An Informal Sketch of a Formal Architecture

A formal architecture for Construction Grammar (CG) is sketched. Modeling domain objects (constructs) are constituent structures with feature structures at the nodes, aka Feature Structure Trees (FTs). Constructions are partial descriptions of FTs, expressed as sets of constituent structure equations and path equations. Uni-cation of constructions is deened. A construct c is licensed by a grammar G ii G contains a set of constructions whose uniication fully describes c. 1 Introductory The major empirical motivation for Construction Grammar (CG) is the need to develop a system of grammatical description in which the marked constructions (more or lessìdiomlike' forms of expression) are represented in the same formal system as the regular, `core' patterns or rules (Fillmore & Kay Forthcoming, Kay & Fillmore In Press). 1 The original representation system for Construction Grammar (CG) was a system that represents constructions (items of grammar) and constructs (items of language: sentences, phrases and words) in`box diagrams', which depict constituent structure as nested boxes, with the syntactic, semantic, lexical and phonological information associated with each constituent written in the box representing that constituent. In the example in (1) below, a highly oversimpliied representation of the sentence Sid sat, the outer box represents the sentence as a constituent, the small, left-daughter box indicating the subject (Sid) constituent and the right-daughter box representing the predicate (sat) constituent. The feature structure enclosed only in the larger box, at the top, says that (1) syntactically we have a sentence, (2) semantically, (a) the frame (relation) is SITTING, 1 Charles Fillmore originated the approach to a construction-based grammar for which a formal architecture is sketeched here. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the contributions to this paper of Ron Kaplan and Mary Dalrymple, without whose stimulation and advice it would not have been developed.