costructures

A costructure is a term used in linguistics, particularly within the framework of dependency grammar, to describe a grammatical construction that shares a significant amount of structural or semantic information with another construction. This shared information means that the two constructions are not entirely independent but are related in a systematic way. Essentially, a costructure is a construction that is licensed or constrained by the presence of another construction.

The concept of costructures highlights how grammatical knowledge is organized and how speakers can produce and understand complex utterances efficiently. Instead of learning each grammatical construction in isolation, speakers can leverage shared patterns. For instance, a particular verb might enter into multiple constructions, and the shared properties of these constructions create a costructure relationship. The shared elements can include syntactic roles, semantic roles, or even specific lexical items.

Costructures are not limited to simple sentence structures. They can also be observed in more complex phenomena such as phrasal constructions, argument structure alternations, and even across different languages where translation equivalents exhibit similar structural or semantic correspondences. Analyzing costructures helps linguists understand the underlying principles of grammatical regularity and the cognitive mechanisms involved in language processing. It provides a way to account for the productivity and systematicity of language.