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 language. More specifically, a construction is a description of construct, a combination of a mother node and one or more daughter nodes. The nodes of the trees in such descriptions are not category labels, as in traditional phrase-structure grammar, but feature structures, known as signs. Signs include not only phrases but also words and lexemes. I describe Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG), a formal implementation of Construction Grammar based on representational locality. According to the locality constraint, all of the details needed to construct a construct from a construction are to be found in the mother sign, which has not daughters but a daughters feature. In SBCG, grammar is viewed, not as a set of abstract constraints, but as a type hierarchy of constructions of varying levels of specificity. I review four sets of linguistic facts that provide evidence for this conception of grammar. First, constructions license arguments and syntactic sisterhood relations (Section 3). Second, there is a continuum of idiomaticity (Section 4). Third, core constructions and peripheral constructions are interleaved during production (Section 5). Fourth, constructions exhibit formal and semantic commonalities that cannot be described in procedural terms (Section 6). A concluding section addresses the question of whether construction-based grammar provides a universal framework for syntax.