USAGE-BASED FOUNDATIONS OF CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR

English Cognate Object Construction : A Usage - based , Construction Grammar Approach ∗

The English cognate object (CO) construction like laugh a nervous laugh raises intriguing analytic and empirical questions. They include (a) what kind of verb licenses the CO, (b) what is the grammatical status of the CO (including its argumenthood), and (c) what are the semantic/pragmatic contributions of the construction? In answering these questions and to see real usages of the construction...

Sign-Based Construction Grammar

In Construction Grammar, rules of syntactic combination (descriptions of local trees, e.g., a verb phrase and its daughters) have meanings. These meanings are represented by syntactic, semantic and usage features that attach to the mother or daughter nodes in these trees (Sag 2007, 2008). A construction defines the distinctive properties of a mode of combination that is part of the grammar of a...

Grammar Is Grammar and Usage Is Usage

A number of disparate approaches to language, ranging from cognitive linguistics to stochastic implementations of optimality theory, have challenged the classical distinction between knowledge of language and use of language. Supporters of such approaches point to the functional motivation of grammatical structure, language users’ sensitivity to the frequency of occurrence of grammatical elemen...

Introducing Sign-Based Construction Grammar

1 Background Modern grammatical research,1 at least in the realms of morphosyntax, includes a number of largely nonoverlapping communities that have surprisingly little to do with one another. One – the Universal Grammar (UG) camp – is mainly concerned with a particular view of human languages as instantiations of a single grammar that is fixed in its general shape. UG researchers put forth hig...

COGNITIVE FOUNDATIONS of GRAMMAR