What's (in) a construction? Complete inheritance vs. full-entry models

Buchbeitrag

In spite of the obvious importance that is accorded to the notion grammatical construction in any approach that sees itself as a construction grammar (CxG), there is as yet no generally accepted definition of the term across different variants of the framework. In particular, there are different assumptions about which additional requirements a given structure has to meet in order to be recognized as a construction besides being a ‘form-meaning pair’. Since the choice of a particular definition will determine the range of both relevant phenomena and concrete observations to be considered in empirical research within the framework, the issue is not just a mere terminological quibble but has important methodological repercussions especially for quantitative research in areas such as corpus linguistics. The present study illustrates some problems in identifying and delimiting such patterns in naturally occurring text and presents arguments for a usage-based interpretation of the term grammatical construction.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

Classification and Topics

• Subject: Konstruktionsgrammatik ; Sprache

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Zeschel, Arne
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Amsterdam [u.a.] : Benjamins
• (when): 2017-10-05

Further information

• URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-65077
• Last update: 06.03.2025, 9:00 AM CET