constructionlinguistics

Construction linguistics, or construction grammar, is a family of approaches within cognitive linguistics in which constructions are the fundamental units of language. A construction is a conventional pairing of form and meaning, and it can be as small as a morpheme or as large as a syntactic pattern or idiom. Language knowledge is acquired from usage, stored in form-meaning pairings, and generalized through analogy and frequency.

Core ideas include the rejection of a sharp boundary between lexicon and grammar. Grammar emerges from recurrent form-meaning pairings rather than being a separate module of rules. Constructions vary in schematicity: highly specified templates like kick the bucket as an idiom, and more abstract patterns such as the ditransitive construction, where an agent gives something to a recipient. The approach is usage-based and emphasizes the integration of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, with processing and acquisition shaped by experience with language.

Historical roots lie in Charles J. Fillmore’s frame semantics and related work on form-meaning mappings, with Adele Goldberg’s 1995 influential exposition promoting constructions as the central data of syntactic knowledge. Since then, construction grammar has diversified into typology, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and computational modeling, and it has influenced analyses of cross-linguistic constructions and grammaticalization.

Applications include explaining why certain idiosyncratic expressions resist compositional analysis, predicting cross-linguistic patterns of argument structure, and informing natural language processing and second language teaching. Critics argue that the field risks overgeneralization or lack of a single formal apparatus, though many researchers pursue formalized or computational implementations of construction-based theories.