Constructional approaches to grammar

Constructional approaches to grammar are based on the observation that the meaning of a whole utterance is more than a combination of the words it contains – the meaning of the whole is more than the meaning of the parts (Lakoff, 1977). There are (at least) four main varieties of constructional approach to grammar. The first is the theory called Construction Grammarthat was developed by Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay and their colleagues (e.g., Fillmore et al., 1988/this volume). While this theory is broadly generative in orientation, it set the scene for the development of cognitively realistic theories of construction grammar which adopted the central thesis of Fillmore and Kay’s approach. This thesis is the position that grammar can be modelled in terms of constructions rather than ‘words and rules’. In part, Construction Grammar is motivated by the fact that certain complex grammatical constructions (e.g. idioms like kick the bucket or throw in the towel) have meaning that cannot be predicted on the basis of their sub-parts and might therefore be ‘stored whole’ rather than ‘built from scratch’.

We also briefly introduce three other constructional approaches that are set firmly within the cognitive linguistics framework: (1) a model that we call Goldberg’s Construction Grammar, developed by Adele Goldberg (e.g., 1995, 2003/this volume); (2) Radical Construction Grammar, developed by William Croft (e.g., 1996/this volume, 2001); and (3) Embodied Construction Grammar, a recent approach developed by Benjamin Bergen and Nancy Chang (2005/this volume). It is worth pointing out that Cognitive Grammar could also be classified as a constructional approach to grammar because Langacker also adopts a constructional view of certain types of grammatical unit. However, Langacker defines the notion of a construction in a different way from these models.

Cognitive Grammar and constructional approaches to grammar share another feature in common. Both are inventory-based approaches to the study of grammar (Evans & Green, 2006). In other words, both types of approach view the grammar as an inventory of symbolic units rather than a system of rules or principles. This amounts to the claim that the language system does not work predominantly by ‘building’ structure (as in generative models of grammar) but by ‘storing’ it.

30. Fillmore’s Construction Grammar

Fillmore et al.’s Construction Grammar In their 1988 paper (this volume), Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor argue in favour of a model in which, like the lexical item, the complex grammatical construction (the phrase or the clause), has semantic and pragmatic properties directly associated with it. To illustrate they examine formal idioms, complex expressions which have syntax that is unique to the complex construction of which it is part. In principle, the number of instances of a formal idiom constructions is infinitely large. Despite this, such constructions often have a clearly identifiable semantic value and pragmatic force. For this reason, formal idioms pose a particularly interesting challenge to the ‘words and rules’ model of grammar. They are productive and therefore rule-based, yet often defy the ‘usual’ rules of grammar. Fillmore et al. therefore took as their case study the idiomatic let alone construction.

In light of their findings concerning the let alone construction, Fillmore et al. argue against the ‘words and rules’ view (which they call the ‘atomistic’ view) of grammatical operations, where lexical items are assembled by phrase structure rules into complex units that are then assigned compositional meaning and only subsequently subjected to pragmatic processing. In other words, they argue against a modular view of the language system. Instead of a model in which syntactic, semantic, phonological and pragmatic knowledge is represented in encapsulated subsystems, the constructional model proposes that all this information is represented in a single unified representation, which is the construction.

In later work, for example Kay and Fillmore (1999), Fillmore, Kay and their collaborators develop their theory of Construction Grammar further. This model is monostratal: containing only one level of syntactic representation rather than a sequence of structures linked by transformations, a feature that characterizes transformational generative models like Principles and Parameters Theory. Furthermore, the representations in Construction Grammar contain not only syntactic information but also semantic information relating to argument structure as well as pragmatic information.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 1113