Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 25 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter discusses what the Parallel Architecture has taken from Construction Grammar and what it might contribute to Construction Grammar. After outlining the fundamentals of the architecture, it explains why rules of grammar should be formulated as lexical items encoded as pieces of structure: there is no hard line between words, constructions, and standard rules. The chapter also argues for a “heterogeneous” variety of Construction Grammar, which does not insist that every syntactic construction is invested with meaning. Finally, it discusses the crucial issue of semiproductivity, usually thought to be a property of morphology, showing that constructions too can be either productive or semiproductive.

Keywords: Parallel Architecture, Construction Grammar, lexicon, grammar, syntax, semantics, phrasal constructions, lexical items

Ray Jackendoff

Ray Jackendoff is Seth Merrin Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He was the 2003 recipient of the Jean Nicod Prize in Cognitive Philosophy and has been President of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. His most recent books are Foundations of Language (Oxford, 2002), Simpler Syntax (with Peter Culicover, Oxford, 2005), Language, Consciousness, Culture (MIT Press, 2007), Meaning and the Lexicon (Oxford, 2010), and A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning (Oxford, 2011).

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.