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.

The relatively new world of ESG indicators displays many similarities with the original markets for ratings and benchmarks, but it also has some distinguishing features. This chapter explores to what extent the regulatory strategies that were developed in ‘traditional’ financial law to support confidence in ratings and benchmarks can be exported to the ‘new’ world of ESG finance, and concludes that policymakers should be cautions when transposing rules. This is especially the case with ESG ratings. In this area, credit ratings are the immediate reference for ESG rating regulation also, because of the common label of ‘rating’, which is rather misleading, and of the anchoring effect this entails. First, the assessments underlying ESG ratings are often more subjective than those supporting traditional indicators, due to their multivariate nature. Second, the risk of regulatory failures connected to the authorisation and registration labels also seems higher in the ‘new’ world of sustainability. The chapter analyses the new ESG Ratings Regulation and the Benchamkr Regulation against this backdrop, and highlights the suboptimality of some policy choices.

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 study enquires about the role of conduct risk with respect to the currently evolving ESG-related regulation wave. It questions the relevance of conduct risk as an additional determinant of banks’ effective intermediation in the ESG value chain, in addition to normatively set non-financial reporting, governance and due diligence duties. The suitability of a conduct risk-based approach to the identification and management of ESG risks is grounded in the conceptualization of ESG regulations as (sustainable) conduct of business rules centred on the management of ESG risk. This systemic reading of ESG-related rules explains and at the same time supports the main assumption underlying this study, namely that, while setting norms of conduct for the management of sustainability risks, the emerging framework engenders new risks of unsustainable conduct. The analysis finally argues that the flexible and cultural-sensitive nature of conduct risk makes it an effective tool for the forecast, correction and even prevention of potentially harmful misconducts directly stemming from either the missed or wrongful enactment of ESG policies. Ultimately, it is argued that the employment of conduct risk in the field of ESG is useful to re-conceptualize the bank’s internal risk management of inappropriate behaviour, also from a prudential perspective.

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.

It has become widely acknowledged that the looming climate crisis and the necessary transition to a low-carbon economy can and will be financially material for financial institutions. Accordingly, microprudential supervisors have started including climate-related financial risks in their daily practices. Comparatively less attention has been given to the role macroprudential policies may play in addressing these risks from a system-wide perspective. This paper tackles climate risks as a macroprudential concern. It argues that macroprudential policies may play a key part in assessing and managing these risks, deploying new methodological means to map and model existing and evolving climate risks under different plausible scenarios. Insights from scenario analysis may help inform the use of ‘hard’ macroprudential tools to foster the robustness and resilience of the banking system against climate-induced shocks. Against the backdrop of the ongoing reform of the EU’s macroprudential framework, the paper explores how the macroprudential toolkit could be adjusted to the reality of climate-related financial risks.

In this chapter, I analyse the main trade-offs between the economic value of the firm and its social value, exploring how they are solved through corporate governance and regulatory constraints. To begin with, I show how firms generate social value while also increasing their long-term value under the enlightened shareholder value approach. Thanks to organizational and technological innovation, firms are led to change their business models and organization to enhance environmental and social sustainability and increase long-term profitability. In addition, managers promote their firms’ sustainability in compliance with ethical standards which are part of corporate culture. In similar situations, generating social value may determine pure costs to the enterprise. I argue therefore that the perspective of instrumental stakeholderism appears too narrow, for situations exist where non-economic values are also relevant to the firm. The importance of ethics is especially underlined by CSR and stakeholder theory. Moreover, management studies emphasize the role of corporate governance and organizational theory in the promotion of social value. The board of directors should identify the ethical and cultural values of the firm and monitor their application at all levels. In addition, organizational purpose plays a fundamental role for the ‘intrinsic’ motivation of people in corporations. The international soft law on corporate due diligence further contributes to the design of corporate purpose and to the motivation of managers and employees. Once corporate due diligence is recognized by European hard law through the proposed Directive, specific obligations will arise for companies which will impact their governance and could become a source of civil liability. As a result, the corporate purpose orientation to sustainability will be reinforced by the regulation of environmental and human rights externalities and by the due diligence obligations deriving from it.

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.