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date: 28 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

In Construction Grammar, rules of syntactic combination have meanings, represented by syntactic, semantic and usage features that attach to the mother or daughter nodes in these trees. The nodes of the trees in such descriptions are not category labels, but feature structures, known as signs. Signs include not only phrases but also words and lexemes. The chapter describes Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG), a formal implementation of Construction Grammar based on representational locality. In SBCG, grammar is viewed as a type hierarchy of constructions of varying levels of specificity. Four sets of linguistic facts are reviewed providing evidence for this conception of grammar: constructions that license arguments and syntactic sisterhood relations; a continuum of idiomaticity; a construction whereby core and periphery are interleaved during production; and constructions which exhibit formal and semantic commonalities that cannot be described in procedural terms.

Keywords: argument structure, lexical projection, Sign-Based Construction Grammar, construction-based syntax, complementation, compositionality, idioms, grammar universals, use-based grammar

Laura A. Michaelis

Laura A. Michaelis is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and a faculty fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of Aspectual Grammar and Past-Time Reference (1998) and Beyond Alternations: A Constructional Model of the German Applicative Pattern (2001) (with Josef Ruppenhofer). She is the co-editor, with Elaine Francis, of Mismatch: Form-Function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar (2003). She is currently collaborating on a Construction Grammar monograph with Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay, and Ivan Sag. Her work has appeared in the journals Language, Journal of Semantics, Journal of Pragmatics, Cognitive Linguistics, Journal of Linguistics, Linguistics and Philosophy, and Studies in Language.

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