Framenets and constructiCons are applied instantiations of the linguistic frameworks known as Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar, respectively, in the form of computational, semiformally structured linguistic resources. The resources have a common history, both theoretically and in design: They are built as English-language resources in the framework of the Berkeley FrameNet initiative. They enjoy the double nature of being descriptive linguistic resources as well as finding frequent use in a computational linguistic context, where they have been used both in NLP applications and as underlying knowledge bases in areas such as computer-assisted language learning. The chapter provides a bird’s-eye view on these resources: their theoretical foundations; design principles and how they are compiled; theoretical and methodological interrelations; the challenges involved in building framenets and constructiCons for new languages and for cross-linguistic application; the differences and interactions between linguistic and computational linguistic work on framenets and constructiCons; application to language pedagogy; and outstanding theoretical and methodological issues.

Arbib’s chapter places the old debate over whether the protowords of protolanguage may often be holophrases or are more akin to words of current languages within the context of Bickerton’s changing views on the emergence of languages from protolanguages. He traces Bickerton’s ideas from the Universal Grammar with a default parameters approach of the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis via the “just add Merge” account of Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans to the replacement of Universal Grammar by a notion of Universal Bases of Language in More than Nature Needs: Language, Mind, and Evolution. As a counterpoise, Arbib considers the Mirror System Hypothesis of the evolution of the language-ready brain in which, starting from protowords, words and constructions akin to those of modern languages emerged via cultural evolution with fractionation of holophrases playing a crucial (but not the only) initial role.

This chapter presents an overview of some of the central concepts of constructional syntax. Focusing on key insights from Berkeley Construction Grammar and Cognitive Construction Grammar, it discusses how construction entries of different types from the inventory of constructions interact with each other to license constructs. This chapter also outlines a novel methodology for discovering constructions in a corpus that allows for a systematic way of compiling construction entries that are relevant for research in Construction Grammar and constructicography.

Bakker’s chapter discusses the syntactic development in twin grammars. Twins and other young children are sometimes reported to create their own languages, sometimes called autonomous languages. The grammars of these languages are quite rudimentary, and the lexicon is derived from the language(s) spoken around them. Bickerton claimed that Creoles share structural properties because the languages have been created by children. Bakker looks at the structures of documented autonomous languages and compares them with Creole languages. It appears that the autonomous languages have more in common with pidgins than with Creole languages, structurally, even though they are created by children, like Creole languages. The twin situation influences the rudimentary properties of the autonomous languages.

Spoken language exhibits not only grammatical constructions but also prosodic constructions. While the latter are also form–function mappings, there are differences: Prosodic constructions involve temporal configurations of diverse prosodic features, their functions are primarily pragmatics-related and interactional, they can be present to greater or lesser degrees, and they are frequently superimposed and aligned in complex ways with other prosodic constructions and with grammatical constructions. This chapter illustrates these properties with examples from American English.

Veronique’s paper compares the use of bare and determiner marked NPs in Indian Ocean Creoles (IOC) which consists of Seychelles, Mauritian and Reunion Creoles. These three main IO Creoles share closely related overt indefinite, definite, demonstrative and plural determiners and the use of bare NPs. Réunion Creole is the only IO Creole which has a specific use for prenominal markers: definite singular lo, definite plural lé and indefinite plural dé. The three Creoles exhibit many similarities in the expression of nominal reference but they do not grant the same categorial status to markers -la and sa. As such the paper discusses the significance of this difference for nominal reference in the three languages involved. It concludes that grammatical affinities between IO Creoles do not exclude functional differences due inter alia to the grammaticalization of definite determiners.

The chapter gives a general overview of the approach to constructional analysis called Construction Discourse, where the term ‘discourse’ is implanted with the same rigor and systematicity as the term ‘grammar’ has in Construction Grammar. In Construction Discourse, constructions are not seen as form–meaning pairings, but as form–meaning–discourse constellations. A set of twelve discourse attributes is postulated and some of them are illustrated in more detail. Together, these twelve discourse attributes (and their respective values) are seen as being able to define aspects of ‘context’ that are necessary for a full description and analysis of the dynamicity of language. The intricacies of Construction Discourse are illustrated with a detailed analysis of the Wellerism construction in the Solv dialect of Swedish.

Construction Grammar and typology share many assumptions and each approach can fruitfully inform the other. Both fields start from a pairing of form and function and treat lexicon, morphology, and syntax as a continuum of varying strategies to express function. Cross-linguistic comparison leads to a distinction between language-particular categories and structures, determined by distributional analysis, and comparative concepts that are cross-linguistically valid. Strategies are morphosyntactic formal structures that are defined language-independently and constructions are comparative concepts; as such, constructions and their components can be aligned across languages, and strategies allow the alignment of morphosyntactic structures used for constructions across languages. Typologists have also developed representations of the conceptual relations between the functions of different constructions in terms of conceptual spaces. Typological diversity also suggests that the only universal syntactic structure is the part–whole relation between a construction and its constituents. Both Construction Grammar and typology give a prominent role to diachrony, seeing constructions as lineages.

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.

Alexandre and Swokien’s chapter takes a look at reflexive constructions in the emergent variety of Cape Verdean Portuguese (CVP). They argue that the close contact between Cape Verdean Creole (CV) and CVP has some impact on the reflexive patterns available, but also that Cape Verdean speakers reconfigure the features of the reflexive construction of their native language (CV) into CVP. These observations are supported by two experiments – a sentence repetition task and a cloze test. Results show that there is significant variation in using reflexive constructions in CVP, indicating grammatical unsteadiness, but se ‘SELF’ omission is the preferred strategy.

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.