meningsbyggnad

Meningsbyggnad, often translated as meaning construction or sentence construction, is a central concept in linguistics describing how speakers build utterances to express intended content. The concept spans the integration of form and meaning from phonology and morphology through syntax to semantics and pragmatics. It concerns how syntactic structure encodes semantic roles (such as agent and patient), how tense, aspect, and mood constrain interpretation, and how modifiers, complements, and clause links refine sense. Prosody and punctuation influence interpretation in spoken and written language, respectively, and information structure helps determine what part of the sentence is given or new, or the focus of the statement.

Theoretical approaches differ in emphasis. In generative grammar, attention is on underlying syntactic representations and their transformations. Construction grammar treats constructions—conventional form-meaning pairings—as the primary units of grammar. Functional and typological perspectives study how languages vary in encoding meaning, such as through word order flexibility, case marking, or affixal morphology, and how discourse roles shape form.

Cross-linguistic variation means that the same meaning can be expressed by different constructions, and conversely that a given construction can carry different meanings in context. Language acquisition and processing research investigates how speakers learn and interpret these structures, and how cognitive constraints influence their development.

Applications include language teaching, parsing and generation in natural language processing, translation, and linguistic typology.