From X to Y: Anatomy of a Constructional Pattern

Compositionality is undoubtedly one of the hardest problems in linguistics. In decoding theories, speaker occupies a leading role, having to carefully choose form that better encodes meaning be communicated. contrast, inferential burden shifted from hearer: linguistic information typically underspecifies and hearer must make number inferences bridge gap between what said meant. this article, I argue constructional can aid process sentence formation by providing scaffold help with construal operations. Constructions, an additional layer meaning, constrain range possible meanings activated words thereby reducing combinatorial explosion when several are joined together. This examined here analysing associated grammatical construction [from X Y], which connected polysemy network related senses, using examples extracted multimodal corpus. A preliminary analysis gesturing behaviour different senses proposed also included, seen contribute characterisation network.