2023

86 pages
22.9 x 15.1 x 0.5 cm, 0.14 kg

'The Element serves as an appetizer to broaden one's horizon, consider studies outside one's comfort zone, and seek input from researchers of other subdisciplines in Construction Grammar and from disciplines beyond. It excels at pointing at possible future areas of interest and analytical tools that concern all (construction) grammarians. This Element is thus an important contribution to contemplate what is important in linguistics.' Claudia Lehmann, English Language & Linguistics

Construction Grammar (CxG) has developed into a broad and highly diverse family of approaches that have in common that they see constructions, i.e. form-meaning pairs at various levels of abstraction and complexity, as the basic units of language. This Element gives an overview of the origin and the current state of the art of constructionist approaches, focusing, on the one hand, on basic concepts like the notion of 'constructions', while at the same time offering an in-depth discussion of current research trends and open questions. It discusses the commonalities and differences between the major constructionist approaches, the organization of constructional networks as well as ongoing research on linguistic creativity, multimodality and individual differences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

1. Introduction
2. Discovering idiomaticity: the case for constructions
3. From sign-based to radical: 'Flavors' of Construction Grammar
4. Connecting the dots: the construct-i-con
5. Creativity, multimodality, individual differences: recent developments in Construction Grammar
6. Conclusion and outlook.

Subject Areas: Grammar, syntax & morphology [CFK]