Konstruktionsart

Konstruktionsart is a term used in linguistics, particularly within construction grammar, to denote a construction type—a conventional form-meaning pair that governs how words can combine and what semantic roles are projected. A construction type comprises a template with slots for arguments and sometimes functional elements, and its meaning is not reducible to the meanings of its parts alone. Construction types can be broad, such as transitive or intransitive patterns, or highly specific, including idiomatic phrases, light-verb constructions, or fixed prepositional phrases.

In practice, Konstruktionsart helps explain how speakers store and access knowledge about multiword expressions and syntactic patterns, emphasizing form-meaning mappings over abstract word-by-word rules. The same concept can be applied cross-linguistically, where different languages may realize a given construction type with distinct surface forms, illustrating both universals and variation in language structure.

Examples include the ditransitive construction in English (subject-verb-indirect object-direct object, as in give someone something) or various resultative and causal constructions where a particular syntactic form encodes a specific semantic relation. In German-language linguistics, Konstruktionsart is used to analyze how verbs interact with case marking, prepositions, or aspectual particles to create stable patterns of meaning.

Research on Konstruktionsart often engages with valency and argument structure, syntactic alternations, and diachronic change, exploring how constructions expand, shift, or migrate across languages. It has practical implications for language teaching, corpus linguistics, and natural language processing by clarifying which constructions carry particular meanings and functions.

See also: construction grammar, valency theory, argument structure, idioms.