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تسجيل

The architecture of construction grammars

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C20-P666

2026-03-09

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The architecture of construction grammars

In the last chapter, we explored motivations for a constructional approach to grammar. We established that a constructional account rests upon a single unified representation that links together all aspects of the meaning and form of an utterance, rather than viewing these as the output of distinct com ponents of the grammar. In that chapter, we concentrated on the model of Construction Grammar developed by Paul Kay and Charles Fillmore, a broadly generative model that claims that grammatical constructions can be meaningful, in part, independently of the words that ‘fill’ them. As we will see in this chapter, this claim has been central to the constructional approaches developed within cognitive approaches to grammar. We will concentrate our discussion here mainly on the framework developed by Adele Goldberg, particularly in her 1995 book, Constructions (section 20.1). As we will see, Goldberg’s approach focuses on the argument structure of sentence-level constructions such as the English ditransitive construction (for example, Lily knitted George a jumper) and the English resultative construction (for example, Lily drank herself stupid). Although most instances of these constructions are not idiomatic in the sense that they do conform to the ‘regular’ patterns of language, Goldberg argues that these constructions contain meaning that cannot be attributed to the lexical items that fill them. In this way, the constructional approach is extended to account for regular instances as well as idiomatic instances. As we will see, however, Goldberg’s model departs from Kay and Fillmore’s Construction Grammar in that it is fully usage-based. Having discussed Goldberg’s approach in some detail, we will then briefly compare two other cognitively oriented constructional approaches: Radical Construction Grammar, developed by William Croft (section 20.2) and the most recent approach known as Embodied Construction Grammar, developed by Benjamin Bergen and Nancy Chang (section 20.3). Finally, we will draw some explicit comparisons between the various constructional approaches to grammar that we have explored in Part III of this book (section 20.4).