Construction grammar

In linguistics, construction grammar groups a number of models of grammar that all subscribe to the idea that knowledge of a language is based on a collection of "form and function pairings". The "function" side covers what is commonly understood as meaning, content, or intent; it usually extends over both conventional fields of semantics and pragmatics.

Such pairs are learnt by hearing them being used frequently enough by others. Uses of constructions may happen and be acquired in mainstream or everyday language, but also in linguistic subcultures that are using a sociolect, dialect, or in formal contexts using standard languages or jargon associated with greater sociolinguistic prestige in comparison to plain language.

Construction grammar (often abbreviated CxG) is thus a kind of metalinguistic model, letting the door open to a variety of linguistic theories. It is typically associated with cognitive linguistics, partly because many of the linguists that are involved in construction grammar are also involved in cognitive linguistics, and partly because construction grammar and cognitive linguistics share many theoretical and philosophical foundations.

Historically, the notion of construction grammar developed out of the ideas of "global rules" and "transderivational rules" in generative semantics, together with the generative semantic idea of a grammar as a constraint satisfaction system. George Lakoff's "Syntactic Amalgams" paper in 1974 (Chicago Linguistics Society, 1974) posed a challenge for the idea of transformational derivation.

Construction grammar was spurred on by the development of Cognitive Semantics, beginning in 1975 and extending through the 1980s. Lakoff's 1977 paper, Linguistic Gestalts (Chicago Linguistic Society, 1977) was an early version of CxG, arguing that the meaning of the whole was not a compositional function of the meaning of the parts put together locally. Instead, he suggested, constructions themselves must have meanings.

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