Constructions include words (aardvark, avocado), morphemes (anti-, -ing), fixed expressions and idioms (by and large, jog X's memory), and abstract grammatical rules such as the passive voice (The cat was hit by a car) or the ditransitive (Mary gave Alex the ball).
[10] Construction grammar is associated with concepts from cognitive linguistics that aim to show in various ways how human rational and creative behaviour is automatic and not planned.
[11][6] Construction grammar was first developed in the 1980s by linguists such as Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay, and George Lakoff, in order to analyze idioms and fixed expressions.
One of the most distinctive features of CxG is its use of multi-word expressions and phrasal patterns as the building blocks of syntactic analysis.
Advocates of CxG argue these kinds of idiosyncratic patterns are more common than is often recognized, and that they are best understood as multi-word, partially filled constructions.
[1] Construction grammar rejects the idea that there is a sharp dichotomy between lexical items, which are arbitrary and specific, and grammatical rules, which are completely general.
Instead, CxG posits that there are linguistic patterns at every level of generality and specificity: from individual words, to partially filled constructions (e.g. drive X crazy), to fully abstract rules (e.g. subject–auxiliary inversion).
Thus a construction is treated like a sign in which all structural aspects are integrated parts and not distributed over different modules as they are in the componential model.
Consequentially, not only constructions that are lexically fixed, like many idioms, but also more abstract ones like argument structure schemata, are pairings of form and conventionalized meaning.
Four different models are proposed in relation to how information is stored in the taxonomies: Because construction grammar does not operate with surface derivations from underlying structures, it adheres to functionalist linguist Dwight Bolinger's principle of no synonymy, on which Adele Goldberg elaborates in her book.
BCG also offers a unification-based representation of 'argument structure' patterns as abstract verbal lexeme entries ('linking constructions').
In terms of form and function, this type of construction grammar puts psychological plausibility as its highest desideratum.
William A. Croft's radical construction grammar is designed for typological purposes and takes into account cross-linguistic factors.
Fluid construction grammar (FCG) was designed by Luc Steels and his collaborators for doing experiments on the origins and evolution of language.
[29][30] FCG is a fully operational and computationally implemented formalism for construction grammars and proposes a uniform mechanism for parsing and production.
[31] FCG integrates many notions from contemporary computational linguistics such as feature structures and unification-based language processing.
The research on FCG is conducted at Sony CSL Paris and the AI Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Most of the above approaches to construction grammar have not been implemented as a computational model for large scale practical usage in Natural Language Processing frameworks but interest in construction grammar has been shown by more traditional computational linguists as a contrast to the current boom in more opaque deep learning models.
[32] Approaches to integrate constructional grammar with existing Natural Language Processing frameworks include hand-built feature sets and templates and used computational models to identify their prevalence in text collections, but some suggestions for more emergent models have been proposed, e.g. in the 2023 Georgetown University Roundtable on Linguistics.
[36] At the same time, the claim made by construction grammarians, that their research represents a continuation of Saussurean linguistics, has been considered misleading.
[37] German philologist Elisabeth Leiss regards construction grammar as regress, linking it with the 19th century social darwinism of August Schleicher.
[38] There is a dispute between the advocates of construction grammar and memetics, an evolutionary approach which adheres to the Darwinian view of language and culture.
[46] As these phenomena are well-established, some linguists propose that core grammatical relations be excluded from CxG as they are not constructions, leaving the theory to be a model merely of idioms or infrequently used, minor patterns.
Adele Goldberg and her associates had previously reported similar negative results concerning the pattern of direct objects in parental speech.