This chapter explores the potential of Construction Grammar for analyzing literary texts. First, it investigates typical features of literary language from a constructional point of view. Fairy tales, for example, are characterized by their opening lines like “Once upon a time …,” analyzed as a concrete, complex construction. Similarly, many authors, styles, and genres are characterized by particular constructions, or the use of particular words and phrases. The second section deals with creative, innovative, and seemingly ‘rule-breaking’ language in a constructional framework, suggesting that Construction Grammar as a usage-based and cognitively plausible model offers the perfect toolkit to analyze seemingly unruly linguistic behavior. The third part deals with literary genres as linguistic units beyond the sentence, arguing that literary texts are also learned form–meaning pairings and can be treated as constructions. Genres as constructions may change dynamically over time and be subject to prototypeeffects. Drawing on numerous examples, this chapter thus demonstrates that literary language and texts can be productively analyzed using concepts and methods of Construction Grammar.

This chapter discusses the role of frequency for Construction Grammar, especially concerning usage-based models of language, and offers definitions of different aspects of frequency, namely token frequency, type frequency, relative frequency, frequency of co-occurrence, and dispersion. It discusses how these aspects can be measured on the basis of corpus data, and how these measurements allow the observation of frequency effects that relate to phenomena such as entrenchment, ease of processing, productivity, phonological reduction, and resistance to regularization. These effects are illustrated by experimental and corpus-based analyses of lexical, morphological, and syntactic constructions. The chapter also addresses open questions regarding the role of frequency in constructionist research. Not only is the relation between corpus frequencies and theoretical notions such as entrenchment far from trivial, it is also important not to attribute effects to token frequency that can be explained by other, correlating variables. The chapter will also examine strategies that can reach beyond the use of frequency values in the future development of Construction Grammar.

This chapter examines a class of grammatical patterns called functional amalgams, for example, That’s the real issue is that you never really know and I have a friend in the Bay Area is a painter. Distinct from syntactic blends, functional amalgams are innovative constructions that combine otherwise incompatible subparts of other constructions. These combinations are not licensed by the canonical phrase-structure rules of the language and may appear illogical or redundant. However, unlike speech errors, functional amalgams are purposeful productions and serve to distribute across constituents units of meaning that would otherwise coalesce in a single constituent sign of a complex linguistic expression. We examine the properties that distinguish functional amalgams from syntactic amalgams, and explore the syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic features of functional amalgams, using an array of English sentence patterns as illustrations and showing why amalgams qualify as constructions in the sense of Construction Grammar. Finally, we extend this conception of functional amalgams to complex words, asking how selection properties of derivational endings may lead to coerced meanings.

This chapter explores the interaction between discourse structure, grammar, and prosody, on the example of insubordination, that is, the main clause use of formally subordinate clauses. After an overview of the forms and meanings of insubordinate constructions cross-linguistically, it focuses on a particular illustration of this phenomenon: contrastive insubordinate conditionals (CICC) in Spanish. First, it argues for the constructional status of the pattern and then it explores its discursive and prosodic features. The results of a corpus study show that CICC can occur in five different contexts, with a high preference for dispreferred responses. This is taken as evidence for proposing a network representation, with a schema representing the common form and meaning features of the construction and several instantiations in prototypical and peripheral contexts. Prosodically, the construction is combined with restricted prosodic patterns expressing similar pragmatic functions (focus and contrast). We can thus model prosodic patterns as pairings of a prosodic form and a pragmatic meaning and are inherited by sentence-level constructions expressing compatible pragmatic meanings.

This chapter reviews ways of analyzing interactional and grammatical regularities of spoken, dialogically organized language in a constructional framework. The basic tenet is that grammatical constructions, when used in talk-in-interaction, are housed in interactional sequences, and it is the constructions’ positions in certain sequential locations that motivates their use and shapes their form. Therefore, aspects of sequence and discourse organization are potentially distinctive features of constructions, and reflections of the interactional contingencies that generate them. Four types of construction are examined: receipt questions, second assessments, a construction of meaning negotiation, and pseudo-clefts. All these patterns can be said to be responsive in one way or another, thus lending themselves well to a dialogically sensitive analysis. The analytic examples highlight the necessity of abstracted interactional information for a fuller understanding of the workings of grammatical constructions in talk-in-interaction and for how an interactional perspective can enrich constructional approaches to analyzing linguistic structure.

This chapter provides an overview of corpus-based advances in Construction Grammar. After a brief introduction on kinds of data in linguistics in general and the notion of corpora in particular, I discuss a variety of corpus-based studies categorized into (i) largely qualitative studies, (ii) studies based on frequencies and probabilities, (iii) studies focusing on association strengths, and (iv) statistical as well as machine-learning studies. In each section, representative studies covering a variety of languages and questions are covered with an eye to surveying methodological as well as theoretical advantages. I conclude with an assessment of the state of the art by comparing how recent developments fare relative to Dąbrowska’s discussion of Cognitive Linguistics’s seven deadly sins.

Recent progress in deep learning and natural language processing has given rise to powerful models that are primarily trained on a cloze-like task and show some evidence of having access to substantial linguistic information, including some constructional knowledge. This groundbreaking discovery presents an exciting opportunity for a synergistic relationship between computational methods and Construction Grammar research. In this chapter, we explore three distinct approaches to the interplay between computational methods and Construction Grammar: (i) computational methods for text analysis, (ii) computational Construction Grammar, and (iii) deep learning models, with a particular focus on language models. We touch upon the first two approaches as a contextual foundation for the use of computational methods before providing an accessible, yet comprehensive overview of deep learning models, which also addresses reservations construction grammarians may have. Additionally, we delve into experiments that explore the emergence of constructionally relevant information within these models while also examining the aspects of Construction Grammar that may pose challenges for these models. This chapter aims to foster collaboration between researchers in the fields of natural language processing and Construction Grammar. By doing so, we hope to pave the way for new insights and advancements in both these fields.

We present an overview of constructional approaches to signed languages, beginning with a brief history and the pioneering work of William C. Stokoe. We then discuss construction morphology as an alternative to prior analyses of sign structure that posited a set of non-compositional lexical signs and a distinct set of classifier signs. Instead, signs are seen as composed of morphological schemas containing both specific and schematic aspects of form and meaning. Grammatical construction approaches are reviewed next, including the marking of argument structure on verbs in American Sign Language (ASL). Constructional approaches have been applied to the issue of the relation between sign and gesture across a variety of expressions. This work often concludes that signs and gesture interact in complex ways. In the final section, we present an extended discussion of several grammatical and discourse phenomena using a constructional analysis based on Cognitive Grammar. The data come from Argentine Sign Language (LSA) and includes pointing constructions, agreement constructions, antecedent-anaphor relations, and constructions presenting point of view in reported narrative.

In this chapter, we argue that it is highly beneficial for the contemporary construction grammarian to have a thorough understanding of the strong relationship between the research fields of Construction Grammar and artificial intelligence. We start by unraveling the historical links between the two fields, showing that their relationship is rooted in a common attitude towards human communication and language. We then discuss the first direction of influence, focusing on how insights and techniques from the field of artificial intelligence play an important role in operationalizing, validating, and scaling constructionist approaches to language. We then proceed to the second direction of influence, highlighting the relevance of Construction Grammar insights and analyses to the artificial intelligence endeavor of building truly intelligent agents. We support our case with a variety of illustrative examples and conclude that further elaboration of this relationship will play a key role in shaping the future of the field of Construction Grammar.

After a long tradition of studying languages as isolated systems, researchers are increasingly aware of the fact that speakers of most of the world’s languages are multilingual. The coexistence of multiple languages within the brain can be a significant force shaping each. The recognition of constructions and their arrays of constructional properties provides a useful tool for understanding contact phenomena: much of what is transferred in contact situations are constructions or constructional features. Conversely, examination of what is replicated can enhance our understanding of the nature of linguistic knowledge. Here replicated constructions of varying sizes and degrees of schematicity are first described, from words through discourse structures, then the transfer of individual constructional features, including prosody, special connotations, various pragmatic effects, linguistic and extralinguistic contexts of use, and frequency are discussed, as well as the social situations under which they occur. The kinds of constructions and constructional properties replicated provide additional evidence that constructions are more than simple combinations of basic form and meaning.