Construction Grammar — CxG
This article contains discourse on important aspects of CxG and the next contains examples of constructions from various sources. Examples can also be found at the project repositories of Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG) and Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG).
Why we need another grammar? The meaning of an utterance cannot be composed from the keywords used in it. First, context becomes add important pieces to meaning of the utterance. Second, the structure of utterance in itself contains vital pieces of information. Third, the syntax grammar taught to us in school is just one abstract formalism of language — syntax grammar is derived from the language speakers and not the other way around — and this syntax grammar fails hopelessly to capture most of the utterances of native speakers. Therefore, every grammar formalism derived from this school grammar fails terribly (referring to Chomskyan grammar). Fourth, human brain learns patterns in variety of forms based on frequency (not on probabilities). Fifth, day to day usage of language is filled with metaphors.
Construction grammar contains collection of constructions. Constructions are indivisible association of form and meaning and this fact makes CxG non-modular. In other words, constructions are symbolic unit. An utterance derives it’s meaning by composition of meaning (in contrast with composition of keywords) i.e. the utterance is licensed by numerous constructions, these constructions link together to compose a meaning from their unitary meanings. The last sentence implies that CxG is unification based but non-derivational. How?!. Non-derivational implies there won’t be a parse tree kind of output on parsing an utterance. Unification based means that constructions licensed to an utterance can link with each other. This linkage shouldn’t be imagined as a tree but as one construction filling slots in another construction. To explain this I have shamelessly copied this example from [1].
Utterance “What he saw was an elephant.”
The constituent an elephant is licensed by a construction which places a constituent which can play a determining role, such as an article, a demonstrative or a possessive noun phrase, before a nominal constituent not so determined. The constituent what he saw is licensed by a construction which structures headless relative clauses in general (whose properties are briefly noted below). The constituent was an elephant is licensed by the English verb phrase construction, which provides for a lexical verb to be followed by exactly as many constituents as are necessary to satisfy its non-subject valence requirements (including adjuncts, which are treated in CG as augmentations of minimal valences). The full sentence of (6) is licensed by the Subject-Predicate construction. This construction licenses as a sentence of English a structure consisting of a finite verb phrase preceded by a constituent capable of serving as its subject.
What’s inside a construction? Well, CxG tries to account for all that is involved when speakers make an utterance. This seems logical as every aspect in the process of producing an utterance adds a vital piece of meaning for the listener. The constructions also contain the background knowledge needed to understand an utterance. This is where frames fits in i.e. frames provide the necessary background knowledge to the constructions. Finally, to answer the question asked in beginning of this para, constructions contain: syntactic information such as lexical category, finitennes, grammatical function; semantic information such as number, definiteness and semantic role; prosodic information such as prosodic constituent, intonation and stress; pragmatic information such as activation in discourse, register, speech act and genre. Well this is just a small list of what can be included in a construction. Thus, CxG has full coverage i.e. focuses on accounting for totality of facts available to speaker of a language.
Constructions may vary in the degree of specificity i.e. there is a continuum from schematic complex constructions (corresponding to syntactic rules in other theories) to substantive atomic constructions, that is, words (corresponding to the lexicon in other theories). The following table picked from [2] illustrates this with example.
