Construction Grammar - The Grammatical Construction in CxG

The Grammatical Construction in CxG

In CxG, like in general semiotics, the grammatical construction is a pairing of form and content. The formal aspect of a construction is typically described as a syntactic template, but the form covers more than just syntax, as it also involves phonological aspects, such as prosody and intonation. The content covers semantic as well as pragmatic meaning.

The semantic meaning of a grammatical construction is made up of conceptual structures postulated in cognitive semantics: Image-schemas, frames, conceptual metaphors, conceptual metonymies, prototypes of various kinds, mental spaces, and bindings across these (called "blends"). Pragmatics just becomes the cognitive semantics of communication — the modern version of the old Ross-Lakoff performative hypothesis from the 1960s.

The form and content are symbolically linked in the sense advocated by Langacker.

Thus a construction is treated like a sign in which all structural aspects are integrated parts and not distributed over different modules as they are in the componential model. Consequentially, not only constructions that are lexically fixed, like many idioms, but also more abstract ones like argument structure schemata, are pairings of form and conventionalized meaning. For instance, the ditransitive schema is said to express semantic content X CAUSES Y TO RECEIVE Z, just like kill means X CAUSES Y TO DIE.

In CxG, a grammatical construction, regardless of its formal or semantic complexity and make up, is a pairing of form and meaning. Thus words are instances of constructions. Indeed, construction grammarians argue that all pairings of form and meaning are constructions including phrase structures, idioms, words and even morphemes.