Corpus-based methods used in 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.

Language users learn these pairings as individual, whole facts about language. These language facts are indexed to specific interactive contexts and linguistic practices. They may be associated in the mind of the language user with a highly particularized sociolect, dialect, pattern of jargon,genre, or register.

The guiding insight of construction grammar (often abbreviated CxG) is that rules of syntactic combination are directly associated with interpretive and use conditions. All construction-based grammars allow units bigger than the word as semantic building blocks of syntax. In contrast to traditional compositional approaches to syntax, in which all conceptual content comes from the lexicon, and rules of syntactic combination do no more than determine which word sequences function as units for syntactic purposes, constructional approaches assume a continuum of idiomaticity (or generality) of expressions, from tightly bound idioms to fully productive patterns. This fundamental commitment unites all of the varieties of CxG, whether or not formal descriptive methods are used and whether the research program targets language development, second-language learning, typology, diachrony, language productions and comprehension, language evolution, conversational practice or social identity. Owing to its focus on descriptive precision, patterns of usage, grammaticalization and the structure of linguistic categories, CxG is closely linked to the explanatory frameworks of cognitive-functional linguistics.

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.

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