How to Make Construction Grammars Fluid and Robust

Natural languages are fluid. New conventions may arise and there is never absolute consensus in a population. How can human language users nevertheless have such a high rate of communicative success? And how do they deal with the incomplete sentences, false starts, errors and noise that is common in normal discourse? Fluidity, ungrammaticality and error are key problems for formal descriptions of language and for computational implementations of language processing because these seem to be necessarily rigid and mechanical. This chapter discusses how these issues are approached within the framework of Fluid Construction Grammar. Fluidity is not achieved by a single mechanism but through a combination of intelligent grammar design and flexible processing principles.