Construction Grammar and Its Application To English

Construction Grammar and its Application to
English
Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language – Advanced
General Editor
Heinz Giegerich, Professor of English Linguistics, University of Edinburgh
Editorial Board
Heinz Giegerich, University of Edinburgh – General Editor
Laurie Bauer (University of Wellington)
Olga Fischer (University of Amsterdam)
Willem Hollmann (Lancaster University)
Marianne Hundt (University of Zurich)
Rochelle Lieber (University of New Hampshire)
Bettelou Los (University of Edinburgh)
Robert McColl Millar (University of Aberdeen)
Donka Minkova (UCLA)
Edgar Schneider (University of Regensburg)
Graeme Trousdale (University of Edinburgh)
Titles in the series include:
Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English, 2nd edition

Hans Lindquist and Magnus Levin
Modern Scots: An Analytical Survey
Robert McColl Millar
Contemporary Stylistics: Language, Cognition, Interpretation
Alison Gibbons and Sara Whiteley
A Critical Account of English Syntax: Grammar, Meaning, Text
Keith Brown and Jim Miller
English Historical Semantics
Christian Kay and Kathryn Allan
A Historical Syntax of English
Bettelou Los
Morphological Theory and the Morphology of English
Jan Don
Construction Grammar and its Application to English
Martin Hilpert
A Historical Phonology of English
Donka Minkova
English Historical Pragmatics
Andreas Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen
English Historical Sociolinguistics
Robert McColl Millar
Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English
Hans Lindquist
Construction Grammar and its Application to English, 2nd edition
Martin Hilpert
Pragmatics
Chris Cummins
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Construction Grammar and
its Application to English
Second edition
Martin Hilpert
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Contents
List of tables and figures x

Preface to the first edition: Why you shouldn’t pick up, let alone read,
this book xi
Preface to the second edition xiii
Acknowledgements xv
1 Introducing Construction Grammar 1

1.1 What do you know when you know a language? 1
1.1.1 Idiomatic expressions permeate ordinary
language 3
1.1.2 Idiomatic expressions are more than fixed
strings 5
1.1.3 Idiomatic expressions are productive 7
1.1.4 The growth of the appendix 7
1.2 What is a construction? 8
1.2.1 Defining constructions: a first try 9
1.2.2 Defining constructions: beyond
non-predictability 12
1.3 Identifying constructions 14
1.3.1 Does the expression deviate from canonical
patterns? 14
1.3.2 Does the expression carry non-
compositional meaning? 16
1.3.3 Does the expression have idiosyncratic
constraints? 18
1.3.4 Does the expression have collocational
preferences? 20
1.4 Summing up 22
1.5 Outline of the following chapters 23
Study questions 24
Further reading 24
v
vi contents
2 Argument structure constructions 25

2.1 Analysing ‘simple sentences’ 25
2.2 Argument structure 26
2.3 Valency-increasing constructions 31
2.3.1 The Ditransitive construction 31
2.3.2 The Caused Motion construction 35
2.3.3 The Way construction 36
2.4 Valency-decreasing constructions 39
2.4.1 The Passive 39
2.4.2 The Imperative construction 42
2.4.3 Null Instantiation 44
2.5 Relations between argument structure constructions 45
2.6 Summing up 47
Study questions 49
Further reading 49
3 Inside the construct-i-con 50

3.1 Meaningless constructions? 50
3.2 The construct-i-con: a network of interlinked
constructions 57
3.2.1 Inheritance 57
3.2.2 Kinds of inheritance links 60
3.2.3 Constructional contamination – when
subpart links influence speakers’ choices 65
3.2.4 Complete inheritance vs. redundant
representations 67
3.3 ‘Normal syntax’ in Construction Grammar 68
3.4 Summing up 72
Study questions 74
Further reading 74
4 Constructional morphology 75
4.1 More than a theory of syntax 75
4.1.1 one wug, two wugs 75
4.1.2 skypable 76
4.1.3 shpants 78
4.1.4 a what-the-heck-is-wrong-with-you look 80
4.2 Morphological constructions and their properties 81
4.2.1 Morphological productivity 82
4.2.2 Paradigmatic organisation 84
4.2.3 Non-compositional meanings 86
4.2.4 Simultaneous affixation 87
contents vii
4.3 Constructional solutions to morphological puzzles 89

4.3.1 Affix ordering 89
4.3.2 Compounding 94
4.4 Summing up 97
Study questions 100
Further reading 100
5 Information packaging constructions 102

5.1 The pragmatic side of Construction Grammar 102
5.1.1 Information packaging: the basics 105
5.1.2 Presupposition and assertion 106
5.1.3 Activation 108
5.1.4 Topic and focus 110
5.2 Information packaging and grammar 112
5.2.1 Cleft constructions 113
5.2.2 Dislocation and related constructions 118
5.3 Island constraints 123
5.4 Summing up 127
Study questions 129
Further reading 129
6 Constructions and language processing 130

6.1 The quest for behavioural evidence 130
6.2 Evidence from language comprehension 132
6.2.1 Constructions explain how hearers
understand novel denominal verbs 132
6.2.2 Constructional meanings are routinely
accessed in sentence comprehension 134
6.2.3 Constructions explain knowledge of
grammatical unacceptability 137
6.2.4 Constructions explain incidental verbatim
memory 142
6.3 Evidence from language production 144
6.3.1 Constructions explain reduction effects in
speech 144
6.3.2 Constructions explain syntactic priming,
and exceptions to syntactic priming 145
6.3.3 Constructions explain how speakers
complete sentences 148
6.4 Summing up 151
Study questions 154
Further reading 154
viii contents
7 Constructions and language acquisition 155

7.1 Construction Grammar for kids 155
7.1.1 Item-based learning 156
7.1.2 The sociocognitive foundation of language
learning 158
7.2 Evidence for the item-based nature of language
learning 163
7.3 From item-based schemas to constructions 169
7.4 The acquisition of complex sentences 172
7.5 Summing up 176
Study questions 178
Further reading 178
8 Language variation and change 179

8.1 Language myths 179
8.2 Constructional variation 181
8.2.1 There’s more than one way to do it 181
8.2.2 Variation in syntactic constructions: the
example of relative clauses 183
8.2.3 Analysing variation between
constructions 185
8.3 Constructional variation across groups of speakers 191
8.4 Constructional change: variation across time 194
8.5 Three open questions in Diachronic Construction
Grammar 199
8.5.1 What is investigated in Diachronic
Construction Grammar? 199
8.5.2 When is a new construction a new
construction? 200
8.5.3 Are there nodes in the constructional
network? 202
8.6 Summing up 204
Study questions 206
Further reading 206
9 Constructions in spoken language 208

9.1 Overcoming the written language bias 209
9.2 On-line syntax 213
9.3 Emergent constructions 218
9.4 Using constructions in spoken language 221
9.4.1 Projector constructions 221
9.4.2 Apo-koinou constructions 223
contents ix
9.4.3 The Double-Is construction 225

9.4.4 Collaborative insubordination 227
9.5 Summing up 230
Study questions 231
Further reading 232
10 Constructions across grammars 233

10.1 Diasystematic Construction Grammar 234
10.2 Do foreign language learners also have constructions? 241
10.3 Typological differences and their effects on L2
learners 243
10.4 Implications for the L2 classroom 247
10.5 Summing up 252
Study questions 253
Further reading 254
11 Concluding remarks 255
References 258
Index 275
Tables and figures
Table 2.1 Thematic roles 27

Table 4.1 Types of the Adj-en construction 83
Table 4.2 Frequencies of militarise and demilitarise 89
Table 4.3 Frequencies of government, discernment, and their bases 91
Table 4.4 Ratio of parsed types for fifteen suffixes 91
Table 6.1 Sentences used by Bencini and Goldberg (2000: 650) 137
Table 6.2 Verbs in the As-Predicative and their frequencies 150
Figure 3.1 face the music and the constructions it instantiates 58

Figure 4.1 Correlation between the ratio of parsed types and
rank in the suffix hierarchy 93
Figure 7.1 Operations required to link target utterances with
predecessor utterances 168
x
Preface to the first edition: Why
you shouldn’t pick up, let alone
read, this book
So, you have found this book, an introduction to a linguistic theory

called Construction Grammar, on a shelf in a library or bookshop, or you
are reading these lines on your computer screen. Chances are that you
somehow came across the term Construction Grammar, perhaps in con-
nection with a sentence such as John sneezed the napkin off the table, and
you were curious to find out more. Before you read any further, let me
tell you why that would be a bad idea.
Most importantly perhaps, Construction Grammar is not one of
those topics in linguistics where decades of work have produced a
solid stock of ideas that most researchers in that area can more or less
agree on. Take phonology, for instance, or sociolinguistics. Yes, there
are important differences between current approaches to these topics,
issues that give rise to fierce debates and the occasional ad-hominem
attack. However, few of those arguments concern the ideas that are laid
out in an introductory textbook. Adherents of optimality-theoretic pho-
nology and followers of exemplar theory would both expect a textbook
of their subject to introduce ideas such as the phoneme, complementary
distribution, syllable structure, assimilation, dissimilation, and the like.
They could sit down together and draw up a list of topics to represent
the common bedrock of their respective research areas. Things are a
little different when it comes to Construction Grammar. Researchers in
Construction Grammar broadly agree that their work is ‘different from
work in generative grammar’ and that ‘constructions are important’. A
necessary caveat to this statement is that Construction Grammar shares
a fair number of ideas with the generative enterprise and that the notion
of ‘constructions’ is rather hotly contested. That being the case, I have to
warn you, dear reader, that this book will present a view of Construction
Grammar that is not necessarily shared by the majority of researchers
working in this field, which is still very young, highly diverse, and
undergoing rapid development. I am writing these lines in early 2013,
and the more time elapses between now and the moment in which you
xi
xii preface to the first edition
are reading them, the more likely you are to find a view that is not only
disputed, but also hopelessly outdated.
Another point I would like to offer in order to discourage you from
any further engagement with this book is that there are excellent texts
out there that you can profitably use to get an overview of the kind of
work that is being done in Construction Grammar. Let me mention
the work of Adele E. Goldberg (1995, 2006), which has been extremely
influential, and which offers an authoritative and highly accessible
starting point for the interested novice. Also, The Oxford Handbook of
Construction Grammar has recently been published (Hoffmann and
Trousdale 2013). This hefty tome of some 650 pages, written by experts
in the respective topics, is in a much better position to do justice to the
complexities of the field than a slim introductory book such as this one.
Another resource that I would like to mention is the excellent textbook
Syntactic Theory, in which Ivan Sag, Thomas Wasow, and Emily Bender
give a detailed account of how constructions can be usefully formalised
(Sag et al. 2003). Formalisation is completely disregarded in this book,
but it is essential in many areas of research, not least in computational
linguistics. Oh, one more thing. If you are passing through Northern
California in the not-too-distant future, you could stop by at Copy
Central, 2560 Bancroft Way, in Berkeley, and ask for a copy of the text-
book manuscript written by Charles J. Fillmore and Paul Kay, who are
the main architects of Construction Grammar and whose ideas literally
inform every page of this book.
Lastly, you will note that the title of this book is Construction Grammar
and its Application to English. What this book aims to do is to lay out an
inventory of English constructions and to explain how these can be
analysed, using the framework of Construction Grammar. The focus
on English constructions comes at the price of neglecting all other lan-
guages that are currently the subject of constructional research and,
importantly, comparisons between them. Construction Grammar has
been devised as a framework for the analysis of the general human
capacity for language. It is a basic assumption that knowledge of lan-
guage will be organised according to the same principles across differ-
ent languages, but to what extent this assumption is correct is still very
much a matter of investigation. This book will completely ignore this
interesting issue, focusing instead on English constructions, many of
which are actually quite well described in existing treatments of English
grammar, idioms, and vocabulary.
You’re still reading? Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Preface to the second edition
Since the first edition of this book came out in 2014, it has been a busy
time for Construction Grammar, which has been growing as a field
and as a community of researchers. The second edition, which you
are holding right now, aims to reflect these new developments and
offers an updated and expanded version of the original text. Aside from
additions that have been made throughout the book, two new chapters
address topics that, in retrospect, really should have been part of the
first edition. Chapter 9 focuses on constructions in spoken language.
Many areas of linguistics have a history of neglecting spoken data and
mischaracterising its features as mere performance errors. For the long-
est time, Construction Grammar has not been an exception to this, but
there is now a growing body of work that seriously engages with spoken
language and its implications for a constructional view of linguistic
knowledge. Chapter 10, which is entitled ‘Constructions across gram-
mars’, turns to the issues of bilingualism, language contact, and second
language acquisition. These phenomena also have been treated as side
issues in linguistics for far too long. What they have in common is that
they reflect scenarios in which speakers’ knowledge of language con-
tains more than a network of constructions from a single language. The
chapter explores how Construction Grammar can be used for analyses
of situations in which several languages are at play.
Do these two chapters remedy the shortcomings of the book that I
pointed out in the preface to the first edition? Hardly. If anything, the
new chapters are even less representative of a general consensus than
the old chapters were. I thus stand by the assessment that I made in the
heading of the first preface, and I encourage readers to engage directly
with the exciting constructional research that has been coming out over
the past years, in journals such as Constructions and Frames, Cognitive
Linguistics, or Language and Cognition, amongst several others. An even
better way to get in touch with current research might be to attend
the International Conference on Construction Grammar, which takes
xiii
xiv preface to the second edition
place every two years. Not only will you hear interesting new ideas
straight from the horse’s mouth, but you’ll also get to observe how other
researchers in the field react and what questions they ask. Interactions
of this kind will reflect the current state of the field far more accurately
than the discussion in this book.
Wait, you’re still reading? Well, in that case you are one of the read-
ers to whom this second edition is dedicated. It is meant for the next
generation of young Construction Grammarians, who are stubborn
enough to ignore bad advice, and who will take the enterprise forward,
following their own ideas. I wish you good luck, and I look forward to
learning from you.
Acknowledgements
I would like to write a few words of thanks to my colleagues, friends,

and students who have been involved in the project of writing this
book. First of all, I need to thank Heinz Giegerich, general editor of
the ETOTEL series, for giving me the opportunity to write a textbook
on Construction Grammar. Through the writing process, I discovered
that I only half-knew a couple of things that I thought I did know, so
at least one reader of this book has learned something from it. I also
want to thank Graeme Trousdale, who read the entire manuscript and
provided critical comments, and two not-so-anonymous referees, who
commented on the book proposal. A big round of thanks goes to Florian
Dolberg and his students at the University of Mainz for testing out the
manuscript and pointing me towards issues that needed clarification.
By the same token, my own students at the universities of Freiburg,
Zurich, and Neuchâtel have offered their critical feedback. Thank
you all! Finally, I would also like to express my gratitude towards the
researchers whose ideas form the backbone of this book.
xv
1 Introducing Construction
Grammar
1.1 What do you know when you know a language?

What do speakers of English have to know in order to produce utter-
ances that other speakers will understand? For many linguists, across
different theoretical persuasions, working out what speakers know
when they know a language is the most important task in their field
of study. So, what do speakers know? If you had to come up with a
number of bullet points with the most important aspects of linguistic
knowledge, your list would be likely to show some overlap with the
following ones.
(1) What speakers have to know:
• must know words
• must know how to combine words into phrases and sentences
• must know how to put the right endings on words
• must be able to understand newly coined words
• must know that sometimes what is meant is different from what
is said
• must know that language varies across different contexts
• must know idiomatic expressions.
Clearly, more items could be added to this list. In order to get a work-
ing model of linguistic knowledge, it would further be necessary to
work out how each item on the list interacts with all the other ones.
For instance, how does knowledge of idioms relate to knowledge of the
words that occur in them? How does knowledge of syntactic patterns
relate to knowledge of morphological inflections of the words in a
sentence? Given that modelling speakers’ knowledge of language is a
highly complicated task, it will be likely to come to you as a surprise
that linguistic knowledge, according to Construction Grammar, can
be captured by a list that is considerably shorter than the one shown
above.
1
2 construction gr ammar and its application to english
(2) What speakers have to know, according to Construction

Grammar:
• must know constructions.
Yes, you have read correctly. All that speakers need to have, according
to the constructional view, is knowledge of constructions. This claim
is expressed by Adele E. Goldberg, one of the central developers of
Construction Grammar as a theory of linguistic knowledge, in the fol-
lowing way (2003: 219):
The totality of our knowledge of language is captured by a network of
constructions: a ‘construct-i-con’.
At this point you will probably wonder what a construction is. This
chapter will offer a comprehensive definition, but as a first approxima-
tion, Goldberg and other researchers in Construction Grammar view
constructions as units of linguistic knowledge that pair a linguistic form
with a meaning. This means that you are in fact familiar with a very
common kind of construction, namely words. Words, by virtue of being
symbolic form–meaning pairings, are constructions. The construct-i-
con, as the name suggests, thus contains everything that would be con-
tained in a lexicon, but in addition to that a large number of symbolic
units that are larger in size than single words. The remaining parts of
this chapter will characterise these units in some more detail, but let
us for the moment return to the fundamental claim of Construction
Grammar, namely that knowledge of language consists of a large
network of constructions, and nothing else in addition. Everything that
speakers know about words, about syntactic patterns, about prefixes and
suffixes, about idioms, and about the intricacies of what is said and what
is meant, everything of this is to be recast as knowledge of constructions.
At first, this may seem an outrageous proposition. What motivates a
claim that departs so drastically from the seemingly obvious conclusion
that speakers need many different kinds of linguistic knowledge? The
short answer is that all of that knowledge is thought to be represented
directly at the level of constructions. The constructions that speakers
know are directly associated with phonological, morphological, and
syntactic properties, along with conventionalised meanings, possible
variants, and the social contexts in which you are likely to use and hear
them. In the simplest of terms, your knowledge of a construction is the
sum total of your experience with that construction.
This view of linguistic knowledge may be hard to stomach at first,
because it militates against an idea that is widely shared, both among
laypeople and among professional linguists. That idea goes by the name
introducing construction gr ammar 3
of the dictionary-and-grammar model (Taylor 2012: 8), which is

a model of linguistic knowledge in which knowledge of vocabulary
is neatly separated from knowledge of grammatical rules. (You will
recognise the first two bullet points from our laundry list of linguistic
knowledge.) And indeed, you might say, is it not obvious that children
learn words and, in a second step, rules to combine those words into
phrases and sentences? The central challenge for the dictionary-and-
grammar view of linguistic knowledge is one that has plagued genera-
tions of second language learners, namely idiomatic expressions. (You
recognise the last, seemingly less important bullet point from the list.) In
the dictionary-and-grammar model, idioms form a kind of ‘appendix’ to
the dictionary, a list that contains expressions such as beat it, hit the road,
or make like a banana and split. These expressions need separate entries
in the mental lexicon because speakers have to learn that each of the
three means ‘to leave’, and that each of them is appropriate for slightly
different contexts of use. Knowledge of the individual words and their
meanings will not lead a speaker to that particular conclusion. The con-
structional view of linguistic knowledge originates with the observation
that relegating idioms to an appendix is not satisfactory. The following
sections outline why this is the case.
1.1.1 Idiomatic expressions permeate ordinary language

Contrary to what you might think, idiomatic expressions are no particu-
larly peripheral phenomenon in naturally occurring data. Consider the
following snippet from the British National Corpus (BNC), which is a
large text collection that documents the usage of British English in the
second half of the twentieth century.
(3) In winter you can look out of the window and tell it’s 2°C outside.
How? Because the crocuses are coming into bloom. Crocuses are
plants that nature has provided with a biological thermometer. It’s
very accurate, reacting to temperature differences of as little as
0.5°C. As the weather gets warmer the flowers open. But when the
temperature drops, they close again.
On the face of it, the text excerpt seems to be entirely unremarkable.
You would be hard pressed even to find an expression in the text that
would qualify as an idiom. However, a closer look reveals a number of
expressions that would be difficult to explain with a dictionary-and-
grammar model of linguistic knowledge. Take the very first words,
In winter. This is a conventional way of saying during the time of winter,
in general, as opposed to in the winter of 2012. Knowing this is part of
your linguistic knowledge, and a second language learner of English

might not necessarily know it, opting for in the winter instead. Moving
on, the sentence you can look out of the window and tell it’s 2°C outside is
not as straightforward as you might initially think. Note that the verb
tell in this sentence does not have its usual meaning of ‘narrate’, as in
tell a story, but rather, the sentence conveys that the listener can infer
that the temperature is 2°C. Again, you understood that without any
problems, but how so? The answer is that you know an idiomatic usage
pattern with tell, which is important enough to receive its own entry in
the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘preceded by can: To be able to state; to know;
to discern, perceive, make out, understand’ (OED: tell, v.). An example that
would almost count as a real idiom is the expression coming into bloom,
said of the crocuses. Plants in general can be coming into leaf, coming into
flower, or coming into fruit, but crucially not into leaves, flowers, or fruits,
even though that might be a more accurate description of what happens.
Proficient speakers of English are aware that the singular is required;
learners have to work that out, but cannot bank on the help of a diction-
ary or grammar book in that endeavour. Two sentences later, the text
mentions temperature differences of as little as 0.5°C. Here, we have an
expression that many second language learners of English are actually
taught, namely the use of as . . . as with an intervening adjective. This
expression typically serves to make a comparison, as in John is as tall as
Bob, but note that here, the expression connects a scale with a value on
that scale, so that the phrase differences of as little as 0.5°C is an example
of a schema that is also at work in interest rates of as high as 100 per cent, or
microcredit loans of as small as £40. What is conveyed by these examples
is that some measure is comparatively high, or comparatively low, but
the standard against which the respective measurements are compared
remains implicit, to be understood by the reader. You know that, but
neither because you know what the individual words mean, nor because
you know how to combine words into phrases. Again, the dictionary-
and-grammar model is at a loss.
What emerges from the discussion of the short text excerpt is that
ordinary language is fully permeated by a large number of idiomatic
expressions whose forms and meanings are not entirely predictable on
the basis of either the word meanings recorded in a dictionary or the
rules of syntax provided by a grammar. The appendix to the dictionary,
listing expressions such as in winter, coming into bloom, or differences of as
little as 0.5°C, would have to be of a substantial size in order to reflect
speakers’ knowledge of language fully.
1.1.2 Idiomatic expressions are more than fixed strings

Besides the sheer size of the appendix that would have to be added to
the lexicon, the dictionary-and-grammar model faces difficulties that
are less easily resolved. Representing speakers’ knowledge of idiomatic
expressions would be a relatively straightforward task if those idioms
were just fixed strings of words such as bite the dust, let off steam, or jump
the gun. However, many idiomatic expressions cannot be analysed as
memorised strings, as two examples from the following BNC excerpt
illustrate.
(4) ‘Clients tell me that they are not worried about their property
as long as their pets are all right,’ says William Lewis, managing
director of Home & Pet Care. ‘We often get asked to look after
elderly pets whose owners are worried that going into kennels
may be too big a shock.’ Most sitters are over 60, sensible and
probably have pets of their own.
Sentences such as going into kennels may be too big a shock have been dis-
cussed under the heading of the Big Mess construction (Van Eynde
2007).1 Clearly, understanding a phrase such as too big a shock does not
come about because speakers have memorised that very phrase. Rather,
what speakers know is a more abstract pattern that also allows them to
identify sentences such as That’s quite useful a lesson or How big an area
are we talking about? as conventional expressions. You can think of this
abstract pattern as a cognitive schema, that is, a mental representation
that captures the construction’s general traits. In the case of the Big
Mess construction, this schema deviates in some ways from general
syntactic patterns of English. For instance, in an ordinary English noun
phrase, an attributive adjective follows the determiner and precedes the
head noun, as in a big shock, rather than big a shock. Importantly, the Big
Mess construction has a certain grammatical systematicity, which is to
say that it is sensitive to distinctions that, under the dictionary-and-
grammar model, would be handled by the grammar, rather than by the
dictionary. To illustrate, the nominal in the Big Mess construction must
be indefinite. Replacing the indefinite article in too big a shock or quite
useful a lesson with the definite determiner the or a demonstrative such as
this renders the examples highly unconventional. Likewise, the nominal
must be in the singular, so that it is not possible to replace a shock with
1
Throughout this book, you will find the names of constructions printed in Small
Capitals, as in the Ditransitive construction, the Be Going To construction, or
the S-Genitive construction.
two shocks, some shocks, or a few shocks. Lastly, the schema that represents
speakers’ knowledge of the Big Mess construction must include some
information on the pre-adjectival modifiers that are acceptable in the
construction. It is easy to find authentic examples with the degree modi-
fiers quite, rather, too, somewhat, and pretty; examples with interrogative
how are quite common; but examples with very are surprisingly rare,
and even unacceptable to some speakers (Van Eynde 2007). Speakers’
knowledge of the Big Mess construction is thus more than a fixed string
of words, or perhaps a list of fixed strings, but rather a generalisation
over such strings that specifies what works and what does not.
The second example from the excerpt that is worth some considera-
tion is the sentence Most sitters are over 60, sensible and probably have pets of
their own. The crucial phrase here is have pets of their own, which illustrates
another idiomatic expression with internal grammatical systematicity.
The elements of and own are invariant, but between the two, any pos-
sessive determiner (my, your, his, her, etc.) may enter the expression. The
construction, which we may call the N of One’s Own construction,
includes a nominal that must be indefinite. The sentence John now has
a car of his own is a conventional expression, but replacing the indefinite
determiner with the definite determiner the leads to an ungrammatical,
perhaps even uninterpretable result. By contrast, a constraint on the
number of the nominal, as observed in the Big Mess construction above,
does not apply. John now has three cars of his own is just as good an example
as the one in which he owns only one car.
Summing up this particular argument, there is evidence to suggest
that many idioms cannot be stored as fixed strings, which makes it
necessary to think of idiomatic expressions as schemas with slots that
can be filled with certain elements but not others. The slots of some
idioms are sensitive to grammatical distinctions, such as the distinction
between singular and plural, or the distinction between definite and
indefinite. These observations put the dictionary-and-grammar model
of linguistic knowledge in a rather awkward position: should the appen-
dix to the dictionary perhaps include a bit of grammatical information,
so that these expressions could be accounted for? Doing this is possible,
but you see how that decision would start blurring the line between
dictionary and grammar. If grammar enters the appendix, a large grey
area emerges between dictionary and grammar in which the patterns
that are memorised show characteristics of lexical entries, but also of
grammatical rules. It is this grey area that researchers in Construction
Grammar call the construct-i-con.
1.1.3 Idiomatic expressions are productive

A good reason for keeping vocabulary and grammar apart as separate
forms of linguistic knowledge is that words can be thought of as ‘build-
ing blocks’ that are highly numerous, but essentially fixed and atomic,
whereas syntactic rules and morphological word formation processes
are productive, that is, they allow speakers to create structures that are
new and original. Vocabulary is thus just a finite collection of building
material; grammar is what gives language the power to produce an
infinite variety of new utterances.
The dictionary-and-grammar model of linguistic knowledge would
be much more convincing if the idioms of a language were essentially
like words: fixed and learnable as strings. The previous section has
argued that this is an impoverished view. Many idiomatic expressions
do not fully specify the lexical elements that can occur in them, and a
good number of them even allow different grammatical elements into
the variable slots that can be filled. For example, the phrase the more, the
merrier instantiates a schema that has given rise to many expressions
that are structurally identical but contain other adjectives in the com-
parative, such as the bigger, the better or the redder, the deadlier. It appears
that the more, the merrier, also known as the Comparative Correlative
construction (Culicover and Jackendoff 1999) or The X-er the Y-er
(Fillmore et al. 1988), is productive, allowing speakers to produce crea-
tive utterances. The productivity, however, does not stop with different
types of adjective that are inserted into that construction, but it extends
to variation of grammatical forms. In an example such as The darker the
roast, the stronger the taste, each adjective is followed by a nominal. In The
stronger a voice we have, the more effective we are, each adjective forms part
of a clausal structure. In The more carefully you do your work, the easier it
will get, the first part is in fact adverbial, rather than adjectival. Hence,
speakers’ knowledge of this construction is not limited to the fact that
there are open slots for different kinds of adjective, but rather, speak-
ers have an active command of the kinds of grammatical unit that are
acceptable in the construction. The fact that speakers know how to use
idiomatic expressions productively makes it necessary to abandon the
strict separation of lexical and grammatical knowledge.
1.1.4 The growth of the appendix

The considerations that were presented in the previous sections make
one thing very clear. The commonsensical view of linguistic knowledge
as divisible into knowledge of vocabulary and knowledge of grammar
suffers from a painful growth of the appendix, requiring an emergency

procedure. Should the appendix perhaps be surgically removed, so that
the patient can recover? In a paper that has since become one of the
central references of the Construction Grammar literature, Charles J.
Fillmore and colleagues suggest a solution that takes a surprisingly
different route. In the conclusion to their study of the Let Alone con-
struction (I don’t eat fish, let alone raw oysters), they propose the following
(1988: 534):
It appears to us that the machinery needed for describing the so-called
minor or peripheral constructions of the sort which has occupied us here
will have to be powerful enough to be generalized to more familiar struc-
tures, in particular those represented by individual phrase structure rules.
In other words, if it is the case that idiomatic expressions are abun-
dant in language, if they cannot be characterised as fixed strings, and if
speakers can be observed to use them productively, then these expres-
sions deserve to be given a proper analysis. Since idiomatic expressions
accommodate different words and show structural variation, the tools
for such an analysis will have to be sensitive to both lexical and gram-
matical distinctions. Hence, and this is the punchline of Fillmore et
al.’s argument, these tools can just as well be used for the ‘more familiar
structures’, that is, everything that used to be part of the grammar com-
ponent of the dictionary-and-grammar model. Instead of dictionary and
grammar, all that is needed for the description of linguistic knowledge is
the ‘construct-i-con’. Essentially, this means that after the operation, the
surgeons watch in astonishment as the severed appendix gets up, thanks
everybody in the room, and walks out of the hospital, all on its own.
Up to now, the discussion in this chapter has dealt with linguistic
knowledge in fairly general terms. What is still missing from the picture
is a more detailed account of what constructions actually are. The fol-
lowing sections will focus on precisely that topic.
1.2 What is a construction?

The term construction is used not only in Construction Grammar, but
in almost any area of research that is concerned with language. Hence,
you will probably already have an idea of what a construction is, but
your idea might not fully correspond to the way in which the term will
be used in this book. In pedagogical language textbooks, a construc-
tion is typically a complex linguistic form that serves a grammatical
function. Examples would be the Passive construction (The village was
destroyed), the Imperative construction (Go to your room and stay there!),
or the Past Perfect construction (I had already heard the news). The
examples of idiomatic expressions that were discussed in the sections
above would seem to suggest that the term means something similar in
Construction Grammar. Perhaps, you might reason, the term is used a
little more broadly, including not only grammatical constructions such
as the past perfect, but also idioms and words. That is a good enough
guess, but one important issue is missing from this view of constructions.
Recall that Construction Grammar is a theory of linguistic knowledge.
Hence, constructions are first and foremost something cognitive, that
is, a piece of speakers’ linguistic knowledge. More specifically, we can
say that a construction is a generalisation that speakers make across a
number of encounters with linguistic forms. Let’s take another look at a
few examples of the Comparative Correlative construction.
(5) the more, the merrier
the bigger, the better
the redder, the deadlier
the younger, the messier
The darker the roast, the stronger the taste.
The larger the company, the worse is the service.
The stronger a voice we have, the more effective we are.
The more that Mrs Bell reflected upon the subject, the more at a
loss she was.
The less he knows, the better.
The more carefully you do your work, the easier it will get.
As was pointed out in the discussion above, the construction displays
substantial variation in the lexical items that can appear, but also in the
grammatical units that instantiate it. Nonetheless, you will probably
agree that all of the examples above are ‘the same’ in that they belong to
a common constructional pattern. If you do agree, that is evidence that
your experience with language led you to abstract away from individual
differences between sentences like these ones and to form a generalisa-
tion. It is this generalisation that Construction Grammarians talk about
when they discuss the Comparative Correlative construction.
1.2.1 Defining constructions: a first try

The preceding discussion has mentioned several characteristics of con-
structions, but it has not yet presented a satisfying definition of the term
that would allow us to identify a construction as such when we look
at linguistic data. A widely cited definition of constructions has been
offered by Adele E. Goldberg (1995: 4):
C is a CONSTRUCTION iffdef C is a form–meaning pair <Fi, Si> such

that some aspect of Fi or some aspect of Si is not strictly predictable from
C’s component parts or from other previously established constructions.
This definition captures three important notions. First, a construction

pairs a linguistic form with a meaning. (In the definition, F stands for
Form, S is for Semantics). Second, by virtue of being a form–meaning
pair, a construction is a unit of knowledge, rather than a form that could
be described without reference to speakers’ knowledge of language.
Third, the definition introduces a criterion that we have not explicitly
mentioned up to now, namely the criterion of non-predictability. A
construction is defined as a form–meaning pair in which either an aspect
of form or an aspect of meaning is non-predictable. What does that
mean? With regard to meaning, this criterion captures the common
characteristic of idioms that the interpretation of the whole idiom is
more than just a combination of the meanings of its component words.
Consider the following idioms that carry non-compositional and hence
non-predictable meanings.
(6) We’re back to square one.
Will and Jenny finally tied the knot.
His theory is totally off the mark.
Let’s call it a day.
Non-compositional meaning is perhaps the most widely used diag-
nostic to identify constructions, but note that the definition does not
only talk about non-predictable meanings. Constructions can also be
identified on the basis of non-predictable aspects of their form. A form
of a construction is non-predictable if it is not an instance of a more
general formal pattern, say, a particular sentence type or a morphologi-
cal schema. The following examples illustrate the idea of constructions
with non-predictable forms.
(7) all of a sudden
by and large
the more, the merrier
Try as I might, I just couldn’t grasp the principle.
How big an area are we talking about?
I have waited many a day for this to happen.
These examples defy typical phrase structure rules that would model
the structure of phrases such as the large sandwich with egg salad. In fact,
for several of the examples it is not even possible to determine the parts
of speech for every component word. Into what word class would we
categorise sudden in all of a sudden? Is the by in by and large a preposition,

and if so, why is it not followed by a nominal (by the lake), or at least
coordinated with another preposition (made by and for dog-owners)? In
some of the examples, the component parts are clearly identifiable,
but their order seems to revolt against ordinary syntactic patterns. For
instance, there is no general phrase structure rule that would allow
speakers to conclude that many a day is a conventional expression of
English. Usually, many occurs with plural nouns, or as a pronominal
form by itself. In those contexts, many can be replaced by few, but this
does not work in many a day. Fillmore et al. (1988: 506–10) describe these
kinds of examples when they speak of ‘familiar pieces, unfamiliarly
arranged’, and ‘unfamiliar pieces, unfamiliarly arranged’. In pedagogical
works on idioms, these two categories are often relegated to the relative
background, with the focus being on expressions such as set the record
straight, tie up loose ends, or show someone the ropes. These idioms, as you will
notice, have non-compositional meanings, but are formally ‘familiar
pieces, familiarly arranged’, that is, there is nothing idiomatic about
their form, only about their meaning.
With all of these observations in place, we are in a position to look at
linguistic data and to decide whether or not a given expression qualifies
to be called a construction. Since formal or semantic non-predictability
is a required criterion in the definition proposed by Goldberg (1995),
this gives us a reason to exclude all kinds of expressions that are both
semantically compositional and formed according to general phrase
structure rules or word formation processes, as illustrated in the follow-
ing examples.
(8) John enjoys playing the piano.
Strawberries are more expensive than apples.
I wonder why he keeps wearing that hat.
Harvey’s taunting of the bear was merciless.
Saying that these are not constructions does of course raise the ques-
tion of what else they might be. And, you might add, was Construction
Grammar not founded on the premise that knowledge of language was
knowledge of constructions, and nothing else in addition? How can this
claim be reconciled with the assessment that a certain linguistic expres-
sion is no construction? So, when we say that John enjoys playing the piano
is not a construction, what is meant is that this particular example is not
a construction in its own right, because first, the meaning of the whole
is fully derivable from the meaning of the parts, and second, the struc-
ture of the whole is fully explicable from constructions that are known
to exist in English. The sentence thus instantiates several more general
constructions. At the most general level, this concerns the Subject–

Predicate construction, which is instantiated by all sentences that com-
bine a subject noun phrase with a predicate verb phrase. Somewhat more
specifically, the sentence exemplifies the Transitive construction, which
pairs a verb such as enjoy with a structure that serves as a direct object. In
John enjoys playing the piano that object is not a noun, but rather a participial
clause, which means that the sentence also instantiates the Participial
-ing Clause construction. Within that participial clause, we find another
instance of the Transitive construction, as the piano is the direct object
of playing. Finally, the phrase the piano instantiates the Definite Noun
Phrase construction. In summary, saying that a particular sentence is no
construction boils down to the statement that every part of that sentence
can be analysed in terms of a more general construction. There is even
a term for expressions that are not in themselves constructions: phrases
and sentences that instantiate more general constructions are called
constructs. Dwelling on this term for a minute, you will notice that by
and large is a construction because it does not instantiate any pattern that
would be more general than itself. The same holds for all of a sudden.
However, the phrase many a day in the sentence I have waited many a day for
this to happen is a construct: it instantiates a more general pattern, namely
the Many a Noun construction, which also gives rise to the expressions
many a time or many an Englishman. The distinction between construc-
tions and constructs is thus one between generalisations and concrete
instances, between abstract types and the tokens that instantiate them.
You could memorise the rule of thumb that constructions are relatively
more abstract, whereas constructs are relatively more concrete, which
will serve you well as a general principle. However, note that patterns
such as by and large or all of a sudden are constructions that are not any more
abstract than their instantiations. For these patterns, the constructs, that
is, the actual tokens that appear in language use, have the exact same form
as the constructions on which they are based.
1.2.2 Defining constructions: beyond non-predictability

The criterion of non-predictability in meaning or form is a very power-
ful diagnostic. If the meaning of an expression cannot be inferred from
the meanings of its parts, then there is simply no alternative to the
conclusion that speakers must have learned this expression as a form–
meaning pair in its own right, that is, as a construction. Nonetheless,
researchers in Construction Grammar these days have largely aban-
doned the idea that non-predictability should be a necessary criterion
for some expression to qualify as a construction. The reason for this
assessment is that there are many expressions that are semantically

and structurally transparent, but which nonetheless seem to qualify as
constructions. Consider the following set of expressions.
(9) I love you.
I don’t know.
Take a seat!
Can I ask you something?
How has your day been?
As you will agree, all of these expressions would have to be viewed as
constructs because they instantiate highly general syntactic patterns.
The sentence I love you illustrates the most basic form of the Transitive
construction, I don’t know is an instance of the Negation with Do
construction, and so on and so forth. Still, despite the fact that these
examples are structurally transparent, and despite the fact that their
meanings can be compositionally derived, there is a reason for viewing
these expressions as constructions. That reason is the fact that all of
these expressions are highly frequent, highly conventionalised ways
of saying things. The question How has your day been? literally asks for
the information how someone’s day turned out, but note that it is very
different from Of what quality has your day been?, which would seem to be a
rough paraphrase, but which is inadequate for opening a conversation of
small talk. Some expressions may thus superficially look like constructs,
but through repeated use, they have become the default option for a
specific communicative situation. Taylor (2012: 100) offers the conspic-
uous example of How old are you?, which simply cannot be replaced with
How long ago were you born? to ask for the interlocutor’s age. As a proficient
speaker of English, you know this, and hence this kind of information
needs to be represented in the construct-i-con. Knowledge of language
does not only include the ability to understand everything that is said,
but it crucially also involves the ability to speak idiomatically. In order
to accommodate this important aspect of linguistic knowledge, Adele
E. Goldberg has proposed a modified version of her earlier definition of
constructions (2006: 5):
Any linguistic pattern is recognized as a construction as long as some
aspect of its form or function is not strictly predictable from its compo-
nent parts or from other constructions recognized to exist. In addition,
patterns are stored as constructions even if they are fully predictable as
long as they occur with sufficient frequency.
You recognise the prior definition in the first sentence: non-predictable
constructions are still recognised as such. However, the second sentence
opens up the definition to cover forms that are frequent enough to be

remembered as such. These include sentence-level expressions such
as How old are you? and I don’t know, but crucially also many inflected
word forms such as cats, walked, or easier. In the dictionary-and-grammar
model of linguistic knowledge, these forms would not be stored as
such, and also under Goldberg’s earlier definition, these would have
been viewed as constructs of the Plural construction, the Past Tense
construction, and the Morphological Comparative construction. In
short, if you know the word cat, and if you know how the plural is
formed, there is technically no need for you to remember the form cats.
However, the view that regular, but sufficiently frequent expressions
are stored in the construct-i-con is not only theoretically viable, but also
receives empirical support from psycholinguistic studies (Stemberger
and MacWhinney 1988; Arnon and Snider 2010). We will come back
to psycholinguistic evidence for Construction Grammar later in this
book.
1.3 Identifying constructions

Armed with our definition of what a construction is, we are now in a
position to analyse linguistic data in the pursuit of finding and identify-
ing constructions. Think of it what you like – many researchers in
Construction Grammar are genuine language lovers who enjoy noth-
ing more than finding a construction with peculiar non-predictable
characteristics, preferably one that no one has investigated before.
Occasionally, Construction Grammarians even acknowledge their
love of ‘butterfly collecting’ (Hilferty 2003: 49), though usually they
hasten to add that finding generalisations is the ultimate purpose of
their endeavours. Finding constructions is an activity that requires
some practice, although there are people who seem to have a natural
talent for sniffing out grammatical oddities. This section discusses a
number of strategies that are useful for the detection and identification
of constructions.
1.3.1 Does the expression deviate from canonical patterns?

A first strategy relates to Goldberg’s criterion of non-predictability,
especially the formal side of that criterion. If a linguistic expression
exhibits formal characteristics that deviate from more canonical gram-
matical patterns, then you have an argument for calling that expression
a construction. Formal deviation from canonical patterns can be identi-
fied in different ways. Take for instance the expression by and large. A
first observation would be that a phrase consisting of a preposition, a

conjunction, and an adjective, in that order, is unique in the grammar of
English. You do find sequences of those parts of speech in phrases such
as acquainted with and supportive of the school aims, but note that with and
supportive does not form a constituent in that expression. A second piece
of evidence would be that by and large becomes completely unintel-
ligible if the adjective large is replaced with the synonymous adjective
big. Taken together, these pieces of evidence lead to the conclusion that
there is no broader generalisation that would allow speakers to produce
or comprehend the expression by and large. See for yourself if you can
apply the same logic to the examples that are offered in (10).
(10) There was cat all over the road.
The tractor was driven by a 16-year-old boy.
John is best friends with Eddie Murphy.
The first example, which describes the unfortunate result of a car acci-
dent involving a feline, is probably the easiest to analyse. The lexical
item cat is, in most contexts of use, a count noun. In the example above,
it behaves structurally as a mass noun. Constructions in which count
nouns are used as mass nouns are aptly called Grinding constructions
(Fillmore et al. 2012). Two structural characteristics of the example are
worth some consideration. First, cat occurs here without a determiner.
Second, when used as a mass noun, cat disallows pluralisation. The
sentence There were cats all over the road would enforce a count noun
interpretation and thus refer to numerous intact felines occupying the
road. Turning to the second example, the final noun phrase a 16-year-old
boy instantiates what could be called the Measurement as Modifier
construction. The idiosyncrasy that can be observed here is that the
noun year is in the singular, despite the fact that years might be expected,
given that the boy is 16 years old. This peculiarity is systematic, as is
evidenced by expressions such as a twelve-inch-thick wall or a six-foot-tall
athlete. The third example expresses a reciprocal relation between John
and Eddie Murphy: the two are best friends. What is remarkable about
the structure of the example is that we have a singular subject, John, but
a plural subject complement, best friends. In canonical predicative con-
structions, subject and subject complement have to agree in number, as
in John is a doctor or They might be giants. Note also that the Reciprocal
Predicative construction, unlike canonical predicative constructions,
requires a prepositional phrase such as with Eddie Murphy. Summing
up, even though formal non-predictability is not a required criterion
for constructions, finding formal idiosyncrasies is an excellent source of
evidence for calling something a construction.
1.3.2 Does the expression carry non-compositional meaning?

The second strategy that will help you to find and identify constructions
relates to Goldberg’s criterion of non-predictable meaning. Can hearers
work out the meaning of an expression by combining the meanings of
its individual parts, or does the whole expression signify something in
addition that cannot be worked out? If the meaning of an expression is
‘more than the sum of its parts’, there is evidence to speak of a construc-
tion. Non-compositional meanings are self-evident in idioms such as get
your act together, make waves, or call the shots. A second language learner of
English would be likely to know all component words of these idioms,
but this would not allow her to work out their overall meanings. In the
preceding sections, we have discussed expressions that may be less sali-
ent than these figures of speech, but which nonetheless convey non-com-
positional meanings. Recall that in winter conveys the idea of ‘in winter,
generally’, or that How has your day been? is used as a conventional way to
strike up a conversation. A second language learner would have little
trouble understanding these expressions, but she would have no way of
knowing beforehand that these are typical, idiomatic ways of express-
ing the respective meanings. Identifying non-compositional meanings
essentially requires you to ‘play dumb’, pretending not to understand
anything that cannot be worked out on the basis of the component parts
of an expression. Use the following examples to get some practice.
(11) During the game John broke a finger.
The result was not much of a surprise.
The Royal Shakespeare Company is a tough act to follow.
The first example conveys that John had an accident that left him with
one of his fingers broken. Crucially, he did not break someone else’s
finger, even though there is nothing in the words of the example that
would preclude that interpretation. In the second example, the phrase
not much of a surprise does not refer to ‘a small part of a surprise’, whatever
that might be, but rather, it is to be understood as ‘no surprise at all’.
Taylor (2012: 60) calls this the (Not) Much of a Noun construc-
tion and points out some of its structural and semantic characteristics.
The last example may be a little trickier than the two previous ones.
What we are dealing with here is a special case of what has been called
the Tough-Raising construction (Langacker 1995). Adjectives such as
tough, difficult, or hard occur in sentences such as Proust is tough to read,
which ascribes toughness to ‘reading Proust’, rather than to ‘Proust’
himself. In the example above, the Royal Shakespeare Company is not
‘a tough act’, as a second language learner might conclude. Rather,
following an act such as the Royal Shakespeare Company is considered

a tough challenge.
At this point, we need to introduce a concept that is of central impor-
tance for the idea of non-compositional meaning in constructions. This
concept is called coercion, and it describes the phenomenon that the
meaning of a lexical item may vary systematically with the construc-
tional contexts in which it is found. Laura Michaelis has formulated a
principle of coercion that captures this phenomenon (2004: 25):
If a lexical item is semantically incompatible with its morphosyntactic
context, the meaning of the lexical item conforms to the meaning of the
structure in which it is embedded.
What this means is that constructions may override word meanings,
creating non-compositional constructional meanings in the process.
The ‘morphosyntactic context’, that is, the construction in which a
lexical item is found, thus has the power to change or suppress certain
semantic characteristics of that lexical item. When word meanings can
be observed to change within a constructional context, we speak of
coercion effects. The principle of coercion can be seen at work in the
examples below.
(12) Three beers please!
John sauced the pizza.
Frank played the piano to pieces.
The first example illustrates the converse of expressions such as There
was cat all over the road. The noun beer is usually a mass noun, and hence
semantically incompatible with the plural inflection and the numeral
three. The morphosyntactic context thus imposes an interpretation that
differs from the default meaning of beer: instead of a mass, the example
refers to three units of beer, as served in a bottle or a glass. Constructions
that convert mass nouns to count nouns will be discussed in this book as
Individuation constructions. In the second example we find the noun
sauce used as a verb. The entire expression conveys the meaning that
John applied sauce to the pizza. This meaning cannot be derived from
the individual words, and a second language learner might arrive at
different interpretations, assuming for instance that John dipped a piece
of pizza into sauce, or that John, using a heavy-duty blender, turned a
pizza into a thick, unappetising sauce. Meanwhile, proficient speakers
of English arrive at the intended interpretation because their linguistic
knowledge includes a subpattern of the Transitive construction with
denominal verbs that shows itself in expressions such as pepper the steak,
butter the toast, or egg and breadcrumb the fish. The construction coerces the
lexical meanings of pepper, butter, egg, and breadcrumb into the meaning
‘apply to a surface’, which is a substantial semantic enrichment. Finally,
the third example illustrates the English Resultative construction.
What is conveyed by the example is that Frank played the piano in such
a violent manner that it ultimately fell to pieces. The lexical meaning of
play does make reference to an instrument that is played, but it does not
specify a possible change of state in that instrument. It is the morpho-
syntactic context of the resultative construction that coerces play into
the meaning ‘bring about a change of state by means of playing’.
Spectacular coercion effects, as for instance in John sneezed the napkin
off the table or in She smiled herself an upgrade, have served as a very
compelling argument for the idea that constructions are symbolic units
that carry meaning. After all, the only alternative explanation for the
meanings of the above examples would be that verbs such as sneeze or
smile have highly specific secondary senses, namely ‘cause to move along
a path by means of sneezing’ or ‘cause a transfer of a good between an
agent and a recipient by means of smiling’. Goldberg (1995: 9) points out
that Construction Grammar obviates the need to posit such implausible
verb senses. In the dictionary-and-grammar model of linguistic knowl-
edge, there would be no other choice.
1.3.3 Does the expression have idiosyncratic constraints?

So far, we have discussed two strategies that allow the detection and
identification of constructions: we could be looking for non-predictable
formal aspects or for non-compositional meanings. This section will
discuss a third strategy, which relates to both form and meaning of a
construction. Suppose that we come across an expression that, on a
cursory glance, would seem to be entirely unremarkable, such as The
dog over there is asleep. In terms of its structure, every part of that sentence
can be analysed as instantiating more general patterns of the grammar of
English: the dog over there is a Definite Noun Phrase construction that
incorporates a prepositional phrase, not unlike the book on the table. The
entire expression instantiates a Predicative construction, which gives
rise to expressions such as The book on the table is new. Still, there is some-
thing about the example that necessitates a constructional analysis. To
let the cat out of the bag, the adjective asleep belongs to a class of English
adjectives that exhibit an idiosyncratic constraint: they cannot be used
attributively. Whereas you could speak of an interesting book, the gram-
mar of English does not allow you to refer to *the asleep dog. Evidently,
restrictions of this kind have to be learned, and there is evidence to
suggest that language learners pay close attention to the contexts in
which elements such as asleep do and do not appear (Boyd and Goldberg
2011). At any rate, the positioning constraint on adjectives such as asleep
is something that constitutes knowledge of language, and hence it needs
to be included in the construct-i-con. The following examples show
constraints that affect other English constructions.
(13) I brought John a glass of water.

*I brought the table a glass of water.
Mary is a smarter lawyer than John.
*Mary is the smarter lawyer than John.
She elbowed her way through the room.
*She elbowed her way.
I have long known your father.
*I have long read this book.
The first pair of examples illustrates a constraint on the English

Ditransitive construction, namely that the referent of the recipient
argument be animate when actual transfers are at issue. In metaphorical
examples such as Give the table a good scrub! that constraint is relaxed.
Note that this is a semantic constraint, rather than a formal one. The
second pair of examples shows a constraint on a Degree Marker
construction. As is shown by the examples, there is a constraint with
regard to definiteness: only the example with the indefinite article is
acceptable. In the third pair of examples, we see an example of the
English Way construction (Goldberg 1995). In present-day usage, this
construction requires the presence of an argument that specifies a path,
here instantiated by through the room. As was shown in a historical study
by Israel (1996), this was not always the case: the Way construction
used to occur without path arguments, but as such arguments became
increasingly frequent, a constraint developed that is categorical for
present-day speakers of English and that renders the second member
of the pair ungrammatical. Finally, the fourth pair of examples shows a
use of long as an adverb with the meaning ‘for a long time’. Whereas it
could be presumed that all sentences of the structure I have V-ed NP for a
long time could be paraphrased as I have long V-ed NP, the unacceptability
of the second example suggests otherwise. There are constraints on the
Have Long V-ed construction, and they form part of what speakers of
English know about their language.
Discovering idiosyncratic constraints on the use of constructions is
not as straightforward a task as the identification of non-predictable
formal aspects or non-compositional meanings. Mainly, this is because
finding an example such as The dog over there is asleep or I have long known
your father in a corpus will not tell you anything about constraints that
might affect parts of those expressions. In the words of Noam Chomsky,
‘A corpus never tells you what is impossible. In fact, it does not even tell
you what is possible’ (Aarts 2000: 6). Contrary to what Chomsky sug-
gests, corpora in fact do both if quantitative tools of analysis are applied
(Stefanowitsch 2008, 2011; Goldberg 2011). Still, Chomsky would have
a point if the quote were altered to ‘A single, isolated example never
tells you what is impossible. In fact, it does not even tell you what is
possible.’ So, if that is the case, how can we determine what is pos-
sible and impossible? For a long time, linguists have approached the
issue by constructing examples and judging the grammaticality of those
examples, using their intuitions. Using intuitions as the only source of
evidence is methodologically highly problematic (Schütze 1996), and
for readers of this book who are non-native speakers of English it might
not even be feasible. Still, it would be wrong to demonise linguistic
intuitions. Intuitions are in fact necessary for the analysis of idiosyn-
cratic constraints, but they are only half of the story. What I recommend
for the analysis of constructions and their constraints is to use intuition
to construct examples and to check those examples against a large data-
base, such as Mark Davies’s suite of corpora, which is freely accessible
on the world wide web (e.g. Davies 2010). If your experience in doing
corpus analyses is limited, Lindquist and Levin (2018) is an excellent
resource to use. For a start, try to work out some restrictions on the
constructions that are illustrated in (14). First, search for expressions
that conform exactly to these sentences, altering at most the concrete
lexical items. Determine the parts of speech for all components of the
respective expressions. Then, move on to change some of their formal
aspects and see if the results point to restrictions.
(14) Most at risk are the very young and the elderly.
I check my email once every ten minutes.
I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.
Even if your own intuitions at first do not generate the ‘right’ predic-
tions about what is found in a corpus and what is not, chances are that
you will get a clearer idea of how the respective constructions are used
and what restrictions might be at play.
1.3.4 Does the expression have collocational preferences?

There is one strategy for finding constructions that we still need to dis-
cuss. Even if an expression seems formally regular, semantically trans-
parent, and without noticeable constraints on its behaviour, it might still

be a construction in its own right, rather than an instantiation of a more
general pattern. Take the following example.
(15) I will call you tomorrow morning.
The sentence is an example of the English Will Future construction.
Let us for a moment ponder the question of on what grounds, if any, we
could make the case that a sentence-level construction with the auxil-
iary verb will and a following non-finite verb phrase should be called a
construction. Evidently, pedagogical grammars call it a construction,
but is it a construction according to the definitions and criteria that
we have set up in the preceding sections? The argument from non-
predictable structural criteria appears to fail: there is a more general
pattern according to which auxiliary verbs can be paired with non-finite
verbal complements. The argument from non-compositional meanings
will not get us any further. The overall meaning of the example in (15)
can clearly be worked out from the meanings of the individual words;
for will we rely on the OED and adopt the definition ‘auxiliary of the
future tense with implication of intention or volition’ (OED: will, v., 11).
Can we identify constraints? It appears that will combines rather freely
with verbs in the infinitive. Consequently, there would be nothing left
for us to do but to concede that we are looking at a construct instantiat-
ing what we might call the Auxiliary plus Infinitive construction.
However, there is evidence to suggest otherwise. Even though will
is technically combinable with just about any verb of the English lan-
guage, data from corpora show that will occurs more frequently with
some verbs than with others. Well, you might say, is that not to be
expected, given that some verbs, like be, are very frequent, and others,
like procrastinate, are used less often? That is of course the case. But if
you control for the respective frequencies of be, procrastinate, arrive, eat,
copy, argue, and all the other verbs that are used with will, it turns out
that some verbs occur more frequently than expected whereas others
occur less frequently than expected. Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004a)
have analysed the collocational preferences of will and be going to, find-
ing that these two expressions of future time have markedly different
preferences with regard to the verb types that occur with them. The
basic result, which is replicated in Hilpert (2008), is that be going to
exhibits a tendency to occur with verbs that are agentive, punctual, and
high in transitivity. Conversely, will attracts verbs that are non-agentive,
durative, and low in transitivity. Gries et al. (2005) present experimental
evidence that speakers are acutely sensitive to the relation between
constructions and their typical collocates. The construct-i-con, it turns
out, stores information about language use in a highly detailed fash-

ion that includes rich information about how linguistic units combine
with others. Hence, it is absolutely warranted to speak of Will plus
Infinitive as a construction. The question of whether a construction
has collocational preferences can be addressed with relative frequency
counts on the basis of corpus data. Stefanowitsch and Gries (2003) have
developed an elegant method that goes by the name of collostructional
analysis, and that has been applied to a variety of English constructions
(see Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004a; Gries and Wulff 2005; Hilpert
2006; Stefanowitsch 2006; inter alia).
1.4 Summing up
In this chapter, we have raised the question of what speakers have to
know when they know a language such as English. Common sense
suggests that linguistic knowledge consists of several different kinds of
knowledge. In linguistics, this idea has given rise to what is called the
dictionary-and-grammar model of linguistic knowledge (Taylor 2012),
which makes a clear distinction between knowledge of vocabulary on
the one hand and knowledge of grammar on the other. Construction
Grammar is a theory that takes a radically different perspective:
knowledge of language is to be modelled as knowledge of construc-
tions, and nothing else in addition. The main reasons for adopting
such an approach are the following. First, it is observed that idiomatic
expressions fully permeate ordinary language. Listing all idiomatic
expressions in an appendix to the mental lexicon would greatly inflate
its size. But a second point is more problematic. Many idioms cannot
be reduced to fixed strings that could be memorised and represented
as such. Rather, idiomatic expressions have slots that can accom-
modate different lexical items, and different grammatical structures.
Furthermore, many idiomatic expressions are clearly productive, so
that speakers can generate new and original utterances with them.
The overall conclusion of these observations is that the line between
the mental lexicon, containing knowledge of words, and the mental
grammar, containing knowledge of rules, becomes increasingly blurry;
so much so that Construction Grammarians propose to abandon it
altogether. Instead, knowledge of language is seen as a large inventory
of constructions, a construct-i-con.
Constructions, on this view, are defined as linguistic generalisations
that speakers internalise. Specifically, this book adopts a definition of
constructions under which they are form–meaning pairs which have
either non-predictable formal characteristics, non-compositional mean-
ings, or a high enough frequency to be remembered as such (Goldberg

2006: 5).
This chapter also discussed four strategies that allow you to identify
constructions. The first strategy is to look out for structural traits of an
expression that deviate from more canonical patterns. Second, con-
structions can be identified on the basis of non-compositional meanings.
Third, idiosyncratic constraints that involve meaning or form serve
as a powerful and flexible diagnostic. Fourth, even if the first three
strategies fail to identify an expression as a construction, an analysis of
collocational preferences may reveal that the expression in question
does in fact have the status of a construction.
1.5 Outline of the following chapters

It was the aim of this chapter to give you a rough overview of the
enterprise that is Construction Grammar. In the remaining chapters
of this book, that overview will be successively fleshed out in order to
address the many open questions that will be on your mind right now.
So, what lies ahead? The rest of this book is structured into two main
parts. Chapters 2–5 will further familiarise you with the central con-
cepts of Construction Grammar. They will do so by describing a rep-
ertoire of constructions that illustrates how these concepts are applied.
Specifically, we will be concerned with argument structure construc-
tions (Chapter 2), abstract phrasal and clausal constructions (Chapter
3), morphological constructions (Chapter 4), and information packaging
constructions (Chapter 5). What you can expect is thus a grand tour of
English grammar. That tour will include several stops at locations that
may seem more or less familiar, but I promise that these will appear in a
new light. The second part of the book, comprising Chapters 6–10, will
focus on interfaces between Construction Grammar and specific areas
of linguistic study. What makes Construction Grammar attractive as a
linguistic theory is not least that it connects usefully to many areas of
research that may interest you. I will start by discussing constructional
work in psycholinguistics (Chapter 6), research on language acquisition
(Chapter 7), and language variation and change (Chapter 8). After that,
the topics of spoken language (Chapter 9) and multilingualism (Chapter
10) will take us to areas of constructional research that are currently
under development. A concluding chapter will try to connect the most
important ideas of this book, sending you off with a number of sugges-
tions for research projects.
Study questions
1. What is the dictionary-and-grammar model of linguistic knowledge?
2. What is the construct-i-con?
3. How are constructions defined?
4. What are the reasons for rejecting non-predictability as a definitional
criterion of constructions?
5. What is the difference between a construction and a construct?
6. What strategies can you use to identify a construction?
7. What is meant by the term ‘coercion’?
Further reading
The work of Adele E. Goldberg (1995, 2006) has been extremely influ-
ential. An excellent starting point for further reading is her synopsis
article of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2003). All of the issues
raised in the present chapter are discussed in greater depth in The Oxford
Handbook of Construction Grammar (Hoffmann and Trousdale 2013). I also
highly recommend the chapters on Construction Grammar that are
found in two introductory works on cognitive linguistics (Croft and
Cruse 2004; Evans and Green 2006). The first two chapters in Fried and
Östman (2004) provide further information on the intellectual back-
ground of Construction Grammar and on formalisation, the latter of
which is also treated in Sag et al. (2003). Among the foundational works
of Construction Grammar, Fillmore et al. (1988) and Kay and Fillmore
(1999) stand out. Working through these papers is not easy, but very
rewarding.
2 Argument structure
constructions
2.1 Analysing ‘simple sentences’

The last chapter made the point that language use is full of idiomatic
expressions that exhibit idiosyncrasies with regard to form and meaning.
Constructions of this kind have been addressed in many classic studies in
Construction Grammar, for instance in Fillmore et al. (1988), who focus
on sentences such as I don’t eat fish, let alone raw oysters. Idiomatic expres-
sions constitute the central theoretical motivation for Construction
Grammar as a theory of language: if speakers have to memorise a large
number of idiosyncratic, semi-fixed constructional schemas, then the
dictionary-and-grammar model of linguistic knowledge cannot be
maintained. Given the importance of idioms, it may come as a sur-
prise to you that one of the most influential studies in Construction
Grammar addresses ‘simple sentences’ that at first glance appear to
behave much more regularly than constructions such as let alone. In her
book Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure,
Adele Goldberg (1995) discusses expressions such as the following.
(1) Pat gave Bill a book.
John threw the ball over the fence.
Bob hammered the metal flat.
On the face of it, these sentences seem to fail the most important criteria
for constructionhood that were developed in the last chapter, as there
does not appear to be anything unusual about either the form or the
meaning of these examples. A learner of English who knew all of the
words in these sentences would have no trouble understanding what
they mean. Still, there is good evidence for viewing these examples as
instances of a special kind of construction, namely argument structure
constructions. This chapter will discuss what these constructions are
and it will explain why these constructions continue to attract substan-
tial attention in current research.
25
The remaining sections of this chapter are organised in the following

way. The next section will introduce the term argument structure and
flesh out its role in a constructionist theory of linguistic knowledge.
The subsequent section will discuss a number of valency-increasing
constructions, that is, constructions that can add arguments to the event
structure of a verb. The Resultative construction is one such construc-
tion, but there are quite a few more of them in English. The section after
that will focus on the inverse process and discuss valency-decreasing
constructions. In such constructions, a role that is present in the event
structure of a verb is ‘suppressed’, that is, it is not overtly expressed.
Perhaps the most conspicuous example of a valency-decreasing con-
struction is the Passive. In a sentence such as Mistakes were made, which
passivises the verb make, the person making the mistakes is not identi-
fied. The Passive construction thus reduces the valency of make by
suppressing its agent argument. As this chapter will discuss, there are
other constructions that behave in similar ways. The final section of this
chapter will discuss relations between argument structure construc-
tions, introducing the concept of syntactic alternations.
2.2 Argument structure

The phenomenon that is described by the term argument structure is
often also referred to as valency. The term ‘valency’ is borrowed from
chemistry, where it describes how many different atoms a chemical ele-
ment can bind to itself to form a complex molecule. Chemical elements
differ in this regard, such that hydrogen for instance can only bond with
a single other atom, whereas carbon can bond with several others, thus
forming larger molecules. The words of a language can be likened to
this behaviour of chemical elements: the verb yawn usually forms a bond
with just one element, namely its subject (The cat yawned). The verb send
typically bonds with three elements, namely its subject and two objects
(Sylvia sent me a message). Valency is first and foremost a characteristic
of verbs, but the concept can also be applied to adjectives and nouns.
For instance, the adjective certain can form a bond with a that-clause
(I’m certain that he left) or an infinitival clause (John is certain to win the
election). Nouns such as fact or suspicion can bond to that-clauses as well
(the fact that he left, the suspicion that sausages contain dog meat). Hence, the
terms ‘argument structure’ and ‘valency’, as used in linguistics, refer to a
relationship that holds between a predicate denoting an activity, state,
or event and the respective participants, which are called arguments.
In the sentence John threw the ball over the fence, the verb form threw is
the predicate, and John, the ball, and also the prepositional phrase over
argument structure constructions 27
Table 2.1 Thematic roles

Role Definition Example
AGENT the initiator of an action Pat ate a waffle.
PATIENT the participant undergoing an Pat ate a waffle.
action or a change of state
THEME the participant which is moving Pat threw the rope over.
EXPERIENCER the participant who is aware of Pat heard a sound.
a stimulus
STIMULUS the participant that is Pat heard a sound.
experienced
BENEFICIARY the participant who benefits Pat sang for me.
from an action
RECIPIENT the participant receiving an item Pat gave me a waffle.
INSTRUMENT the participant serving as a Pat opened it with a
means to an action knife.
LOCATION the place of an event Pat was born in Florida.
GOAL the end point of a movement Pat threw it into the fire.
SOURCE the starting point of a movement Pat came home from
work.
the fence would be its arguments. Arguments are thus not only expressed
by nominal structures; other phrase types and clauses may also express
them.
What makes argument structure a difficult term to deal with is that it
can be understood in two ways: semantically and syntactically. A verb
such as eat evokes a scene with two participants, someone who is eating
and something that gets eaten. This would be the semantic argument
structure of eat, which is sometimes also called its event structure. In
order to talk about event structure, linguists have developed a vocabu-
lary that abstracts away from individual verbs and describes different
semantic roles, which are sometimes also called thematic roles. Table
2.1 lists eleven semantic roles that are frequently referred to (Saeed
2003: 153).
Naturally, this list is open-ended, the roles are not necessarily mutu-
ally exclusive, and it would be possible to make finer distinctions or to
construct more abstract roles. For instance, recipients and beneficiaries
share certain characteristics with patients, and goals and sources both
encode locations. The event structure of a verb specifies the kinds of
roles that may appear with that verb. As is illustrated by the first two
examples in the table, the verb eat typically occurs with an agent and
with a patient, but other configurations are possible. Importantly, eat
also has a syntactic argument structure. Speakers know that the verb
eat usually occurs with a subject and a direct object, but they also know
that eat is sometimes used intransitively, as in Thanks, I have already eaten.
In the dictionary-and-grammar model of linguistic knowledge, the dic-
tionary entry for a lexical element such as eat would include information
on its event structure, including the roles of someone who is eating and
something that is eaten, and information on syntactic argument struc-
ture patterns. Typically, there will be several patterns. For instance, the
entry for sweep would list the following ones, amongst others.
(2) We still have to sweep.
We still have to sweep the tiles.
We still have to sweep the tiles squeaky clean.
We still have to sweep the mud off the tiles.
It seems very natural to assume that speakers’ knowledge of a verb
such as sweep includes knowledge of the structures in which that verb
typically appears. However, Goldberg (1995) argues that argument
structure cannot be wholly explained in terms of lexical entries alone.
An important piece of evidence in this regard is that speakers occasion-
ally use verbs ‘creatively’, that is, with argument structures that are
not conventionally associated with the respective verbs. The following
examples illustrate that phenomenon.
(3) John played the piano to pieces.
He pulled himself free, one leg at a time.
No matter how carefully you lick a spoon clean, some goo will
cling to it.
The verb play can be used intransitively (The kids were playing), transi-
tively (Sylvia played a Schubert sonata), and in the Prepositional Dative
construction (John played the ball to the centre forward), to illustrate just
three of its conventional argument structure patterns. It is typically the
case that the meaning of a verb is not quite the same across different
patterns. In the examples just mentioned, intransitive play evokes the
idea of ‘interacting with toys’, transitive play conveys the meaning of
‘using a musical instrument’, and play in the Prepositional Dative
construction simply means ‘pass’. Despite these differences, the respec-
tive activities of the kids, Sylvia, and John all count as instances of
playing. With the use of play that is given in (3), things are not quite
as straightforward. The example conveys that John’s playing had an
effect on the piano, such that it fell to pieces. This meaning cannot
be explained as a conventional sense of the verb play. Rather, it is the
syntactic form of the sentence that leads hearers to understand this non-
compositional meaning. Goldberg (1995) calls this form the English
Resultative construction. Compare the phrase played the piano to pieces

with pulled himself free and lick a spoon clean. In each case, the verb com-
bines with a direct object and a predicate that expresses a resultant state.
The Resultative construction is an argument structure construction,
because it ‘adds’ an element to the conventional argument structure of
verbs such as play, pull, or lick. In the case of the above example with play,
this extra element is the prepositional phrase to pieces. Goldberg argues
that syntactic constructions, such as the Resultative construction, are
not just structural templates that are used to arrange words into phrases
and sentences, but carry meaning. That is, speakers of English know
that there is a syntactic pattern that conveys the meaning ‘X causes Y to
become Z’, independently of the actual verb that is found in this pattern.
This pairing of form and meaning is stored in the construct-i-con, and
it allows speakers to create and understand sentences in which verbs
are used resultatively, regardless of whether their conventional argu-
ment structure specifies a result, or even a direct object. The verbs play,
pull, and lick frequently occur with direct objects, but even intransitive
verbs such as run, sneeze, or worry can be inserted into the Resultative
construction, as the following examples show.
(4) John ran his feet sore.
Frank sneezed his cat soaking wet.
Bob’s mother worried herself sick.
In these examples, the Resultative construction contributes not only a
result argument, but also a patient argument. The phrases his feet, his cat,
and herself denote patients, which undergo a change of state as a result
of an action. One can take the argument even further and construct
example sentences with invented words, which are associated neither
with a conventional argument structure nor with a particular semantic
event structure. The following examples draw on some nonce words
that Lewis Carroll used in his famous poem Jabberwocky.
(5) The children were gimbling the cat frumious.
Chortle the toves into small pieces. Season liberally with salt and
pepper.
David has whiffled my borogoves completely vorpal again!
Naturally, the interpretations of these sentences depend on contextual
cues, such that hearers try to link the words gimbling and frumious to
activities and states that ensue when children and cats interact in pro-
totypical ways. Note, however, that the third example is largely devoid
of such contextual cues, and still, you are likely to have come up with
an idea of what David might have done. Regardless of the specifics,
your interpretation of the sentence will be consonant with the idea that
David whiffled the borogoves, and that this act of whiffling made them
vorpal again. Given that you have no idea what the words by themselves
mean, this is a remarkable achievement!
To summarise these observations, the ‘simple sentences’ of English
matter deeply to Construction Grammar because they instantiate argu-
ment structure constructions. These constructions have to be part of
speakers’ knowledge of language for two reasons. First, they can change
the conventional valency patterns of verbs, thus generating expressions
that are formally idiosyncratic. A verb such as sneeze does not usu-
ally take a patient argument, but it does take one in the Resultative
construction. Second, argument structure constructions convey mean-
ings that cannot be explained compositionally. The resultative meaning
of the example sentences in (4) and (5) does not simply follow from
combining the individual word meanings. Rather, it is the syntactic
construction as such that imposes this meaning on the words. Goldberg
(1995) points out that the combination of verbs and constructions is not
entirely unconstrained. A verb can only be inserted into a given con-
struction if the event structure of that verb and the argument structure
of the construction match semantically. To illustrate, it is possible to
insert sneeze into the resultative construction because both sneeze and
the resultative construction require an agent argument in the subject
position. Hence, the respective roles can be ‘fused’. This idea is ren-
dered more precise in what is called the semantic coherence principle
(Goldberg 1995: 50):
Only roles which are semantically compatible can be fused. Two roles
r1 and r2 are semantically compatible if either r1 can be construed as an
instance of r2, or r2 can be construed as an instance of r1.
The semantic coherence principle explains why verbs such as hear or sink
cannot readily be inserted into the resultative construction. Sentences
such as *John heard his ears deaf with loud heavy metal or *John sank himself
drowned are odd because neither of the verbs specifies in its conventional
event structure the agent role that the resultative construction requires
for its subject. The verb hear specifies an experiencer in its event struc-
ture, and the verb sink specifies a theme.
Argument structure constructions are important to the Construction
Grammar enterprise for yet another reason. The ‘simple sentences’
of a language tend to have very basic meanings that reflect recurrent
types of everyday experience. In other words, languages have a simple
sentence pattern to express the result of an action because acting on
one’s environment in order to bring about a result is a basic, recurrent,
and important pattern of human behaviour: on any given day, you will
probably start your morning by dragging yourself out of bed, draw-
ing the curtains open, and getting the coffee maker up and running.
Several other resultative actions may follow before you have even had
a shower. Similarly, languages have ditransitive constructions because
situations of giving, sending, offering, and showing are just so central
to the interaction between human beings. The general idea that gram-
matical structures reflect the realities of daily life has been captured in
the slogan that ‘Grammars code best what speakers do most’ (Du Bois
1985: 363). Goldberg (1995: 39) translates this idea into what is called
the scene-encoding hypothesis:
Constructions which correspond to basic sentence types encode as their
central senses event types that are basic to human experience.
The scene-encoding hypothesis predicts that across many languages,

there should be basic syntactic patterns that express ideas such as
bringing about a result, transferring an object, moving along a path,
undergoing a change of state, or experiencing a stimulus. Of the
English argument structure constructions that Goldberg discusses,
the Resultative construction, the Ditransitive construction, and the
Caused Motion construction do correspond closely to basic scenes of
human experience.
2.3 Valency-increasing constructions

Across languages, constructions that increase the valency of verbs tend
to have similar kinds of meanings, most notably Resultative con-
structions, Causative constructions, and Applicative constructions
(see Payne 1997 for a cross-linguistic overview). In English, valency-
increasing constructions are exemplified by the Resultative construc-
tion that was discussed above, the Ditransitive construction (Sylvia
wrote me an email), the Caused Motion construction (John sneezed the
napkin off the table), and the Way construction (Frank cheated his way into
Harvard). The following sections will discuss each of these in turn.
2.3.1 The Ditransitive construction

The Ditransitive construction is exemplified by the following
sentences.
(6) I gave John the keys.
Sylvia wrote me an email.
Sally baked her sister a cake.

Could you draw me a picture of the suspect?
The construction links a verb with three arguments, that is, a subject
and two objects. These arguments map onto three distinct semantic
roles. The subject argument is understood to be the agent of a transfer.
This action involves the second object, which receives the role of the
transferred object. This object is transferred from the agent to a recipi-
ent, who is expressed by the first object. Whereas give, send, offer, and
many other English verbs conventionally include two objects in their
argument structure, the same cannot be said of other verbs that occur
with the Ditransitive construction. The verbs bake and draw, although
perfectly acceptable in the construction, only rarely occur with two
objects in corpus data. In order to explain the acceptability of such
examples, it is thus necessary to posit a construction that forms part of
speakers’ grammatical knowledge. By the same token, the verbs bake and
draw can in no way account for the overall meaning of the respective
examples, which convey the idea of a transfer. If Sally baked her sister
a cake, that means that Sally produced a cake so that her sister could
willingly receive it. Unless we assume an ad hoc sense of bake along the
lines of ‘apply heat to an item of food with the purpose of creating a
product that can then be transferred to a willing recipient’, the overall
meaning of the example cannot be derived from the respective word
meanings. Alternatively, we can posit the Ditransitive construction
as a symbolic unit that carries meaning and that is responsible for the
observed increase in the valency of bake. In this case, bake contributes
its usual lexical meaning while the construction augments its argument
structure to include a recipient argument.
Several semantic idiosyncrasies of the construction are worth point-
ing out. First, it appears that the agent needs to carry out the transfer
consciously and willingly. For instance, it would be highly misleading
to state that Sylvia wrote me an email when in fact Sylvia unintentionally
hit ‘reply to all’, sending out a private message that I was never supposed
to read. Second, it is equally necessary that the recipient be willing to
receive the transferred objects. The sentence We threw the squirrels some
peanuts evokes the idea of squirrels willingly accepting their peanuts.
The example could not be used to describe the activity of throwing
peanuts at dead squirrels. In the following examples, the respective
recipients fail the criterion of being ‘willing to accept’. The examples
are therefore judged as odd by proficient speakers of English.
(7) ?Bill threw the coma victim a blanket. (I threw John a blanket.)
?John gave the house new windows. (I gave John a new key.)
?I left the baby some beer in the fridge. (I left John some beer in
the fridge.)
One might of course object that there are many uses of the Ditransitive
construction in which the recipient does not want to receive the trans-
ferred object, and which are nonetheless perfectly acceptable.
(8) The professor gave the student an F.
The plumber mailed me another invoice.
The criminals sent him a ransom note, asking for a million
pounds.
It is probably fair to say few people enjoy receiving bad grades, unex-
pected bills, or ransom notes. In the light of these examples, it seems
more adequate to say that the recipient has to be able to receive the
transferred object, and perhaps conventionally expected to do so, which
motivates the label of a ‘socially qualified recipient’. But even so, there
are further examples that seem to contradict what we have said so far
about the Ditransitive construction.
(9) The noise gave me a headache.
The music lent the party a festive air.
The flood brought us the opportunity to remodel our old
bathroom.
A first thing to notice about these examples is that the ‘transferred
object’ is immaterial. Headaches and opportunities are not the kind
of thing that could be physically exchanged. Likewise, the examples
contain subject noun phrases that refer to noise, music, and a flood,
none of which can be said to be a volitional agent. Goldberg (1995: 144)
argues that these examples metaphorically extend the basic meaning
of the Ditransitive construction. Whereas the basic meaning of the
construction conveys the idea of a physical transfer, the examples in
(9) express the relation between a cause and an effect. Causal relations
are thus metaphorically understood as events of giving and receiving. A
noise that causes a headache can be described as ‘giving me a headache’.
A flood that causes the destruction of a bathroom could, under a rather
optimistic outlook on life, be construed as ‘bringing an opportunity for
remodelling’. The semantic spectrum of the Ditransitive construction
further includes transfers that will only occur in the future, acts that
facilitate reception of an object, and acts that block a potential transfer.
(10) John ordered Margaret a gin and tonic.
The doctor allowed me a full meal.
The banks refused him a loan.
So far, we have identified a number of semantic idiosyncrasies that

pertain to the Ditransitive construction. Other idiosyncrasies of the
construction concern the collocational behaviour of the construc-
tion. Specifically, there are certain verbs that do not occur in the
Ditransitive construction despite having a lexical meaning that would
fit the constructional meaning.
(11) *Sally shouted John the news.
*John explained me the theory.
*Margaret donated the Red Cross £100.
Why do these verbs ‘not work’ in the Ditransitive construction? While
it could be suspected that we are seeing verb-specific idiosyncrasies
here, some generalisations have been found. For instance, shout behaves
just like a range of other verbs that describe manners of speech, includ-
ing scream, murmur, whisper, or yodel (Goldberg 1995: 128). The verbs
explain and donate have in common that they represent Latinate, special-
ised vocabulary. Gropen et al. (1989) show that a number of morpho-
phonological traits that characterise Latinate vocabulary, notably
involving stress patterns and affixation, can to some extent predict which
verbs do occur in the Ditransitive construction and which ones do not.
However, many open questions remain, and there is even considerable
inter-speaker variation with regard to the acceptability of verbs such as
obtain or purchase. Goldberg (1995: 129) marks *Chris purchased him some
food as ungrammatical, but Hannah purchased him a microscope is one of
several attested examples from corpus data. In Construction Grammar,
idiosyncratic lexical preferences of constructions and even differences
between speakers with regard to such preferences can be modelled as
part of individual speakers’ linguistic knowledge. Constructions will
exhibit some regularities with regard to the kinds of verbs that they
accommodate, but some amount of collocational idiosyncrasy is fully
expected.
Summing up, the Ditransitive construction conveys, as its basic
sense, the meaning of a transfer between an intentional agent and a
willing recipient. The construction conventionally occurs with verbs
such as give, send, and offer; its occurrence with verbs such as bake, feed,
or leave demonstrates that the construction can actively increase the
valency of verbs that do not usually occur with two objects. Besides its
basic sense, the construction metaphorically expresses relationships of
cause and effect; additional meanings include future transfers, ‘enabled’
transfers, and blocked transfers. The construction exhibits collocational
restrictions so that it does not readily combine with several specific
classes of verbs.
2.3.2 The Caused Motion construction

The following examples illustrate the Caused Motion construction.
(12) The audience laughed Bob off the stage.
John chopped carrots into the salad.
The professor invited us into his office.
Like the Ditransitive construction, the Caused Motion construction
can alter and augment the argument structure of the verbs with which it
combines. In the examples given above, the construction adds arguments
to the verbs laugh, chop, and invite. Whereas the event structure of laugh
merely specifies someone who is laughing, the example with laugh adds
an argument of someone who is being moved, what is called a theme,
and the goal of that movement. The event structure of chop includes a
patient argument, that is, something that is being chopped. In the exam-
ple above, this argument has a double role: the carrots are being chopped,
for sure, but in addition to being a patient argument, they are further
understood to be moving towards a goal, in this case into the salad. It
is therefore appropriate to characterise the role of the carrots as both
patient and theme in the context of the Caused Motion construction.
The construction can thus increase the valency of verbs, either by adding
a path/goal argument, or by adding a theme and a path/goal argument.
Semantically, the construction indicates that an agent carries out an
activity that causes a theme to move along a path or towards a goal.
More succinctly, the construction conveys the meaning that ‘X causes
Y to move along or towards Z’. Laughter is hence presented as the
ultimate cause of Bob’s movement off the stage, even if it is presum-
ably the case that Bob was walking. The Caused Motion construction
thus harmonises best with verbs such as throw, kick, or pull, which are
conventionally associated with an event structure containing a theme
argument and a path/goal argument.
(13) John threw the ball over the fence.
Franz kicked the ball into the goal.
She pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket.
Besides its central sense, the construction conveys the meanings of
assisted motion (John helped Mary out of the car), prevented motion (John
locked the dog into the bathroom), enabled motion (Mary allowed the dog out of
the bathroom), and prompted motion (The professor invited us into his office).
Speakers’ knowledge of the Caused Motion construction includes
knowledge of the following constraints. First, the agent argument cannot
be an instrument. Whereas instruments are commonly found as subjects
of active clauses such as The key opened the door or This knife chops and slices
beautifully, the Caused Motion construction requires that the agent act
autonomously.
(14) *The key allowed John into the house.
*The gun threatened the hostages into the back office.
*The knife chopped the carrots into the salad.
Another constraint on the Caused Motion construction is that the path
of the theme is usually intended. Hence, it is not possible to chop carrots
onto the floor or pour milk next to one’s glass. However, if the action
that is specified by the verb is unintentional to begin with, as for instance
with the verb sneeze, unintended paths do not pose any problem.
(15) *John chopped the carrots onto the floor.
*Bob poured milk next to his glass.
He sneezed his tooth right across town. (Goldberg 2006: 6)
The Caused Motion construction is further constrained with regard to
the path of the motion. Specifically, the causal event must fully deter-
mine the path of the theme. Paths with very specific goals, or goals that
require independent movements along a path, therefore lead to the
unacceptability of the following examples.
(16) *The audience laughed Bob home.
*Mary allowed the dog to the next village.
*Bob threw the stone to the bottom of the lake.
To summarise, the Caused Motion construction conveys the meaning
that ‘X causes Y to move along or towards Z’. The construction can add
the arguments of a theme and a path or goal to the event structure of a
verb, and it is associated with a range of senses that relate to the basic
scenario of caused motion. The construction is chiefly constrained with
regard to the subject, which cannot be an instrument, and the path,
which must be fully determined by the causal action.
2.3.3 The Way construction

The English Way construction differs from the constructions that have
been discussed up to now in this chapter because it specifies the lexical
element way and a possessive determiner such as his, her, or their, in its
form. The following examples serve to illustrate the construction.
(17) Frank dug his way out of prison.
John elbowed his way across the room.
She slowly climbed her way up through the branches.
Just like the previously discussed constructions, the Way construction

can add arguments to the event structure of lexical verbs. The construc-
tion evokes a scenario in which an agent moves along a path that is difficult
to navigate. The verbs that occur in the Way construction can be verbs of
directed movement, such as climb, but also verbs such as dig or elbow, which
do not inherently convey the idea of movement along a trajectory. The
Way construction thus imposes this meaning on its component words,
adding up to two arguments in the process: the way argument and a path/
goal argument not unlike the argument that was discussed in connection
with the Caused Motion construction. With a verb such as dig, which
conventionally takes a direct object (digging a hole, digging your own grave),
it could be argued that ‘his way out of prison’ is simply a noun phrase
instantiating a direct object, so that nothing out of the ordinary would be
going on with that example. However, the example states more than that
Frank has dug a tunnel out of prison. What the example conveys is that
Frank succeeded in actually traversing the tunnel, thus escaping from
prison. Goldberg (1995: 200) points out that the Way construction entails
motion, so that examples such as the following are nonsensical.
(18) *Frank dug his way out of prison, but he hasn’t gone yet.
*Staying behind the counter, the bank robbers shot their way
through the crowd.
Verbs such as climb do specify a path argument in their event structure,
but the construction adds the way argument, which cannot be replaced
by other lexical elements that refer to paths or trajectories more
broadly. The following examples are therefore unacceptable, despite
their superficial similarity to the example with climb given above.
(19) *She quickly climbed her escape route down the stairs.
*She steadily climbed her track up to the summit.
In the basic sense of the Way construction, the verb conveys the means
by which a path is being forged: through digging, climbing, elbowing,
or even shooting. In many instances of the Way construction, the path
along which the agent moves is thus not pre-existing, but has to be cre-
ated, prototypically with some effort. This aspect of the constructional
meaning explains that basic motion verbs such as move or step are not
acceptable in the Way construction.
(20) *She moved her way into the room.
*She stepped her way down the stairs.
The Way construction is very commonly used metaphorically, such that
completing a demanding task is talked about in terms of the creation of a
path and movement along that path. The following examples illustrate
metaphorical usages of the construction.
(21) Sally was crunching her way through a bag of potato chips.
Bob worked his way to the top of his profession.
The three girls sang their way into the hearts of the audience.
The Way construction is further used with a meaning that does not
make reference to the means by which a path is created, but that rather
describes the manner in which a movement is performed. In the exam-
ples below, the action denoted by the verb occurs simultaneously to
a movement, but that action neither causes nor enables that move-
ment. Discussions of the Way construction hence distinguish the more
common means interpretation from the manner interpretation of the
construction.
(22) Sam joked his way into the meeting.
John was whistling his way down the street.
Triathlete Paula Finlay cried her way across the finish line.
Goldberg (1995: 212) identifies several semantic constraints on the Way
construction that have to do with the difficulty of creating a path or
moving along that path. First, the activity denoted by the verb has to be
unbounded or repetitive. Hence it is possible to climb one’s way up a cliff but
not *to jump one’s way off a cliff. A second constraint pertaining to the move-
ment demands that it be self-propelled. Speakers therefore reject *The
snow melts its way into the river, in which the movement is not self-propelled,
but they accept The probe melts its way through the glacier, in which the probe
moves of its own accord. Third, Goldberg (1995: 214) suggests that the
Way construction encodes motion that is directed, not aimless. This is
certainly the prototypical case, but many examples, including James Bond
womanising his way across the globe or young people drifting their way through life,
suggest that this constraint can be violated fairly easily.
To conclude this section, the Way construction can be characterised
as an argument structure construction that can increase the valency of
a verb to include a lexically specified way argument and another argu-
ment that expresses a path or a goal. There are two basic interpretations
of the Way construction, namely the more common means interpreta-
tion, in which the verb encodes the means by which a path is created
and/or traversed, and the manner interpretation, in which the verb
specifies the manner of an action that occurs simultaneously to a move-
ment. In the means interpretation of the construction, the agent’s action
is commonly quite difficult, which imposes a number of constraints on
the kinds of movements that can be expressed by the Way construction.
2.4 Valency-decreasing constructions

In the Construction Grammar literature, the discussion of argument
structure constructions has been dominated by the topic of valency-
increasing constructions. It is not hard to see why this should be the
case: constructions that can add multiple arguments to the event
structure of otherwise intransitive verbs provide compelling evidence
for the idea that knowledge of language must include knowledge of
constructions and for the idea that constructions can override lexical
meanings. Specifically, speakers must know that it is acceptable to utter
a sentence such as Sally baked her sister a cake and that the lexical meaning
of the verb bake is enriched by the constructional context to convey
the idea of a transfer. In the introductory chapter, the constructional
override of lexical meaning was discussed as the principle of coercion
(Michaelis 2004). Yet valency-increasing constructions only represent
one half of the set of valency-changing constructions in English. It will
be argued in this section that valency-decreasing constructions are no
less important to the Construction Grammar enterprise than their more
famous relatives.
Cross-linguistically common constructions that decrease the valency
of a verb are Passive constructions (Mistakes were made), Reflexive
constructions (John shaved), Reciprocal constructions (Let’s meet again
soon), and Imperative constructions (Go!). This section will further dis-
cuss Null Instantiation constructions, which can be illustrated with
examples such as Tigers only kill at night or I know. In these examples, cen-
tral participants of the actions that are described are left unexpressed,
but are nonetheless understood.
2.4.1 The Passive

The English Passive construction with be is most often discussed as
the marked counterpart of Active sentences with transitive verbs. The
following examples thus form corresponding pairs.
(23) The reviewer rejected the paper.
The paper was rejected (by the reviewer).
John paid the bill.
The bill was paid (by John).
Because of the close relation between pairs such as these, and because
the Active clearly represents a construction that is applicable in a
much wider set of contexts, characteristics of the Passive are typically
phrased in terms of how Passive sentences deviate from the less marked
Active sentences. Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 1428) point out three
correspondences. First, the subject of the Active (the reviewer, John)
appears in the corresponding Passive sentences as an oblique object
marked with the preposition by. As the parentheses in the examples
indicate, it is possible, and indeed the default option in actual language
use, to omit this argument in the Passive. It is this type of omission
that justifies categorising the Passive as a valency-decreasing construc-
tion. Second, the object of the Active (the paper, the bill) appears as
the subject of the corresponding Passive sentences. The Passive thus
functions to reverse the relative prominence of the two arguments in
the event structure of a transitive verb. Whereas normally the agent of
a transitive verb has to be expressed and the patient argument can be
omitted under certain circumstances (Thanks, I have already eaten), the
Passive construction makes the patient argument obligatory and the
agent argument optional. Third, the verb of the Passive construction
is more complex in form than the corresponding verb in the Active. It
appears in the form of a past participle that is preceded by a form of the
auxiliary be.
Given these clear-cut correspondences, it is a tempting idea to think
of the Passive as a grammatical rule that takes a transitive Active
sentence as its input and yields a passivised counterpart. However,
Huddleston and Pullum (2002) offer a range of examples that differ
from the above description in several respects, but that arguably still
instantiate the Passive construction.
(24) John was given a large data set for the analysis.
*A large dataset was given John for the analysis.
Sally’s papers are referred to a lot.
*The children are looked to a lot.
In the first example, the verb give is a ditransitive verb, not a transitive
one. As the second example shows, only the recipient, not the theme,
can appear as the subject of a Passive sentence. This is not per se
a problem for a putative passivisation rule: the rule would just have
to include the additional information that theme arguments are not
available for passivisation. The example with Sally’s papers illustrates
what is called a prepositional passive. In the example, the prepositional
object of the verb refer appears as the subject of a passivised sentence. By
contrast, this does not work with look. The difference between refer and
look is difficult to explain with recourse to a general grammatical rule,
but it can be made sense of if the Passive is viewed as a construction that
has distinct collocational preferences. As a rule of thumb, it appears that
prepositional passives work well with highly entrenched or idiomatic
combinations of verbs and prepositional objects. Hence, approve of a plan,

pay for everything, or deal with issues are good candidates for prepositional
passives, whereas search under a bed, walk across a hallway, or choose between
two theories yield questionable examples.
(25) The plan was approved of by my mother.
Everything was paid for in advance.
These issues will be dealt with in another paper.
?The bed was thoroughly searched under.
?This hallway was walked across by George Washington.
?These two theories have to be chosen between.
Examples of the Passive also show varying degrees of acceptability
in cases where clausal structures appear as the subject of the passiv-
ised sentence. The following examples show instances of -ing clauses,
infinitive clauses, and wh-clauses. For each of these categories, it is
possible to find examples that sound fully idiomatic and, conversely,
other examples that seem rather unacceptable.
(26) Texting a marriage proposal is not recommended.
*Texting a marriage proposal was remembered (by John).
Not to go would be considered rude.
*Not to go was decided (by John).
Whether it was feasible had not yet been determined.
*Whether it was feasible was wondered (by John).
A general passivisation rule would be of limited use to account for
such asymmetries. The only viable solution in a dictionary-and-
grammar model of linguistic knowledge would be to inscribe these
restrictions into the lexical entries of the respective verbs in an ad
hoc fashion. This, however, raises further questions, specifically with
regard to novel verbs. Take for instance the recent verb blog. The
verb is regularly passivised, and even if your experience with such
examples is limited, you will probably agree that Our wedding was
blogged about! is an idiomatic sentence of English whereas *That we
married was blogged by John is not. If you do, this suggests that your
knowledge of language includes knowledge of how blog behaves as
a verb, how this behaviour compares with that of other verbs, and
in what kind of Passive constructions those verbs appear. This kind
of knowledge can be accommodated by the construct-i-con in a
straightforward way.
Finally, Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 1435) note that there are
verbs which seem to be restricted to the Passive, among them be reputed
to, be said to, and be rumoured.
(27) Pat is reputed to be very rich.

Kim is said to be a manic depressive.
It is rumoured that there will be an election before the end of the
year.
The fact that some examples of the Passive cannot be transformed into
a corresponding Active clause makes it difficult to maintain the idea
of a grammatical rule that systematically links both constructions. To
be sure, speakers will be aware that the two constructions correspond
in important ways, that they often paraphrase one another, and that
they express similar states of affairs. All of this does not run counter to
the idea that the Passive is a construction in its own right, a generalisa-
tion that speakers have to learn as an independent unit of grammatical
knowledge.
2.4.2 The Imperative construction

The English Imperative construction is shown in the following
examples.
(28) Call me after lunch.
For next time, please read chapters three and four.
Take one of these in the morning, and another one before bedtime.
The Imperative is a valency-decreasing construction because it sup-
presses a central argument of the respective verbs, namely the agent.
It is easy to construct paraphrases of the above examples in which such
an agent is overtly expressed. The sentence I would ask you to call me after
lunch makes explicit that it is the addressee who is expected to per-
form the action denoted by the verb. The meaning of the Imperative
construction is thus non-compositional. It cannot be derived from the
lexical meanings of the words alone that the agent of Call me after lunch
should be the addressee. Besides this basic observation, there are several
other pieces of evidence that the Imperative is a construction. Most
importantly perhaps, there are constraints on the combination of the
Imperative with other constructions. Proficient speakers of English find
the following examples questionable.
(29) *Must/should/got to leave!
*Be called later!
The first example suggests that combining the Imperative with a modal
auxiliary yields an intelligible but ungrammatical utterance. There is
nothing semantically odd about such a request; it is the structure that
speakers find unacceptable. Second, Takahashi (2012: 124) observes that

some combinations of the Imperative with the Passive yield unac-
ceptable examples. Examples that do work would include Be checked
over by a doctor or Stand up and be counted for what you are about to receive.
The Imperative further occurs relatively rarely with the perfect (Have
your homework done by 5!) and the progressive (Be waiting in the lobby at
9!). Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 932) explain this by pointing out
that requests typically prompt dynamic actions rather than states. The
grammatical behaviour of the Imperative in this regard is thus a conse-
quence of real-world circumstances.
An unpredictable semantic trait of the construction concerns its
interpretation in coordinations of imperative clauses and declarative
clauses. In the following examples, the initial Imperative clauses are
understood as having conditional meaning.
(30) Take an aspirin and you’ll feel better.
Ask him about his dissertation and he will be rambling on for
hours.
Do that again and you will regret it for the rest of your life.
What is noteworthy about these examples is that quite often, their
overall meaning directly contradicts the Imperative clause. Whereas
the first example suggests that the hearer take an aspirin, the two other
examples are meant to discourage the hearer from complying with the
initial request.
The English Imperative further exhibits strong collocational prefer-
ences. Takahashi (2012: 24) observes that the verbs let, tell, look, and come
are among the most frequently used verbs in the construction. Some of
these even have preferred argument realisation patterns, for instance
tell, which usually combines with me, as in the example below.
(31) Let’s not argue any more.
Tell me about it.
Look, we all make mistakes sometimes.
Come on!
Takahashi’s frequency results indicate that the function of the
Imperative is not so much that of a vehicle for giving orders as that of
the rather polite organisation of discourse, as in expressions such as let’s
see, look, listen, trust me, or guess what. This observation echoes a similar
finding by Stefanowitsch and Gries (2003).
2.4.3 Null Instantiation

The term Null Instantiation refers to the phenomenon that not all
arguments that a verb has in its event structure are overtly expressed.
In many cases, the possibility of Null Instantiation has to be
seen as a property that is inscribed in the lexical entry of a verb. For
instance, the verb eat allows omission of the patient argument (The
children ate noisily) whereas the verb devour does not (*The children
devoured noisily). An interesting aspect of Null Instantiation is
that verbs differ with regard to the definiteness of the argument that
can be omitted. Ruppenhofer (2005) distinguishes Indefinite Null
Instantiation (INI), which can be observed with the verb read, from
Definite Null Instantiation (DNI), which shows itself in uses
of the verb understand. The crucial difference is whether the speaker
knows the exact identity of the omitted argument. Compare the fol-
lowing examples.
(32) Kim was reading. I just don’t remember what.
Kim understood. *I just don’t remember what.
While it is perfectly acceptable for me to say that Kim was reading and
to have only a vague idea of what it was that she was reading, saying
that Kim understood conveys that I know more or less exactly what she
understood. The behaviour of INI verbs and DNI verbs makes for an
interesting topic, but this section will focus instead on a third type of
Null Instantiation, namely cases in which a construction licenses
the omission of an argument. Ruppenhofer and Michaelis (2010) report
on several such constructions, which they find to be genre-specific, that
is, tied to very specific communicative situations. Consider for instance
the Labelese construction.
(33) Contains sulphites.
Creates visibly fuller, thicker hair.
Eliminates pet odours.
The Labelese construction suppresses the subject argument of a verb.
This does not create any communicative problems because the con-
struction can only appear printed on the very referent that is left unex-
pressed by the construction. The Labelese construction not only occurs
with verbs but also works with a whole range of Predicative construc-
tions, as is evidenced by statements such as easy to use, for children 4
years and up, made in China, and dietary supplement. In these examples, the
reader understands that an expression such as made in China describes a
characteristic of the product on which the expression is found.
Another Null Instantiation construction is confined to the lan-

guage of cooking recipes.
(34) Season liberally with salt and pepper.
Chill before serving.
Cut into one-inch-thick slices.
Ruppenhofer and Michaelis (2010: 181) call this the Instructional
Imperative construction. Like the Labelese construction, it represents
a generalisation that speakers must have learned. Whereas it might be
argued that quite generally, an argument can be omitted in contexts
where its identity is glaringly obvious, this theory fails to explain why
Cut into one-inch-thick slices is fine as a written instruction but decid-
edly odd as a spoken request. The next time you are preparing a meal
together with a friend, sprinkle your conversation with something like
Fry until lightly brown, and see what happens.
2.5 Relations between argument structure constructions

Many argument structure constructions in English can be paraphrased in
terms of another, formally and semantically related argument structure
construction. The previous section has discussed the example of Active
and Passive sentences, which are mutually linked through a number of
correspondences. A further example of an argument structure construc-
tion with a close paraphrase is the Ditransitive construction, which
has a ‘twin’ construction in the Prepositional Dative construction.
Consider the following examples.
(35) John gave Mary the book.
John gave the book to Mary.
Another close relation exists between the Caused Motion construc-
tion and what one might call the With-Applicative construction.
(36) John brushed barbecue sauce onto the ribs.
John brushed the ribs with barbecue sauce.
Linguists of different theoretical persuasions have long been interested
in the relations between these constructions. Pairs of constructions such
as the ones given above have come to be known as syntactic alterna-
tions; the pairs in (35) and (36) are known respectively as the Dative
Alternation and the Locative Alternation. As with Active and
Passive sentences, the correspondences between the two members of
those pairs invite the idea of a grammatical rule that systematically
links one to the other. In a dictionary-and-grammar model of linguistic
knowledge, such a rule would allow speakers to use one member of

the pair as the input from which the second member of the pair can
be derived as an output. The rule would apply across the board, for all
manners of verbs, unless the lexical entry of a verb specifically disallows
its application. For both the Dative Alternation and the Locative
Alternation, there are what are called non-alternating verbs, as shown
in the following examples.
(37) John took his son to the doctor.
*John took the doctor his son.
John filled the glass with water.
*John filled water into the glass.
The verb take does not readily enter the Ditransitive construction,
and the fact that fill cannot be used in the Caused Motion construction
is even being taught to learners of English as a second language. As
you may guess, researchers in Construction Grammar view the idea
of a grammatical rule linking the members of a pair of constructions as
problematic. The alternative view is expressed by Goldberg under the
heading of the surface generalisation hypothesis (2006: 25):
[T]here are typically broader syntactic and semantic generalizations
associated with a surface argument structure form than exist between
the same surface form and a distinct form that it is hypothesized to be
syntactically or semantically derived from.
The phrase ‘a surface argument structure form’ here paraphrases the
term ‘construction’ in a theory-neutral fashion. What the hypothesis
claims is that each member of a pair of paraphrasable constructions is
best analysed on its own terms, all correspondences notwithstanding.
The hypothesis further predicts that each member of such a pair will
exhibit systematic differences with regard to the other member and sys-
tematic generalisations that pertain to its own form and meaning. Both
of these points can be illustrated with the behaviour of the Ditransitive
construction. Interestingly, examples of the Ditransitive construction
correspond not only to examples of the Prepositional Dative con-
struction, but also to examples of the For-Benefactive construction.
(38) John gave the book to Mary. John gave Mary the book.
John poured a scotch for Mary. John poured Mary a scotch.
On the dictionary-and-grammar view of linguistic knowledge, these
pairs would need to be linked by two separate rules, which implies
that the two Ditransitive sentences on the right would in fact not
instantiate the same construction, despite having the same surface
argument structure form. This conclusion, however, is questionable.

Goldberg (2006: 27) presents the examples shown in (39) to make the
case that Ditransitive sentences corresponding to Prepositional
Dative examples and Ditransitive sentences corresponding to For-
Benefactive examples show exactly the same behaviour. When one is
fine, so is the other; when one is questionable or ungrammatical, so is
the other.
(39) Ditransitives Paraphrases
Mina bought Mel a book. Mina bought a book for Mel.
Mina sent Mel a book. Mina sent a book to Mel.
??Mina bought Mel it. Mina bought it for Mel.
??Mina sent Mel it. Mina sent it to Mel.
??Who did Mina buy a book? Who did Mina buy a book for?
??Who did Mina send a book? Who did Mina send a book to?
*Mina bought Mel yesterday a book. Mina bought a book yesterday
for Mel.
*Mina sent Mel yesterday a book. Mina sent a book yesterday to
Mel.
Goldberg concludes that the similarities between examples that show
the surface form of the Ditransitive construction are greater than
similarities between the member constructions of a syntactic alterna-
tion. In her own words, ‘[t]he robust generalizations are surface gener-
alizations’ (2006: 33).
2.6 Summing up
This chapter introduced the idea of argument structure, which is a syn-
onym for the term ‘valency’. Argument structure describes the number
and character of elements that can bond to a given linguistic item, and
is a term that pertains both to the meaning of the bonding elements and
to the form of those elements. The former aspect was called the event
structure; the latter was called the syntactic argument structure. The
chapter introduced thematic roles such as agent, patient, and experi-
encer. It was argued that argument structure constructions are items
of linguistic knowledge that allow speakers to use verbs in syntactic
contexts in which they are not conventionally used. ‘Famous’ examples
such as John sneezed the foam off his cappuccino illustrate this phenomenon.
Argument structure constructions are syntactic constructions that can be
filled by all manners of lexical material and that convey some meaning
of their own that goes beyond the meaning of their component words.
There are hence two main pieces of evidence for argument structure
constructions: first, they allow non-conventional combinations of verbs

and syntactic contexts; second, they convey non-compositional mean-
ings. The combination of verbs and argument structure constructions is
not unconstrained: Goldberg’s semantic coherence principle states that
a verb can only be combined with a construction if the participants that
are evoked by the verb and the construction match semantically. There
are hence limits on the possible combinations of verbs and constructions.
The importance of argument structure constructions to Construction
Grammar at large was discussed in connection with the scene encoding
hypothesis, that is, the idea that the basic syntactic patterns of a lan-
guage encode recurrent event types that are basic to human experience.
The chapter then drew a distinction between valency-increasing
constructions and valency-decreasing constructions. Valency-

increasing constructions such as the Resultative construction,
the Ditransitive construction, the Caused Motion construction, and
the Way construction can augment the argument structure of lexical
verbs. The constructions thus add participants to the event structure
of the verb. By contrast, valency-decreasing constructions such
as the Passive, the Imperative, the Labelese construction, and the
Instructional Imperative construction suppress the expression of
participants that are there in the event structure of the respective verb.
Quite often, the suppressed arguments are easily recoverable from the
context. Examples of the Labelese construction such as Contains sul-
phites, read on a bottle of red wine, leave little doubt as to what could
be meant. However, it was argued that contextual recoverability is not
the only constraint on the use of these constructions.
The chapter closed with a discussion of relations between paraphras-
able constructions, called syntactic alternations. In contrast to the idea
of grammatical rules that systematically link argument structure pat-
terns with similar meanings, what is called the surface generalisation
hypothesis expresses the view that argument structure constructions
are best analysed in their own right because similarities will be greater
between examples with the same surface form than between members
of a syntactic alternation.
In summary, despite the fact that ‘simple sentences’ such as Pat gave
Bill a book or Bob hammered the metal flat give the initial impression of being
completely regular and semantically compositional, they illustrate
constructions that yield strong evidence for a constructional view of
linguistic knowledge. Any theory of grammar needs to have an explana-
tion for the fact that John cut the rope in half with a knife is a fine sentence
of English whereas *John heard his ears deaf with loud heavy metal is not.
Positing argument structure constructions, in connection with princi-
ples that constrain possible combinations of verbs and constructions,

provides an intuitive and testable account.
Study questions
1. What is argument structure?
2. Can you give an example of an expression where the event structure
of a verb and its syntactic argument structure do not match?
3. What are thematic roles?
4. What does the surface generalisation hypothesis predict? What data
would cast doubt on the hypothesis?
5. What are the two main pieces of evidence for recognising argument
structure constructions?
6. What is the principle of semantic coherence?
7. What is meant by the term Null Instantiation?
8. Can you come up with an example of an English valency-changing
construction that was not discussed in this chapter?
Further reading
The central reference for this chapter is Goldberg (1995). Chapters 2
and 9 in Goldberg (2006) represent continuations of that work. Boas
(2003, 2005) and Goldberg and Jackendoff (2004) discuss English
Resultative constructions. Foundational work on the topic of verbs
and their argument structure is found in Pinker (1989), Levin (1993),
and Levin and Rappaport Hovav (2005). A very useful resource is the
Valency Dictionary of English (Herbst et al. 2004); see also Herbst and Götz-
Votteler (2007). General overviews of valency-changing constructions
are found in Payne (1997) and Haspelmath and Müller-Bardey (2004).
These include many examples from languages other than English,
which helps to put the English data into perspective.
3 Inside the construct-i-con
3.1 Meaningless constructions?

The previous two chapters presented the view that knowledge of lan-
guage should be modelled as a construct-i-con, that is, as a large network
of form–meaning pairs that accommodates words, idioms, semi-specified
patterns such as The X-er the Y-er, and also argument structure con-
structions such as the Ditransitive construction or the Resultative
construction. For all of these constructions, it is fairly straightforward to
make the case that aspects of their form or meaning cannot be predicted
from more general patterns that exist in the grammar of English. In
short, it is intuitively clear that words such as dog or green are forms that
have lexical meanings; it is equally clear that the phrase pushing up daisies
has an idiomatic meaning; and the non-compositional meaning of an
example such as John sneezed his cat soaking wet is evidence for including
the English Resultative construction as part of speakers’ knowledge of
language. However, you might wonder, is this enough evidence to make
the case that all of linguistic knowledge consists of form–meaning pairs?
Do all syntactic forms carry meaning? On the view that knowledge of
language is a large repository of symbolic units, the answer would have
to be a ‘yes’ – a symbol is only a symbol by virtue of having a form and
a meaning. At the same time, there are syntactic forms for which it is
quite difficult to establish a meaning in anything but the most general of
terms. Consider the following examples.
(1) John sings.
Bob heard a noise.
One sock lay on the sofa, the other one under it.
The first example illustrates what must be one of the most fundamental
principles of English grammar: verbs agree with their subjects, showing
inflections that correspond to the categories of number and person. A
third person singular subject, in the simple present tense, combines with
inside the construct- i - con 51
verb forms that end in the suffix /-s/. Speakers obviously know this, but
does that knowledge represent a construction? The second example, Bob
heard a noise, combines a verb with a subject and an object, thus forming
a transitive clause. The previous chapter discussed argument structure
constructions as units of linguistic structure that have meaning. By
analogy with the Ditransitive construction and the Resultative con-
struction, does the example represent something that could be called
the Transitive construction? If so, what would be its meaning? One
answer to the latter question, motivated by examples such as Bob hit the
nail or Bob ate the sandwich, would be to characterise the prototypical
transitive clause as one in which an agent intentionally affects an indi-
viduated, inanimate patient argument (cf. Hopper and Thompson 1980;
Thompson and Hopper 2001). But if the Transitive construction were
to include examples such as Bob remembered his appointment, Bob walked a
mile, or Bob weighed 15 stone, such a semantic characterisation would be
difficult to maintain. Moving on to the third example, One sock lay on
the sofa, the other one under it illustrates a syntactic pattern in which two
clauses are coordinated and the second clause omits an element that
is common to both, in this case the verb form lay. Evidently, speakers
know that this particular pattern is an acceptable way to express a given
idea, whereas *One sock lay on the sofa, the other one under would not be
acceptable, despite only a seemingly minor difference. Is this kind of
knowledge still knowledge of constructions?
The fundamental question of whether all constructions are mean-
ingful has been answered in conflicting ways in the Construction
Grammar literature. Goldberg (2006: 166–82) takes the position that
even highly abstract patterns are meaningful. She discusses the exam-
ple of Subject–Auxiliary Inversion, which is a syntactic pattern that
occurs in questions, conditionals, and exclamatives, amongst several
other construction types. A few examples are shown below.
(2) Would you mind if I smoke in here?
Had I known this, I would have stayed at home.
May he rest in peace!
Rarely have I heard such nonsense.
Whereas earlier research had pointed to this large range of contexts
as evidence that Subject–Auxiliary Inversion is a purely formal
phenomenon with no semantic substance (Green 1985), Goldberg
argues that all construction types that share this particular syntax also
share semantic traits, notably the characteristic of non-assertiveness.
Especially, questions, conditionals, and wishes describe states of affairs
that are not factual. Arguing against this idea, Fillmore et al. (2012: 326)
explicitly proclaim ‘the legitimacy of semantically null constructions’.

Constructions without meanings would be linguistic generalisations not
unlike traditional phrase structure rules, such as the generalisation that
noun phrases can be formed through the combination of a determiner,
an attributive adjective, and a noun. All that such a generalisation speci-
fies is that a certain configuration of syntactic structures yields a gram-
matically acceptable phrase of English. Note that we are talking about
precisely the kind of thing that would be handled by the grammatical
component in the dictionary-and-grammar model of linguistic knowl-
edge. So, is there something to the distinction of grammar and lexicon
after all? Would the construct-i-con be able to accommodate purely
formal generalisations? In order to answer these questions, we need to
have a closer look at ‘meaningless’ constructions.
Fillmore et al. (2012) identify three construction types that they view
as meaningless. The first kind is exemplified by examples such as John
sings, which combines a subject with an agreeing verb in what is called
the Subject–Predicate construction. This construction reflects a
formal generalisation, but it does not contribute any meaning of its own
that would go beyond the combined meanings of the component lexical
items. Fillmore et al. even reject the idea that the Subject–Predicate
construction might evoke a highly general meaning, such as ‘the estab-
lishment of a topic about which something is said’: in examples such
as There’s a problem or It’s a shame the subject constituents (there, it) are
not referential and hence cannot be topics. The case for viewing the
Subject–Predicate construction as meaningful is thus highly tenu-
ous. Another purely formal construction would be the Modifier–Head
construction, which is instantiated by the combination of an adjective
with a noun (red ball), or an adverb and an adjective (completely full). What
the construction formally specifies is that the first element modifies the
second and that the second element determines the type of phrase that
the whole construct represents. Whereas one might be tempted to argue
that the construction conveys the meaning of ‘an X that has the quality
of being Y’, it turns out that this paraphrase only works for a subset of
all examples that instantiate that construction. Consider the following
examples.
(3) John smoked a fat cigar.
I never see any of my old friends any more.
The judge found the alleged murderer innocent.
Bob’s restaurant was closed down for hygienic reasons.
Whereas a fat cigar is ‘a cigar that is fat’, old friends are not ‘friends that
are old’, and an alleged murderer is no more ‘a murderer who is alleged’
than hygienic reasons are ‘reasons that are hygienic’. So even though the
syntactic mechanism of combining a modifier with a head is the same
across these examples, the respective interpretations differ.
The second type of construction that Fillmore et al. (2012) discuss is
not so much meaningless in itself as highly heterogeneous in the mean-
ings that are associated with different examples of the respective con-
structions. In this category, Fillmore et al. include Subject–Auxiliary
Inversion, criticising Goldberg’s account of a common core meaning
as too vague (Fillmore et al. 2012: 327). While there may be common
semantic traits of questions, conditionals, and exclamatives, Fillmore et
al. doubt that ordinary speakers of English entertain semantic generali-
sations at such high levels of abstractions. However, they maintain that
speakers know the formal pattern of Subject–Auxiliary Inversion.
Another highly abstract formal generalisation that maps onto a variety
of separate meanings is exemplified by Filler-Gap constructions (Sag
2010). These constructions have in common that an argument of a verb,
typically a direct object, appears in a place that differs from its canonical
position in a simple declarative clause. For instance, in the sentence Bob
ate the sandwich, the object directly follows the verb. Compare that with
the following sentences that include the verb eat.
(4) What kind of sandwich did you eat?
How many sandwiches he ate!
Keep track of all the sandwiches you eat!
Normally the kids don’t touch sandwiches, but this one they’ll eat.
The more sandwiches you eat, the hungrier you get.
The examples above illustrate different constructions, namely
Wh-Questions, Exclamatives, Relative Clauses, the Topicalisation
construction, and the The X-er the Y-er construction. In each of these
examples, the thing that is eaten is expressed, but it appears in a place
before the verb, not after it. As a technical way of referring to this state
of affairs, we can say that the thing eaten, the ‘filler’, appears in a non-
argument position. The argument position, which directly follows the
verb eat, is not taken up by any linguistic material in these examples, so
that we speak of it as a ‘gap’. In the published literature on Filler-Gap
constructions you will often find example sentences in which filler and
gap are co-indexed and shown as such, as illustrated in the example
below.
(5) [What kind of sandwich]i did you eat __i ?
filler gap
As with Subject–Auxiliary Inversion, it does appear that Filler-

Gap constructions reflect a broad syntactic generalisation specifying
that an argument of a verb may appear in a non-argument position.
A linguistic theory would be considered ‘elegant’ if it could state that
generalisation and explain, in one fell swoop, the syntactic behaviour
of the whole range of construction types that are shown in (4). By the
same token, it is clear that these construction types do not share a
common semantic core. Fillmore et al. (2012) thus posit Filler-Gap
as an abstract syntactic generalisation that is at work in different con-
structions. The generalisation has no meaning in itself; rather, the con-
struction types (Wh-Questions, Exclamatives, Relative Clauses,
the Topicalisation construction, and the The X-er the Y-er) are
associated with their respective meanings.
Third, Fillmore et al. identify Ellipsis constructions as syntactic
generalisations that do not carry meaning. Three specific cases that they
discuss are called Gapping, Stripping, and Shared Completion (also
known as Right Node Raising).
(6) One sock lay on the sofa, the other one under it.
John put the bowls in the dishwasher, and the plates, too.
The South remains distinct from and independent of the North.
In typical examples of Gapping, two phrasal constituents are juxta-
posed, and the second one is missing a verb form that is present in the
first one, which is called the ‘gap’. The term is motivated by the fact that
the remaining parts of the phrase are still there. In the example above,
the phrases the other one and under it would be called ‘remnants’. The
second example illustrates Stripping (Hankamer and Sag 1976), a term
which is meant to convey that a full sentence is stripped of everything
except one constituent. The example conveys that ‘John put the plates
in the dishwasher’ by means of just mentioning the plates. Stripping can
thus be seen as a more radical form of Gapping. A typical feature of
Stripping is the presence of the adverbial too or the negative particle not,
as in Eric played the guitar solo, not George. The third of the examples given
above is a case of Shared Completion. It is useful to think of distinct
from and independent of as two adjectival phrases that share a common
ending, namely the North. The common ending in Shared Completion
can be the noun phrase part completing a prepositional phrase, but the
following examples show that other patterns are also possible.
(7) His theory is based on – but more complicated than – string
theory.
Stretching can help prevent or at least reduce soreness.
He is one of the most – if not in fact THE most – tragic figure in

sports history.
Each of these examples contains a phrasal head that requires a comple-
ment: the preposition on, the verb prevent, and the determiner one all
require a nominal complement to follow them. However, what follows
these elements is a conjunction (but, or, if), which is followed by further
linguistic material before the projected nominal structure (string theory,
soreness, tragic figure) finally appears. Note that strings such as prevent or
at least reduce or one if not the most are not syntactic constituents. Rather,
it seems more appropriate to view the strings or at least reduce and if not
the most as parenthetical structures that are inserted between a head
and its complement. The role of Parenthetical constructions in
Construction Grammar is discussed in more detail in, for example, Imo
(2007). To sum up, elliptical constructions such as Gapping, Stripping,
and Shared Completion do not lead to coercion, they do not convey
meanings of their own, and they yield sentences with meanings that can
be worked out by processing the meanings of the component words.
Where does this survey of ‘meaningless’ construction leave the idea
of a construct-i-con as a repository of form–meaning pairs? Does the
construct-i-con perhaps need an appendix of syntactic rules, just as the
traditional view of grammar needed an appendix of idiomatic expres-
sions? The least problematic for the Construction Grammar view, as
outlined in the previous two chapters, are construction types such as
the family of Subject–Auxiliary Inversion constructions or Filler-
Gap constructions. Here, there are actually two possible routes for
analysis, which are outlined by Stefanowitsch (2003: 420) in a study that
addresses the different semantic relations between modifier and head in
the two English Genitive constructions:
There are two ways in which this issue can be approached [. . .]: by
a prototype analysis that takes one of the semantic relations [between
modifier and head] as basic and finds a principled way of accounting
for all other relations as extensions from this basic prototype; or by a
schematic analysis that finds an abstract characterization that covers all
and only the relations encoded by the given construction.
We have already seen that Goldberg (2006) takes the ‘schematic’

approach for her analysis of Subject–Auxiliary Inversion, looking
for a common semantic core that is shared by all constructions that
have this syntactic pattern. Taylor (1996: 343–7) takes the ‘prototype’
approach in an analysis of the English S-Genitive construction, trying
to relate the different interpretations of that construction semantically.
Both approaches are viable in principle, as the question of at what levels

of abstraction speakers make generalisations is essentially an empirical
one that has to be determined individually for each and every speaker
and each and every grammatical phenomenon. It is further possible
that schematic analyses and prototype analyses are not even mutually
exclusive, as speakers may entertain several generalisations at the same
time, some at lower levels, and some at higher, more abstract levels. So
far then, no appendix to the construct-i-con is needed, but what about
the other meaningless constructions?
The first construction type discussed by Fillmore et al. (2012), illus-
trated by the Subject–Predicate construction, requires an analysis
that combines the schematic approach with the prototype approach. As
Fillmore et al. point out, positing a schematic meaning for all combina-
tions of a subject with a predicate seems like a project with little hope
of success. Existential and presentational constructions such as There
are no unicorns or There’s beer in the fridge pose difficulties for a schematic
analysis. Conversely, it seems difficult to relate such an abstract mean-
ing to the more concrete meanings that are conveyed by existential
and presentational constructions. The prototype approach, as one of the
solutions advocated by Stefanowitsch, is thus also of limited use. A way
out of the dilemma would be a combination of the two: one could assume
a schematic analysis for instances such as John sings and A man walks
into a bar, while positing separate constructional schemas for sentences
such as There’s beer in the fridge. In fact, one of the foundational stud-
ies in Construction Grammar does this and presents a prototype-based
analysis of English There constructions (Lakoff 1987). The main idea
would be that specialised constructions can share selected formal and
functional aspects of more general constructions, while at the same time
displaying characteristics that are not shared by the more general schema.
With a little goodwill, generalisations such as Subject–Predicate and
Modifier–Head can thus be brought into the fold of the construct-i-con.
What remains as a true problem, however, is the case of elliptical
constructions. It seems that constructions such as Shared Completion,
Gapping, and Stripping have all the characteristics of traditional
phrase structure rules, while not conveying any substantial meaning
of their own. If we were to assign degrees of ‘meaninglessness’ to dif-
ferent constructions, these construction types would surely top the list,
even when compared with Subject–Predicate and Modifier–Head
constructions. Furthermore, it is not immediately clear whether these
syntactic patterns would exhibit other telltale signs of constructions,
namely either idiosyncratic constraints (see Section 1.3.3) or colloca-
tional preferences (see Section 1.3.4). If all of the criteria for construc-
tionhood fail, it would have to be conceded that these syntactic patterns

do not form part of the construct-i-con, as envisioned by current practi-
tioners of the Construction Grammar framework.
Summing up, purely formal generalisations, that is, constructions
without meanings, have no natural place in the construct-i-con. In fact,
if Construction Grammar is to be seen as a veritable theory of linguistic
knowledge, then this theory will make the strong claim that there should
not be any constructions without meanings. A scientific theory is usually
considered ‘good’ if it makes claims that can be falsified. Construction
Grammar is thus only a good theory of linguistic knowledge if it is
clear what empirical observations could show that it is wrong. Hence,
Construction Grammarians need to face the critical evidence of patterns
such as Shared Completion, Gapping, and Stripping in order either
to save the current idea of the construct-i-con or to adapt the theory
in an ad hoc way to accommodate the empirical facts. As elliptical
constructions are fairly frequent and productive, and as the ‘problem’ of
meaningless constructions extends to phrasal constructions such as the
Verb Phrase construction or the Prepositional Phrase construction,
clear answers are needed. The worst that Construction Grammarians
could do would be to look the other way, towards nice meaningful pat-
terns such as The X-er the Y-er or the Way construction, and pretend
that the problem of meaningless constructions does not exist.
3.2 The construct-i-con: a network of interlinked constructions

Up to now, the construct-i-con has been described in quite vague terms,
as a large repository of form–meaning pairs that represents speakers’
knowledge of language. A rather important addendum is that this
repository is not a flat list or even an unordered ‘bag of constructions’,
but instead a highly structured, hierarchical network in which construc-
tions are interlinked. The following sections discuss how constructions
are linked to one another in the construct-i-con.
3.2.1 Inheritance
A central concept in this regard is the notion of inheritance.
Inheritance captures a relation between more abstract constructions,
which are situated towards the top of the constructional network, and
more specific constructions, which are found in lower levels of the
constructional hierarchy. Naturally, there is no simple binary distinc-
tion between abstract constructions and concrete constructions. Rather,
constructional generalisations are situated along a continuum from very
Figure 3.1 face the music and the constructions it instantiates
abstract schemas down to lexically specified patterns. Concrete patterns

thus instantiate more abstract patterns at increasingly schematic levels.
Figure 3.1 visualises the idea that a lexically specified idiom such as face
the music ‘accept unpleasant consequences of one’s actions’ instantiates a
number of more abstract constructions, such as the transitive use of the
verb face and the more general Transitive construction.
Constructional characteristics, that is, characteristics of form and
meaning, are inherited in a downwards direction, from higher, more
schematic levels towards lower, more concrete levels. To give an exam-
ple, one of the most abstract constructions we have encountered so
far would be the Subject–Predicate construction. Almost all clausal
constructions in English share the formal characteristic of the verb
agreeing in number and person with its subject. Specific clausal con-
structions thus inherit this characteristic from the Subject–Predicate
construction. Goldberg (2013) offers another example that illustrates
inheritance. Consider the following set of examples.
(8) He is in prison.
She came from school.
John is going to university.
They are on vacation.
Herbert has been at sea for three years.
Each of these examples contains a sequence of a preposition and a
bare count noun. Goldberg calls this pattern the PN construction. The
construction inherits a very basic formal aspect from the more general
Prepositional Phrase construction, namely the linear order of prepo-

sition and nominal complement. Apart from this inherited formal fea-
ture, the PN construction shows several constructional idiosyncrasies:
first, the construction conveys a stereotypical role in that someone can
only be in prison as an inmate, not as a warden. Students go to university
but not their lecturers, or the janitors, or the vice-chancellor. Second,
unlike in regular prepositional phrases, the nominal cannot be modified
with an adjective (*They are on sunny vacation). Third, whereas regular
prepositional phrases can be formed with all manner of nouns, the PN
construction is clearly restricted. People may go to bed, but not *go to
couch. All of these idiosyncrasies are specific to the PN construction;
they are not shared with prepositional phrases in general. Inheritance is
thus a ‘downwards’ relation; more specific constructional characteristics
are not projected ‘upwards’.
Inheritance is not only a matter of language form, but can also be a
matter of meaning. To illustrate, Michaelis and Lambrecht (1996: 237)
point out that noun phrases can occasionally receive an exclamative
interpretation, as in the following examples.
(9) The time he takes!
The amount of plastic waste!
My car payments!
What is conveyed by these examples is that the referents of the respec-
tive noun phrases represent an extreme point on a scale that has to be
understood by the listener. Even for examples in decontextualised form,
this is not hard to do. The first example states that someone is taking
quite a long time; the second example refers to an enormous amount
of waste; and the third one refers to the fact that the car payments are
relatively high. Michaelis and Lambrecht call this semantic pattern the
Metonymic NP construction. The semantics of that construction is
inherited by noun phrases in formally more specialised constructions,
as in the following examples.
(10) I can’t believe the money I spent on clothes!
It’s ridiculous the amount of plastic waste!
The first of these examples Michaelis and Lambrecht (1996: 244) iden-
tify as an instance of the NP–Complement Exclamative construction.
The exclamative noun phrase is, in this context, an argument of the verb
believe. The second example instantiates the Nominal Extraposition
construction, which consists of a predicative clause and the exclamative
noun phrase. Both of these constructions thus inherit aspects of their
meaning from the Metonymic NP construction.
To summarise our first pass at the concept of inheritance, we can

state that it is a relation between more abstract and more specific con-
struction in which the more specific ones exhibit formal and functional
features of the more abstract ones. Much as a squirrel is a rodent, a
mammal, and an animal at the same time, an idiom such as face the music
simultaneously instantiates a range of more abstract constructions.
3.2.2 Kinds of inheritance links

From the previous discussion it could be concluded that inheritance is
more or less just a matter of organising the constructions of a language
into a hierarchy: we have talked about more abstract types and more
concrete instantiations of those types. While this is certainly an impor-
tant part of the picture, there are several different kinds of inheritance
links in the construct-i-con that deserve discussion. The basic kind of
inheritance link, which was discussed above and which connects face the
music with transitive face and the Transitive construction, is called an
instance link (Goldberg 1995: 79): the idiom face the music is a special
case of transitive face, which in turn is a special case of the Transitive
construction.
Goldberg (1995: 75) identifies polysemy links as another type
of inheritance link. As was discussed in Chapter 2, many argument
structure constructions have several conceptually related meanings;
the technical term for this is that these constructions are polysemous.
This holds, for instance, for the Ditransitive construction, which has
the basic sense of ‘X causes Y to receive Z’, and several extended senses,
such as ‘X enables Y to receive Z’ or ‘X intends Y to receive Z in the
future’. The examples below illustrate the respective senses.
(11) John gave Mary the book.
The doctor allowed me a full meal.
I promise you a rose garden.
In the construct-i-con, the central sense of the Ditransitive construc-
tion would be linked to the extended senses by means of polysemy
links. Note that we are not dealing with a taxonomical relation here,
as an ‘intended transfer’ is not, strictly speaking, a type of transfer.
Nonetheless, it is clear that the sense of an ‘intended transfer’ inherits
a substantial amount of its semantics from the more general ‘transfer’
sense. It is useful to think of polysemy links as metonymic relations,
that is, relations between a whole scenario and parts of that scenario.
Typically, the extended sense of a construction will represent a scenario
that inherits central parts of the scenario that is associated with the basic
sense of the construction. Another example of polysemy links can be

seen in the semantic spectrum of the English S-Genitive construction.
Taylor (1989) identifies ‘possession’ as the central sense, which is related
to extended senses of the construction via polysemy links. Consider the
following examples.
(12) John’s book
John’s office
John’s train
the country’s president
yesterday’s events
inflation’s consequences
Whereas the first of these examples denotes ownership or possession,
the remaining examples convey associative relations of fairly different
kinds. Taylor (1989: 679) lists several features of prototypical posses-
sion, such as the possessor being animate, the possessed being a con-
crete object, the possessor having exclusive access to the possessed, and
the possession relation being a long-term one, amongst several others.
Whereas a phrase such as John’s book may fulfil all criteria of the proto-
type, the remaining examples fail an increasing number of them. For
instance, John’s train ‘the train John is riding on’ is not owned by John
and there is just a short-term relation between John and the train. These
extended senses of the S-Genitive construction would nonetheless be
connected to the central sense through polysemy links.
Constructions may further be connected through metaphorical links.
Like the polysemy links that were discussed above, links of this kind are
semantic in nature and connect a basic sense of a construction with
an extended sense. The special hallmark of metaphorical links is that
the two connected senses represent the source domain and the target
domain of a conceptual metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Goldberg
(1995: 81) argues for a metaphorical link between the Caused Motion
construction (see Section 2.3.2) and the Resultative construction (see
Section 2.1). The conceptual metaphor that links the two is Change is
Motion. The source domain, movement through space, is represented
by the central sense of the Caused Motion construction in examples
such as John combed his hair to the side. Interestingly, speakers commonly
use exactly the same syntactic pattern to express a resultative event, as
in Anne tied her hair into a bun. Goldberg’s explanation for this observation
is based on the Change is Motion metaphor, which motivates the link
between these two constructional meanings.
Another example of metaphorical links between basic and extended
senses of constructions can be seen in the English Modal Auxiliary
constructions. The English core modals (must, may, can, should, etc.)
display a systematic pattern of polysemy that has been interpreted as
metaphorical. Sweetser (1990) argues that the following pairs of sen-
tences are linked through a metaphor that has the sociophysical world
as its source domain and as its target domain the world of possibility,
necessity, and likelihood. The first sentences thus represent what is
known as deontic modal meaning, while the second sentences convey
epistemic meaning.
(13) You must be home by ten! You must be David’s brother!
You may now kiss the bride. He may have escaped through the
window.
I can’t open the door. That can’t possibly be true.
You should try the sushi. Prices should go down sooner or
later.
The kind of construction that we are dealing with in these examples
consists of a modal auxiliary such as must and a non-finite verbal com-
plement such as be home. The semantic difference between You must be
home by ten! and You must be David’s brother! is that the first is a command
whereas the second is a conclusion. In the construct-i-con, deontic and
epistemic uses of each Modal Auxiliary construction would be con-
nected through a metaphorical link.
A fourth type of inheritance link connects constructions that show
partial similarities in their respective forms or meanings. What are
called subpart links (Goldberg 1995: 78) relate constructions that show
either formal or semantic overlap, but which do not allow the clas-
sification of one construction as an instance of the other. To illustrate,
the Transitive construction and the Ditransitive construction have
quite a few features in common: both have a subject with the role of an
agent and a direct object that assumes the role of a patient or theme.
(14) John wrote a letter.
John wrote Mary a letter.
There are clearly correspondences between these two sentences, and
it would not be too unreasonable to assume that speakers’ knowledge
of language includes the fact that the Transitive construction and the
Ditransitive construction have a number of characteristics in common.
Associations between constructions that share formal or semantic struc-
tures but cannot be seen as instances of one another are represented in
the construct-i-con as subpart links. Trivially, every complex syntactic
construction consists of a range of smaller phrasal constructions. Every
instance of the Transitive construction is necessarily linked to the

Noun Phrase construction and the Verb Phrase construction via sub-
part links. The concept of subpart links is, however, more interestingly
elucidated with the example of constructions that are called syntactic
amalgams. The following example has been discussed by Lakoff (1974).
(15) John invited you’ll never guess how many people to his party.
For want of a better label, this type of sentence will be called the Matrix
Clause as Modifier construction here. The sentence can be thought of
as a combination of different constructions, one of which, however, only
contributes a subpart of itself. In the example, one component construc-
tion would be the Complement Clause construction that is instanti-
ated by sentences such as You’ll never guess how many people John invited
to his party. This construction is partly overlaid with the Transitive
construction, which produces examples such as John invited very many
people to his party. The string you’ll never guess how many is a subpart of the
Complement Clause construction that can stand in for the phrase very
many in the Transitive construction, thus creating a syntactic amal-
gam, a mixture of constructions. The amalgamated construction would
be related to the Complement Clause construction with a subpart
link, and to the Transitive construction with an instance link, since it
properly instantiates that construction.
The above example makes clear that constructions in the construct-i-
con form a network, rather than just a hierarchy. Besides instance links,
polysemy links, and metaphorical links, which relate higher and lower
levels of abstraction in the construct-i-con, subpart links may connect
constructions that occupy the same level of abstraction. Rather than
one construction linking to just one other construction, the construct-
i-con is thus a network with many-to-many links. In the Construction
Grammar literature, subpart links are often discussed in connection
with the phenomenon of multiple inheritance, which describes the
way that one construction may instantiate several, successively more
abstract constructions at the same time. Consider the following example.
(16) The Smiths felt it was an important enough song to put on their
last single.
Like the previous example, this sentence can be considered a syntactic
amalgam in which two constructions are interlaced. The first of these is
the Attributive Adjective construction, which is instantiated by noun
phrases such as an important song or the red ball. The second construction
is the Enough To-Infinitive construction, which is further illustrated
by the following examples.
(17) You’re old enough to know better.

I had trained enough to finish my first marathon in good shape.
This fridge contains enough food to feed a small village.
John remembered the incident clearly enough to identify the
suspect.
I was not in control enough to stop this from happening.
In its basic form, the Enough To-Infinitive construction consists of
a phrase in which the phrasal head is modified by the element enough,
and that phrase is followed by a to-infinitive clause. Semantically, the
phrase with enough encodes an enabling precondition that allows the
event or state expressed in the to-infinitive clause to take place. Hence,
an adjectival phrase such as old enough can be followed by the clause to
know better, a verb phrase such as had trained enough can be followed by to
finish my first marathon in good shape, and the noun phrase enough food can
be followed by to feed a small village. If you compare this kind of structure
with example (16), you will notice a syntactic difference. In the noun
phrase an important enough song, the element enough modifies not the head
of the phrase, but the adjective important. Accordingly, the noun phrase
is followed by a to-infinitive clause that connects back semantically to
the adjective. A way to deal with the structure of the example would be
to analyse it as a syntactic amalgam of the two sentences shown below.
As the layout suggests, the two constructions are mutually interwoven.
The material of each source construction appears in full in the syntactic
amalgam, which is linked to both of them via subpart links.
(18) It was an important song.
It was important enough to put on their last single.
A different example of multiple inheritance is offered by Michaelis and
Lambrecht (1996). Michaelis and Lambrecht argue that the Extraposed
Exclamative construction and the Metonymic NP construction that
was discussed in the previous section can be combined into a syntactic
amalgam that they call the Nominal Extraposition construction. The
following examples show the respective source constructions and the
syntactic amalgam.
(19) It’s unbelievable what he can do with the piano!
The things he can do with the piano!
It’s unbelievable the things he can do with the piano!
The examples discussed in the previous paragraphs may give you the
idea that multiple inheritance always results in syntactically quite com-
plex structures, which is not necessarily the case. For instance, all of
the cases of coercion that were discussed in Chapter 2 on argument

structure constructions can be seen as cases of multiple inheritance. An
example such as Bob sliced the carrots into the salad instantiates the Caused
Motion construction, but it also is connected to the Transitive
construction with a subpart link, since Bob sliced the carrots is a typical
transitive clause. In summary, subpart links are extremely pervasive in
the construct-i-con, and it is the pervasiveness of these links that turns
the construct-i-con into a densely woven fabric of constructions, rather
than a mere hierarchy of constructions.
3.2.3 Constructional contamination – when subpart links influence

speakers’ choices
As was discussed in the previous section, subpart links connect con-
structions that show overlap with regard to either form or meaning. On
the basis of data from Dutch, Pijpops and Van de Velde (2016) have
shown that subpart links can influence the behaviour of speakers in
contexts where they have a choice between two constructional variants.
The same phenomenon can also be observed in English (Hilpert and
Flach forthcoming). Consider the following examples.
(20) Doctors concluded that the virus had been sexually transmitted.
Doctors concluded that the virus had been transmitted sexually.
(21) The driver was instantly killed.
The driver was killed instantly.
The examples illustrate syntactic variation within the English Be-Passive
construction. The construction allows the past participle to be modified
by an adverb that can either precede or follow the participle. Given that
two variants are possible, how do speakers select one or the other? With
regard to the examples above, large corpora such as the BNC show
that the selection is not driven by pure chance. Instead, speakers have
recognisable preferences. They strongly prefer the adverb-initial order
in sexually transmitted, but they prefer the adverb-final order in killed
instantly. Are these preferences illustrations of the quirks and idiosyn-
crasies that the first two chapters of this book have discussed? Pijpops
and Van de Velde (2016) do not think so. They argue that preferences
of this kind can actually be explained through the existence of subpart
links in the construct-i-con. The collocation sexually transmitted does
not only appear as part of the English Be-Passive construction, but it
also appears in noun phrases such as sexually transmitted diseases. In fact,
this environment is where we find the collocation most often in corpus
data. By contrast, expressions such as an instantly killed driver are rare.

It is therefore not too surprising that speakers are biased towards the
adverb-initial order in their production of the Be-Passive construction
in example (20), while there is no such bias in example (21). Pijpops
and Van de Velde (2016) call this effect constructional contamination.
Adverb–participle collocations that occur with high frequency in noun
phrases, such as those shown below in (22), can be said to contaminate
the Be-Passive construction and introduce a bias into choices that
speakers make.
(22) a democratically elected government
a publicly traded company
a lightly greased baking sheet
Note that the adverbial-initial order is the only one that is possible
in the English Noun-Phrase construction; strings such as *an elected
democratically government are ungrammatical. While sentences such
as The government was elected democratically or The baking sheet should be
greased lightly are absolutely unproblematic from the point of view of
the Be-Passive construction, they are substantially less likely than
their counterparts with adverb-initial order. What does this tell us
about relations between constructions in the construct-i-con? One
conclusion is that speakers associate constructions that share aspects of
their form, which basically just means that subpart links exist. Another
conclusion is that these subpart links are frequency-sensitive, so that a
frequent subpart of one particular construction can lead speakers to use
that subpart in another construction. The more frequent a substring, the
more likely it is that the substring contaminates other constructions. A
third conclusion is that speakers operate with chunks of language that
only need to be superficially similar. On the whole, the phenomenon
of constructional contamination supports the idea that speakers engage
in what is known as good enough parsing (Ferreira and Patson 2007),
which implies that speakers typically do not construct a detailed syn-
tactic analysis of the speech they hear. Some vagueness in the syntac-
tic parse is tolerable and does not hinder successful communication.
Constructional contamination also allows the conclusion that speakers
use concrete, exemplar-based representations of syntactic structures
(Da˛browska 2014) when they produce or process language. This, of
course, is very much in line with the idea that knowledge of language
is usage-based (Bybee 2010).
3.2.4 Complete inheritance vs. redundant representations

This chapter introduced the concept of instance links, describing
how more specific constructions inherit characteristics from more
general ones as part of their formal and functional profile. Within the
Construction Grammar community, there is a broad consensus that
instance links are an important structuring principle in speakers’ knowl-
edge of language. A point of divergence, however, concerns the ques-
tion of whether the inherited information is to be represented just once
in the grammar, as associated with the most general construction, or
whether this kind of information is redundantly represented across all
of the constructions that share it. Put simply, if the Subject–Predicate
construction already specifies that a verb has to agree in number and
person with its subject, does this information have to be associated
directly with each and every construction that inherits part of its form
from the Subject–Predicate construction? It is clear that the more
economical strategy would be to store information just once, so that
constructions at lower levels of abstractions could be processed by
‘looking up’ all inherited pieces of information in the higher levels of
the construct-i-con. At the same time, however, the most economical
theory of linguistic knowledge need not necessarily be the most plau-
sible theory from a psycholinguistic point of view, as will be discussed
below. So, what information about language do speakers memorise, and
what information do they look up in the construct-i-con? To get a sense
of the point that is at issue, consider the following quote from Fillmore
et al. (1988: 502):
All of the many competing accounts of the workings of language draw a
distinction in one way or another between what it is that speakers know
outright about their language and what it is that they have to be able to
figure out. For example, speakers of English have to know what red means
and that it is an adjective, and they have to know what ball means and that
it is a noun. They have to know that adjectives can co-occur with nouns
in a modification structure (as in a phrase like red ball), and they have to
know the proper strategies for giving a semantic interpretation to such
adjective–noun combinations. But they do not have to know separately,
or to be told, what the phrase red ball means. That is something which
what they already know enables them to figure out.
Theories of linguistic knowledge that leave a maximal amount of infor-
mation to be worked out, rather than stored, endorse a view that is known
as complete inheritance. This point of view is usually taken in branches
of Construction Grammar that have the computational implementation
of grammatical knowledge as their primary aim. This view assumes that

inherited information is only stored once, namely with the most general
construction that carries this information. A second assumption that
follows from this view is that only constructional schemas are stored,
not their specific instantiations. For instance, the Present Tense con-
struction specifies that verbs in the third person carry the suffix -s,
yielding forms such as thinks, walks, or sits. Since both form and meaning
of these forms are completely transparent, a speaker would not have to
memorise them. Knowing the schema is enough; the rest can be worked
out. By contrast, the view that is taken in this book makes the assump-
tion of redundant representations, that is, multiple memorisations of
the same pieces of information across different levels of abstraction. It
is assumed that besides general schemas, speakers memorise a great
many concrete instantiations of those schemas. The main argument
for adopting such a view is fuelled by empirical evidence for the idea
that speakers retain a highly detailed record of linguistic usage events
in memory (Bybee 2010). This record includes fine phonetic detail of
concrete utterances, structural characteristics of utterances, and their
situational context. The richness of each record of course fades with
time, like any kind of memory, but it is refreshed by new usage events.
Crucially, speakers do not ‘strip down’ the record to a more schematic
representation. Gurevich et al. (2010) show that speakers retain ver-
batim memory of language from short stories, even when they are not
explicitly asked to do so. A high level of detail is thus maintained in
memory, leading to redundant representations of linguistic knowledge.
There is evidence that even fully regular inflected forms are stored in
memory, provided that they occur frequently enough (Stemberger and
MacWhinney 1988). On this view, the construct-i-con is usage-based,
that is, created through experience with language and continuously
influenced by experience with language (Bybee 2010). This point will
be further elaborated in Chapter 8 on variation and change.
3.3 ‘Normal syntax’ in Construction Grammar

If you have taken an introductory linguistics course, the sessions on
syntax will have introduced you to different word classes such as nouns,
verbs, prepositions, and so on. In all likelihood, your class will also have
covered how these types of words combine into phrases and sentences.
Most textbooks that are currently on the market offer some discus-
sion of syntactic schemas that allow the composition of noun phrases,
verb phrases, prepositional phrases, and several others. These schemas,
which are sometimes called phrase structure rules, are meant to rep-
resent knowledge of language. Speakers know that different types of

words can be combined to form larger units of language, as for instance
in the following examples, all of which are noun phrases.
(23) milk
an old donkey
the big one with the two horns
all of my personal belongings
my friend Amy, who recently moved to Italy
The fact that all of these examples are noun phrases can easily be
demonstrated with a battery of syntactic tests. It is, for instance, possible
to finish the string Let me tell you a story about . . . with any of the above
examples. Likewise, someone could, after hearing you say that, ask What
did you want to tell me a story about?, to which you would be answering with
the respective example in its bare form. All of this strongly suggests that
speakers have formed a generalisation across different kinds of noun
phrases. However, having come this far in the book that you are reading,
you may wonder how the phrase structure rules that you have learned
for noun phrases in your introductory course fit into the picture of the
construct-i-con that has been sketched in the previous sections. How
does Construction Grammar handle ‘normal syntax’? Is there a Noun
Phrase construction? And is that construction just a phrase structure
rule that is called something else?
The short answer to these questions is that there is in fact a Noun
Phrase construction, but that this construction differs in many respects
from phrase structure rules as they are commonly understood. One cru-
cial difference between the two concepts is that phrase structure rules
are meant to be assembly instructions, like manuals that allow you to
put together a piece of furniture, whereas abstract phrasal constructions
are thought of as generalisations across different linguistic structures
that allow you to identify a given structure as belonging to a certain
category. The Noun Phrase construction is thus not primary to more
specific constructions such as the Attributive Adjective construction
(an old donkey, the red ball), the Nominal Quantifier construction (all of
my personal belongings, some of the juice), or the Relative Clause construc-
tion (the man who left, the sandwich that I kept in the drawer for too long).
Rather, the Noun Phrase construction is an emergent phenomenon
that results from speakers perceiving certain similarities across these
different kinds of construction. In summary, whereas phrase structure
rules would be seen as an essential tool for putting together phrases and
sentences, abstract phrasal constructions are really a case of cognitive
luxury: they are certainly nice to have, but nothing crucial depends on
them, either in language production or in comprehension. The crucial

work is done by constructions that occupy lower levels of abstraction in
the construct-i-con.
Some researchers in Construction Grammar have expressed quite
serious doubts about the existence of high-level syntactic generalisa-
tions such as the noun phrase, subject and object, or even part-of-speech
categories such as noun or verb. For instance, Croft (2001: 55) states that
‘no schematic syntactic category is ever an independent unit of gram-
matical representation’, which means that high-level syntactic generali-
sations only ever become part of knowledge of language when speakers
make out similarities across constructions and form a generalisation. To
take a concrete example, Croft argues that there really is no overarching
syntactic category of a grammatical subject. Rather, there is a certain
kind of subject that occurs in the Transitive construction, there is
another kind of subject that occurs in the Intransitive construction,
and so on and so forth. The subject of the Transitive construction in
turn is a generalisation that speakers would have made across more con-
crete transitive constructional schemas such as transitive kick, transitive
read, transitive eat, and so on and so forth. Since many different construc-
tions combine a subject constituent with a verbal constituent, speakers
may perceive this similarity and arrive at a higher-order generalisation,
which would correspond to the Subject–Predicate construction, or,
for that matter, to a phrase structure rule for clausal constructions.
But whereas such a phrase structure rule would represent the very
bedrock of grammatical knowledge in the dictionary-and-grammar
model of linguistic knowledge, the Subject–Predicate construction
in usage-based Construction Grammar is nothing more than a vague
idea entertained by speakers who are analytically minded enough to
see similarities between different kinds of construction. Croft (2001:
57) points out that not all speakers may in fact make these high-level
generalisations, so that any claim to their psychological reality would
rest on shaky foundations. Importantly, Croft’s arguments do not only
relegate abstract syntactic schemas to a rather marginal place in the
construct-i-con; they also force us to reconsider the cognitive status
of word classes such as noun, verb, preposition, and determiner. In the
dictionary-and-grammar model of linguistic knowledge, each lexical
item that is listed in the mental dictionary has a category label that
identifies it as belonging to a certain word class. Word classes are seen as
the building blocks of phrases and sentences, and phrase structure rules
crucially depend on them: a phrase structure rule defines a construc-
tion (say, the Noun Phrase construction) through parts of speech that
occur in that construction. Construction Grammar stands this relation
on its head: the constructions are basic, and parts of speech come into
being as generalisations across different types of construction. In the
construct-i-con, categories such as ‘determiner’ or ‘preposition’ thus
represent generalisations at an extremely high level of abstraction, like
the Subject–Predicate construction.
Expressing a similar point of view, other researchers have stressed
the importance of low-level generalisations for the overall structure of
the construct-i-con. Boas (2003) offers an analysis of the Resultative
construction, which he views not as a unified phenomenon, but rather
as a cluster of generalisations at a slightly lower level. Importantly,
the Resultative construction occurs with a wide range of verbs and
resultative phrases, but there are restrictions on the kinds of elements
that may occur in a given example. For instance, Jerry danced himself
to exhaustion and Nancy talked herself hoarse are perfectly acceptable
examples, whereas *Jerry danced himself exhausted or *Nancy talked herself
to hoarseness are decidedly unidiomatic (Boas 2005: 449). Rather than
positing a high-level argument structure construction, Boas advocates a
solution that recognises several low-level generalisations, each of which
may serve as the basis for further extensions. Whereas one general
construction would not be able to account for the unacceptability of the
above examples, the empirical facts could be explained by a cluster of
‘productivity islands’, that is, small-scale constructions that speakers use
to form analogies.
Low-level generalisations are of course also important when it comes
to the cognitive representation of word classes or even words them-
selves. Whereas abstract constructions would seem to suggest that when
an adjective is called for, any adjective will do, this is demonstrably not
the case. The Attributive Adjective construction, which combines
a determiner, an adjective, and a noun, yields grammatical constructs
such as the blue book. Applied across all kinds of adjectives, it also yields
ungrammatical examples such as the following.
(24) *the awake child
*the ready food
*the on computer
*the fond of children lady
Clearly, speakers’ knowledge of the Attributive Adjective construc-
tion includes the fact that some adjectives do not appear in that construc-
tion. This means that the construction cannot just specify that it requires
an adjective, any adjective. Rather, the construction is a rich and detailed
representation of speakers’ experience with attributive adjectives.
Adjectives such as awake, ready, or on are conspicuously absent from this
experience, which leads to the effect of ungrammaticality in the exam-

ples above. Turning to an even finer level of detail, it has to be pointed
out that even a word represents something of a generalisation. The lin-
guistic forms walk, walks, walked, and walking all instantiate the verb walk,
which is listed in dictionaries under the latter form only – the lemma
walk. In the dictionary-and-grammar model of linguistic knowledge, it
is a matter of course that only the lemma, the base form, is memorised
in the mental dictionary, and the inflected forms are produced by gram-
matical rules. Not so in Construction Grammar, where inflected forms
can be redundantly represented in the construct-i-con, and where these
inflected forms may develop some independence with regard to their
respective meanings. Newman and Rice (2006) compare inflected forms
of the verbs eat and drink, finding that there are differences, for example,
with regard to the presence or absence of an object. This means argu-
ment structure is not so much a property of a verb lemma as a property of
an inflected verb form. Newman and Rice conclude that a lemma-based
conception of speakers’ knowledge of words is inadequate.
Summarising the paragraphs of this section, Construction Grammar
handles ‘normal syntax’ in a way that necessitates a shift of perspec-
tive away from the common view of words, word classes, and phrase
structure rules. These categories do exist in the construct-i-con, but
not as building blocks and assembly manuals for syntactic structures;
rather, they are generalisations at a fairly high level of abstraction. Work
in Construction Grammar has furthermore stressed the importance of
low-level generalisations in the representation of linguistic knowl-
edge. Generalisations at high levels of abstraction are desirable from
a theoretical point of view, as they allow the construction of ‘elegant’
models of linguistic knowledge. At the same time, most of the available
evidence from corpora and psycholinguistic experiments points to the
crucial role of low-level generalisations.
3.4 Summing up
This chapter has discussed the question of how speakers’ knowledge of
language is organised in the construct-i-con, which has been introduced
earlier as a large network of form–meaning pairings. The first section
addressed the question of whether the claim that constructions have
meanings can in fact be maintained for all constructions, even highly
abstract syntactic patterns such as the Subject–Predicate construc-
tion or ellipsis constructions such as Shared Completion. Whereas
researchers such as Goldberg (1995, 2006) maintain the idea of the
construct-i-con as a repository of meaningful forms, other proponents of
Construction Grammar, notably Fillmore and colleagues (2012), allow

meaningless constructions into the construct-i-con. They identify three
types of construction for which semantic analyses are problematic. The
first type is illustrated by the Subject–Predicate construction or the
Modifier–Head construction. These constructions represent highly
general formal generalisations that contribute little in the way of mean-
ing to the utterances in which they are found. A second type of con-
struction, illustrated by Subject–Auxiliary Inversion or Filler-Gap
constructions, conveys a heterogeneous range of different meanings,
so that a common semantic generalisation appears problematic. The
third type covers Ellipsis constructions such as Gapping, Stripping,
and Shared Completion. These construction types specify particular
syntactic patterns, but do not convey recognisable meanings and do
not lead to coercion effects either. The chapter discussed two strate-
gies for the analysis of these constructions as form–meaning pairs. One
strategy would look for an overarching, schematic meaning whereas
the second would posit a network of lower-level constructions, each of
which would have a meaning of its own.
The second section of the chapter introduced the concept of inherit-
ance, which describes links between constructions in the construct-i-
con. These links concern aspects of form as well as aspects of meaning.
Different kinds of inheritance links were distinguished. Instance links
connect constructions in a hierarchical fashion, linking construction
types with particular instances of those types. Polysemy links connect
constructions that share the same form but display a variety of differ-
ent senses. Examples for such constructions include the Ditransitive
construction and the S-Genitive construction. Metaphorical links are
similar to polysemy links, since they also connect basic and extended
senses of a construction. A metaphorical link is found, for instance,
between the Caused Motion construction and the Resultative con-
struction. Finally, subpart links connect constructions that exhibit partial
similarities in their respective forms or meanings. Subpart links establish
relations between complex syntactic constructions and all those con-
structions that instantiate their parts. These links are largely responsible
for the network-like structure of the construct-i-con. A phenomenon
that was discussed in connection with subpart links is multiple inherit-
ance, the idea that one construction may instantiate several constructions
at the same time. Syntactic amalgams were examined as illustrations of
multiple inheritance. The role of subpart links was further examined in
a discussion of constructional contamination. The section finished with a
discussion of two opposing views on how inherited information would be
represented in the construct-i-con. On the view of complete inheritance,
this kind of information is represented only once, namely at the most

general level where it is necessary. By contrast, the view maintained in
this book, and in usage-based Construction Grammar in general, is that
inherited information is represented redundantly across different levels
of abstraction, with every construction that shares this information.
The final section of the chapter considered the role of ‘normal syntax’
in Construction Grammar. In the dictionary-and-grammar model of
linguistic knowledge, syntax rests on the notions of words, word classes,
and phrase structure rules. It was explained that these concepts have a
proper status in Construction Grammar, but that they are seen as an
epiphenomenon of knowledge of constructions, rather than as the basis
of syntactic knowledge.
Study questions
1. Why are ‘meaningless constructions’ problematic for the idea of the
construct-i-con?
2. What types of constructions do Fillmore et al. (2012) identify as
meaningless?
3. What is meant by the term ‘inheritance’?
4. What kinds of inheritance links are there?
5. What is the difference between complete inheritance and redundant
representations?
6. Discuss the concept of multiple inheritance with regard to the fol-
lowing examples.
(a) This summer, John is travelling to I think it’s the Bahamas.
(b) That’s what bothers me is that he never really listens.
7. What are the similarities and differences between phrase structure
rules and abstract phrasal constructions?
Further reading
The concept of inheritance, with reference to different types of inher-
itance links, is discussed in Goldberg (1995: ch. 3). Zeschel (2009)
elaborates on the distinction of complete inheritance vs. redundant
representations of linguistic knowledge. A useful discussion of abstract
phrasal and clausal constructions is found in Hoffmann (2013). The
question of the ‘right’ level of abstractness for the description of con-
structions is discussed in Gries (2011). Finally, Croft (2001) presents
central arguments for viewing constructions as the basis for high-level
generalisations such as parts of speech and categories such as subject
and object.
4 Constructional morphology
4.1 More than a theory of syntax

The previous chapters have made the case that Construction Grammar
is a theory of linguistic knowledge in its entirety. Everything that speak-
ers know when they know a language is to be represented as a construct-
i-con, a large network of constructions. Despite this all-encompassing
commitment, most examples in this book up to now have been syntactic
in nature: constructions such as the Resultative construction, the
Ditransitive construction, or the Enough To-Infinitive construction.
In fact, most of the Construction Grammar literature that you are likely
to come across deals exclusively with syntactic phenomena. However,
Construction Grammar is not just a theory of syntax. This chapter turns
to morphological constructions, that is, constructions that require an
analysis of word-internal structures. Booij (2010, 2013) has recently
developed a constructional approach to morphology, and this chapter
reviews the basic ideas of that approach. What now would be examples
of morphological constructions? Consider the following sentences.
(1) This is a wug. Now there is another one. There are two . . . wugs.
If you need to reach me, I’m skypable all morning.
Not quite shorts, not quite pants – shpants!
John gave me a what-the-heck-is-wrong-with-you look.
4.1.1 one wug, two wugs

The first example might be familiar to you because it comes from the
famous ‘wug study’ (Berko Gleason 1958). In that study, young children
were prompted to produce plural forms of invented words such as wug,
heaf, or gutch. The children mastered this task, producing wugs with a
voiced /z/, heafs with a voiceless /s/, and gutches ending in /əz/, despite
the fact that they had obviously never encountered these forms before.
75
The fact that they performed in this way indicates that the children
had formed a generalisation about how the English plural is formed.
This generalisation is a morpho-phonological construction. The con-
struction is morphological because regular plural forms consist of a
stem and a plural suffix, and furthermore because the form of the suffix
depends on the phonological characteristics of the stem. This phenom-
enon is called allomorphy, and it is typically talked about in terms of
rules. As you may already expect, the perspective from Construction
Grammar recasts the idea of these rules as a construction that forms part
of the construct-i-con, namely the Plural construction. The Plural
construction belongs to a larger group of inflectional morphological
constructions. Inflectional constructions mark grammatical distinctions,
and there are only a limited number of them in English. Nine important
ones are summarised in the following example.
(2) A group of cats the Plural construction
eats the Present Tense 3rd Person Singu-
lar construction
John’s sandwich that the S-Genitive construction
he topped with cheese the Past Tense construction
produced the Past Participle construction
by grazing cows the Present Participle construction
happier the Morphological Comparative
construction
than the happiest clam. the Morphological Superlative
construction
As always, the whole truth is somewhat more complicated than the
example suggests. Besides the Past Tense construction with -ed there
are alternative ways of expressing past time reference, notably ablaut
(sing, sang, sung) and irregular plurals (put). The suffix -ing is listed just
as the Present Participle construction, but it also instantiates a part
of the Progressive construction (He’s reading). The Past Participle
construction is further involved in the Perfect construction (They have
produced a lot of cheese recently). However, as a first pass at the inflectional
constructions of English, example (2) is useful enough.
4.1.2 skypable
In this chapter, the notion of morphological constructions will be
exemplified chiefly with derivational constructions. Derivational con-
structions are instrumental for word formation. The word skypable from
example (1) above illustrates the coinage of a relatively new word.
constructional morphology 77
There are certain parallels to the wugs example: even if you had never
encountered the word before, you probably had little difficulty in work-
ing out what it meant. Someone who is skypable is ‘someone who can be
skyped’, that is, reached over a computer-mediated channel of com-
munication. By the same token, a fabric that is washable ‘can be washed’,
a foldable chair ‘can be folded’, and so on. You can observe that speakers
come up with new and original coinages of this kind, which suggests
that they have not only mentally stored a long list of adjectives ending
in -able; rather, they have stored a construction that is partially sche-
matic, so that it allows the formation of new words such as pigeonholeable
‘can be pigeonholed’ or cut-and-paste-able ‘can be cut-and-pasted’.
Researchers in English derivational morphology have of course stud-
ied phenomena of this kind for a long time under the heading of word
formation processes. In approaches that associate with the dictionary-
and-grammar view of linguistic knowledge, productive word formation
processes are conceived of as morphological rules (e.g. Aronoff 1976;
see also Plag 2003: 30). The core idea of constructional morphology is
that speakers form generalisations that associate a schematic form with
a schematic meaning. For instance, speakers are thought to generalise
over sets of words such as baker, buyer, runner, seller, and speaker so that
they form the schema shown in (3), which allows them to coin new
words (from Booij 2010: 2).
(3) [[x]V er]N --- ‘one who Vs’
On the face of it, morphological constructions are not very differ-
ent from word formation rules. However, there are several pieces of
evidence that word formation processes behave in ways that are very
similar to the behaviour of syntactic constructions. These behavioural
characteristics would be difficult to model as aspects of rules, but they
lend themselves quite easily to a constructional account. First, word
formation processes are selective with regard to the elements that they
take as input. Chapter 1 discussed the Have Long V-ed construction
that licenses the expression I have long known your father but not *I have
long read this book. Similarly, the V-er construction licenses runner and
swimmer, but speakers are reluctant to accept stander ‘one who stands’ or
drowner ‘one who drowns’ as valid constructs. The construction is thus
restricted to a specific semantic subclass of verbs; typically we find verbs
that express self-controlled dynamic activities. Second, word formation
processes exhibit coercion effects that have been discussed, for instance,
in connection with Grinding constructions (There was cat all over the
road). To illustrate, the V-able construction typically selects transitive
verbs as hosts (washable, foldable, and not *sleepable), but it occasionally
coerces intransitive verbs into quasi-transitive senses, thus subtly chang-

ing their meanings. Specifically, a laughable proposal ‘can be laughed
at’ and a livable wage ‘can be lived on’. These examples indicate that
speakers sometimes stretch the limits of what a constructional schema
typically allows, thereby creating words that are not quite prototypical
of a construction, but nonetheless licensed by it. Chapter 8 will come
back to this and discuss the issue of language variation in more detail.
4.1.3 shpants
Besides word formation processes that create new words through affixa-
tion, there are several morphological construction types that are called
non-concatenative, reflecting the idea that they do not just string
linguistic material together in a morpheme-by-morpheme fashion.
One example is the Blend construction, which combines parts of exist-
ing words to a new word, as in shpants (shorts, pants) or manwich (man,
sandwich). Whereas it is perhaps relatively easy to see how a schema
such as the V-able construction combines a form and a meaning, the
case of blending may initially look like another case of a meaningless
construction (see Section 3.1), and thus, a potential problem case for the
constructional view of linguistic knowledge.
There is compelling evidence that blending represents a formal gen-
eralisation in the minds of speakers. Blends are not formed as random
combinations of two or more words, but follow a rather precise phono-
logical pattern that Plag (2003: 123) describes as the blending rule: two
words combine in such a way that the blend contains the first part of the
first word and the second part of the second word.
(4) AB + CD >> AD
motor hotel motel
smoke fog smog
stagnation inflation stagflation
Examples such as shpants or guesstimate show that sometimes blends even
contain all of a component word, but in these cases too the first word
has to contribute its beginning and the second word has to contribute
its end.
The systematicity goes even further than that. Blending is sensitive
to the syllable structure of the component words. Syllables such as
blip, couch, or soft have three main parts that are called onset (the initial
consonants), nucleus (the vocalic elements), and coda (any final conso-
nants). Nucleus and coda combine to form what is called the rime of a
syllable. Blend formations can combine parts of words relatively freely,
but crucially, the rime of each participating syllable needs to stay intact.
Consider the examples given below.
(5) linguist magician >> linguician linguagician
dentist torturer >> denturer dentorturer
chicken crocodile >> chickodile chickendile
breakfast lunch >> brunch *brench
spoon fork >> spork *spoork
shout yell >> shell *shoull
For the first three word pairs, the Blend construction allows speakers to
form at least two possible blends: ask a few friends what a half-chicken,
half-crocodile monster would be called, and the likely answers will
include chickodile, chickendile, and perhaps a few other forms. There is
thus variability; the blending rule does not completely determine the
outcome of a combination of two words. However, there is not complete
freedom. As the last three examples show, the rime constraint prevents
formations such as *brench, *spoork, or *shoull. This is not because they
might be more difficult to pronounce, but rather because these forms
combine a syllable nucleus from the first word with a syllable coda
from the second word. To get *spoork, you would have to take spoo
from spoon, and rk from fork, dissecting the rimes of both input words. If
you agree that *spoork does not feel quite right as a blend, your knowl-
edge of English contains this idiosyncratic phonological constraint of
the Blend construction. (A puzzling exception to this generalisation
is the blend Spanglish. If you find other exceptions, please send an email
to the author of this book.)
Whereas the formal side of English blends thus clearly suggests that
we are dealing with a construction, it is not so easy to find a generalisa-
tion in terms of their meaning. After all, shpants, chunnel, brunch, and spork
all refer to quite different things. The most promising avenue would be
to take one of the emergency strategies outlined in Chapter 3 and to
posit a fairly general meaning that captures how blends always refer to a
‘chimera’, that is, an idea that results from the conceptual overlay of two
or more previously existing ideas. This kind of meaning is motivated
through iconicity, that is, a correspondence between form and meaning:
a word that combines parts of two words also combines partial meanings
of the two source words. The specifics of such an analysis will, however,
not be fleshed out here.
4.1.4 a what-the-heck-is-wrong-with-you look

The fourth example of a morphological construction type illustrates
what is called a Phrasal Compound. The main characteristic of phrasal
compounds in English is that their non-head elements, that is, their left
constituents, consist not of a word, but of a phrase. A few more examples
are offered below.
(6) What really gets on my nerves are these countless ‘me too’ bands.
Over the counter drugs are medicines you can buy without a
prescription.
I prefer to take a Nietzschean god-is-dead approach to life.
The press photo shows Zuckerberg with a show-me-the-money
grin.
The army followed a don’t ask don’t tell policy.
A sign that these forms are in fact compounds is that their main stress
lies on the rightmost edge of the non-head phrase, so that they are pro-
nounced as over the COUNter drugs or god is DEAD approach (see Giegerich
2004 for a discussion of compounds and stress). This is crucial because
it means that these forms, long as they are, are to be considered as single
words. Phrasal compounds are difficult to explain in a dictionary-and-
grammar model of linguistic knowledge that strictly separates syntactic
rules and morphological rules (Sato 2010). The formation of a phrase
such as over the counter would be the task of a syntactic component in the
mental grammar, whereas word formation processes such as compound-
ing would be handled by a morphological component. In such theories,
cases of ‘teamwork’ require some kind of explanation, typically in the
form of an interface between the different components. In Construction
Grammar, no interfaces are needed because both syntactic construc-
tions and morphological constructions are cut from the same cloth: they
form part of the construct-i-con. Phrasal compounds simply represent a
case of multiple inheritance where characteristics such as stress pattern
and headedness are inherited from the Noun–Noun Compound con-
struction while the non-head inherits the structural characteristics of a
general phrasal construction such as the Prepositional Phrase con-
struction or the Verb Phrase construction. Construction Grammar is
usually not considered to be an elegant theory of linguistic knowledge,
but in the case of phrasal compounds it provides a very straightforward
account that directly follows from its main organisational principles.
Summing up the previous paragraphs, different morphological con-
struction types show that Construction Grammar is usefully applied to
issues of word structure. The following sections build on these insights
and discuss a number of concepts that are crucial to the understanding

of morphology from a constructionist perspective.
4.2 Morphological constructions and their properties

The preceding discussion may have left you wondering what a mor-
phological construction really is. If there is a schema such as the V-er
construction and if there are forms such as baker, swimmer, smoker, and so
on, is the abstract schema a construction while its instantiations are to be
seen as constructs? The view that is proposed by Booij (2010) and that
is adopted here is that both the schema and its instantiations are con-
structions if there is evidence to suggest that they are conventionalised
form–meaning pairings.
To start with the actual words, it is non-controversial to assume that
speakers of English know the words baker, teacher, and smoker as parts of
their active vocabulary. These items have their own firmly established
representation in the construct-i-con, which makes them lexical con-
structions. Note also that words like baker and smoker have meanings that
go beyond ‘one who V-s’: a baker is someone who bakes for a living, a
smoker is someone who smokes habitually. The fact that speakers know
this is evidence for the constructional status of these words. Evidence
for the more abstract V-er construction comes from the fact that hearers
have little trouble understanding new formations that conform to the
schema. Consider the following example, which formed part of the wug
study (Berko Gleason 1958). In the study, an experimenter read the
example to children, showing them a picture of a man balancing a ball
on his nose.
(7) This man knows how to zib.
What would you call a man whose job is to zib?
In order to produce the answer zibber, children would have to have
recourse to the V-er construction, which most of them did. The actual
word zibber, at that point at least, did not form part of the children’s
construct-i-con. Hearing a new word a few times may of course estab-
lish a new node in the construct-i-con and thus lead to the birth of a
new lexical construction. To summarise the argument in a nutshell,
instantiations of a word formation process are constructions if they are
conventionalised form–meaning pairings; the abstract schema behind a
word formation process is a construction if that schema allows speakers
to produce or process new original coinages. The latter idea touches on
the issue of morphological productivity, which we need to discuss in
some more depth.
4.2.1 Morphological productivity

The notion of morphological productivity is not easily defined (Aronoff
1976; Mayerthaler 1981). Adopting ideas from van Marle (1985), the
term is used in this book in the following way.
(8) The productivity of a schematic morphological construction
describes the degree of cognitive ease with which speakers can
produce or process new complex words on the basis of that
construction.
This definition implies that productivity is gradient; a construction may
be more or less productive. Some constructions that are very productive
include the V-er construction (baker, smoker) or the Adj-ness construction
(loudness, softness); much less productive constructions are illustrated by
the N-ship construction (lordship, citizenship) and the N-eer construc-
tion (harpooneer, cannoneer). For the two latter constructions, it is fairly
difficult, perhaps even impossible, to generate neologisms. Some word
formation processes indeed seem to be completely unproductive. A
classic example is the group of English adjective-based nouns ending
in -th, which includes warmth, truth, depth, and width. There is clearly a
pattern to these nouns, but you can imagine that no wug study in the
world could get children to produce nouns such as *greenth, *wrongth,
or *roundth. By the same token, the V-ment construction (amusement,
punishment) is also unproductive. Forms such as *emailment or *jogment are
perhaps processable, but unattested. Morphological productivity shows
itself in records of language use. Chapter 1 discussed the use of linguis-
tic corpora for the analysis of constructions. With regard to the study
of morphological constructions, corpora are extremely useful because
they reveal two important issues that are related to productivity. First,
a corpus allows the researcher to count the different instantiations of a
schematic morphological construction. This measure is called the type
frequency of a morphological construction. For instance, the Adj-en
construction, which is completely unproductive these days, is repre-
sented by only forty-four types in the BNC, which holds 100 million
words of running text. Table 4.1 shows those types along with how often
the respective forms are found in the corpus.
A type frequency of forty-four, given the large size of the BNC, is very
low. Highly productive constructions such as the Adj-ness construction
register hundreds, sometimes thousands of types. The upper end of
morphological productivity is illustrated by inflectional morphological
constructions such as the Plural construction, which works with just
about any noun in the English language (which leads second language
Table 4.1 Types of the Adj-en construction

Type Tokens Type Tokens Type Tokens
weaken 322 fasten 91 toughen 34
widen 317 flatten 89 blacken 28
tighten 302 dampen 88 smarten 25
soften 283 stiffen 74 moisten 20
broaden 269 ripen 70 cheapen 14
lessen 213 awaken 70 deaden 14
loosen 162 quicken 65 redden 11
shorten 144 darken 59 deafen 8
straighten 135 thicken 58 gladden 8
sharpen 132 quieten 56 sadden 7
harden 130 waken 48 neaten 6
lighten 128 fatten 48 steepen 6
deepen 119 sweeten 43 whiten 6
brighten 109 freshen 37 madden 1
worsen 104 slacken 37
learners of English to make mistakes such as *informations, *evidences, and

*researches), and the Past Tense construction; see example (2) in this
chapter. The type frequencies of these constructions lie in the tens of
thousands. Now, the second important issue that corpora reveal about
the productivity of a morphological construction is the occurrence of
low-frequency instantiations. There is a special term reserved for forms
that occur only once in a given corpus; they are called hapax legomena,
or hapaxes, for short. A look at Table 4.1 shows that only one of the
forty-four types of the Adj-en construction is a hapax: madden. A low
ratio of hapaxes – and one out of forty-four is very low – indicates the
absence of productivity. Clearly, speakers do not use the Adj-en con-
struction to create many neologisms. With a productive construction,
corpus data will show that a substantial ratio of types occurs only once.
Not all of these one-offs are neologisms: some established words simply
are very rare. However, a high ratio of low-frequency instantiations
still points to the fact that speakers feel free to produce new coinages,
and furthermore that they expect hearers to understand forms such
as talkativeness, unexplainably, or applauder without problems. The more
strongly a morphological construction is represented as a node in the
construct-i-con, the easier this is.
Given the premise that productivity is gradient, and given that
strength of productivity correlates with the strength of mental repre-
sentation in the construct-i-con, where does this leave non-productive
word formation processes such as the Adj-en construction? Do they
deserve to be called constructions? Booij (2013: 258) argues that non-

productive word formation processes should also be viewed as construc-
tions. One of his arguments is that the suffix -ship is clearly identifiable
in forms such as lordship, citizenship, and so on, so that speakers may well
form a generalisation, despite the fact that managership or consultantship
are words that may seem rather ad hoc, perhaps even unacceptable, to
some speakers. The view that is taken in this book is that a label such
as the N-ship construction may serve as a useful descriptor for a group
of words, but if such a label is used, there needs to be evidence that
speakers (and not only linguists!) do indeed generalise across the words
in question and form a node in the construct-i-con, however weak that
node might be. Productivity, as measured in corpus data, is one piece of
evidence for that.
4.2.2 Paradigmatic organisation

Chapter 3 introduced the concept of subpart links (Goldberg 1995:
78), which relate constructions that partially overlap in either their
form, their meaning, or typically both. An example of two syntactic
constructions that share aspects of form and meaning is the case of the
Transitive construction and the Ditransitive construction. Both of
the examples below have a subject with the role of an agent and a direct
object that has the role of a patient or theme.
(9) John wrote a letter.
John wrote Mary a letter.
Morphological constructions are heavily interlinked through subpart
links. Just think of a simple lexical item such as the verb report and
consider all the morphological constructions that are connected to it via
subpart links. Some of those constructions are listed below.
(10) report-s the Present Tense 3rd Person Singular
construction
report-ed the Past Tense construction
report-er the V-er construction
report-able the V-able construction
mis-report the mis-V construction
report the Deverbal Noun construction
Lists of constructions that are related through subpart links by a common
element are called paradigms. You may have come across paradigms
of inflectional morphological constructions (typically constructions of
different verbal tenses or different nominal case endings) in pedagogical
grammars or language classes. The above list is more inclusive and

also includes derivational morphological constructions. Why now are
subpart links and paradigms important for the constructional view of
morphology? In order to answer this question, Booij (2013: 264) presents
the following list of examples.
(11) alpin-ism alpin-ist
commun-ism commun-ist
de-ism de-ist
fasc-ism fasc-ist
solips-ism solips-ist
On the dictionary-and-grammar view of linguistic knowledge, complex
morphological words are formed in such a way that an input word is
fetched from the dictionary, which is then, by means of a grammatical
rule, combined with an affix in the morphological component of the
grammar. To form alpinism, a speaker may thus retrieve the adjective
alpine from the mental lexicon and combine it with -ism to yield a
word that means ‘alpine activities, that is, sports having to do with
mountains such as the Alps’. Importantly, this procedure does not seem
to work equally well for all word pairs given above. There are simply
no independent lexical items with the forms *de, *fasc, or *solips. In
order to maintain the dictionary-and-grammar view, one could assume
that speakers form fascist by retrieving fascism from the mental lexicon,
whereupon a grammatical rule replaces the suffix -ism with -ist (Aronoff
1976). Booij (2013: 264) points out that such deletion rules are not
necessary in the constructional view of morphology. If speakers know
groups of words that are interconnected through subpart links, they can
form a generalisation across these word groups. In other words, speakers
know that alpine, alpinism, and alpinist belong to a common paradigm that
is also instantiated by social, socialism, and socialist, or ideal, idealism, and
idealist. If speakers’ knowledge of this paradigm is entrenched enough,
hearing the word ventriloquist ‘a performer who speaks in such a way that
his voice appears to emanate from a puppet, not himself’ is enough of
a clue to infer that there might be a word such as ventriloquism for this
kind of performance.
The paradigm linking words suffixed with -ist and -ism is not the only
example of its kind: basically every morphological phenomenon that
involves stem allomorphy (Plag 1999: 193) requires an analysis of this
kind. Word pairs such as summary – summarise, memory – memorise, fantasy
– fantasise, or theory – theoretic, apology – apologetic, energy – energetic illus-
trate this. Subpart links in the construct-i-con that connect these kinds
of words allow speakers to ‘fill in the blank’ when they encounter a word
they have not heard before. Knowledge of constructional paradigms

further plays a major role in processes of regularisation such as the use
of weeped instead of wept, and it looms large in children’s overgeneralisa-
tion errors during first language acquisition. We will thus come back to
this topic in later chapters of this book.
4.2.3 Non-compositional meanings

Throughout this book, we have seen examples of constructions with
meanings that cannot be fully explained in terms of the meanings of
the component parts. Non-compositional meanings are perhaps most
easily seen in fixed idiomatic expressions such as by and large or all of
a sudden. By contrast, many morphological constructions seem to be
perfectly transparent, particularly inflectional morphological construc-
tions. A construction such as the Past Tense construction adds a suffix
to a verb stem and thereby specifies the time of an event as lying in the
past, without, however, changing the meaning of the lexical verb in
any way. Likewise, the derivational un-Adj construction that is used
to form unfair, unhappy, and so on yields adjectives that express the
opposite of their host adjectives. On the whole, English morphologi-
cal constructions thus appear to be broadly compositional in terms of
their meanings (Booij 2012: 209). Yet there are many morphological
constructions that do exhibit non-compositional meanings. Consider
the following examples.
(12) comparable, honourable, agreeable
moth-eaten, husband-dominated, doctor-recommended
moth-eating, husband-dominating, doctor-recommending
I’ll make the tuna salad and you make the salad-salad.
Non-compositional meanings are frequently seen at the level of lexical
constructions, which may start out as semantically regular coinages,
but which subsequently adopt more specialised meanings. This has
been pointed out for baker and smoker above; it also applies to com-
parable ‘roughly equal’, honourable ‘worthy of respect’, and agreeable
‘pleasant’. The second set of words in the example above illustrates a
non-compositional semantic trait that is characteristic of a productive
morphological construction, which is called the Noun–Past Participle
Compound construction here. Note that the overall meanings of moth-
eaten, husband-dominated, and doctor-recommended consistently portray the
nominal constituent of the compound as an agent who has carried out
the action that is specified by the past participle. A doctor-recommended
procedure is one that has been recommended by doctors, not for doc-
tors, or in a non-specific connection with doctors. Conversely, the

words moth-eating, husband-dominating, and doctor-recommending, which
instantiate the Noun–Present Participle Compound construction,
convey meanings in which the nominal constituent undergoes the
action specified by the verb. If you are a native or otherwise proficient
speaker of English, these regularities may seem self-evident to you,
but they do not automatically follow from compositional principles.
There is nothing in the component words themselves that would
prohibit the interpretation ‘recommended for doctors’ for the word
doctor-recommended. The conventional interpretation of these words is
learned as a non-compositional characteristic of the Noun–Present
Participle Compound construction.
Turning to the last example, non-compositional effects can
be observed in a phenomenon that will be referred to here as the
Contrastive Reduplication construction (Ghomeshi et al. 2004). In
this construction, linguistic material is reduplicated, that is, repeated, in
order to convey a particular meaning. Consider the following examples.
(13) I’m up, I’m just not up-up.
My car isn’t mine-mine, it’s my parent’s.
They are rich, but not rich-rich, not New York City rich.
The effect that is achieved by reduplication is that the linguistic structure
in question receives a prototypical or idealised interpretation, often in
contrast to a less prototypical interpretation. In this way, tuna salad is
contrasted to salad-salad, which typically consists of green lettuce, raw
chopped vegetables, and some kind of dressing. Someone lying in bed
awake after having silenced the alarm clock may claim to be up, though not
just yet up-up, which would involve being in an upright position, having
the eyes open, and wearing clothes. The symbolic link between a redupli-
cated structure and the idea of a prototype is non-compositional; knowl-
edge of the individual words is not sufficient to work out the intended
interpretation. In summary, then, the same kinds of non-compositional
meanings that provide evidence for constructions in syntax also provide
evidence for constructions at the level of morphology.
4.2.4 Simultaneous affixation

Word formation processes are usually thought of as applying in serial
fashion, one after the other, in what is called cyclic rule application
(Siegel 1974). According to this concept the suffix -al attaches to form
to yield formal, and after that the suffix -ism attaches to formal to yield
formalism. Similarly, a verb such as deactivate would be derived from
activate, which in turn would be derived from active. Certain word for-
mation processes may thus feed subsequent word formation processes,
that is, provide input for them. Booij (2010) points out that this logic
runs into trouble with the following words.
(14) caffeine decaffeinate
moral demoralise
mythology demythologise
nuclear denuclearise
Stalin destalinise
Cyclic rule application would suggest that the verb decaffeinate has been
formed on the basis of caffeinate. Perhaps unbeknownst to many people,
such a verb does exist in usage (I gotta get caffeinated!), but common
dictionaries do not list it. At any rate, an analysis that posits caffeinate
as the input for decaffeinate is not very plausible because the simpler
verb is much less frequent than the more complex verb. Usually, bases
are more frequent than their derivatives. (The pairs busy – business and
govern – government are counterexamples to this tendency.)
Now, if the cyclic model of word formation does not seem to offer a
satisfactory account, how can the constructionist view of morphology
handle the matter? A constructional analysis (Booij 2010: 44) would
posit a morphological construction in which multiple elements attach
simultaneously to a host. In other words, there is a pattern that we
might call the de-N-ate construction that operates on nominal elements
in its open slot and that yields forms such as decarbonate, dehydrate, or
decaffeinate. Such a construction could be schematically represented as
follows.
(15) [de [[x]N ate]]V --- ‘to remove X’
Importantly, the de-N-ate construction does not require the prior
existence of the verb caffeinate, but in its internal bracketing structure
caffeinate forms a constituent, making such a verb a possible target of
backformation. This accounts for the fact that for some speakers, caffein-
ate may be a perfectly acceptable verb, whereas others may have never
heard of it. The remaining examples can receive parallel accounts,
such that demoralise is formed by the de-N-ise construction, denuclearise
is formed by the de-Adj-ise construction, and so on. In some cases,
it may actually be hard to decide whether simultaneous affixation or
cyclic affixation yields the more plausible analysis. Consider the verbs
militarise and demilitarise and their respective nominalisations. Table 4.2
lists frequencies from the BNC, including occurrences with alternative
spellings (militarize etc.).
Table 4.2 Frequencies of militarise and demilitarise

militar- demilitar-
ise 3 5
ised 13 30
isation 18 18
The frequencies of demilitarise, demilitarised, and demilitarisation are

higher, which would be suggestive of simultaneous affixation, but clearly
this is not incontrovertible evidence for the de-N-ise construction. On
the constructional view of morphology, the de-N-ise construction
would be in evidence if and only if we found complex forms for which
a corresponding simpler verb ending in -ise was not attested. So, if you
think that the form odorise ‘make stinky’ is not a proper verb of English
whereas deodorise ‘remove stinkiness’ is fine, then your knowledge of
English grammar includes the de-N-ise construction.
4.3 Constructional solutions to morphological puzzles

The purpose of any morphological theory is not just to account for
relatively trivial processes such as read and -able combining to form the
word readable. A good theory should provide systematic explanations
for phenomena that, at first sight, do not seem to follow any general
rules. The following sections will discuss two such phenomena, namely
affix ordering and compound formation, explaining how they would be
analysed from a constructional perspective.
4.3.1 Affix ordering

Among the derivational morphological constructions of English, two
productive constructions that can be singled out are the Adj-ise con-
struction (generalise, specialise, stabilise) and the V-ive construction (active,
collective, relative). The Adj-ise construction forms verbs; the V-ive con-
struction forms adjectives. This means that theoretically, each construc-
tion should be able to occur inside the other one: it should be possible
to combine Adj-ise verbs with the suffix -ive and V-ive adjectives with
the suffix -ise. Interestingly, there is an asymmetry. As the following
examples show, only the latter is possible.
(16) activise
collectivise
relativise
*generalisive
*specialisive
*stabilisive
If you are an inquisitive person, you will probably already be thinking
about possible explanations for this asymmetry. First, you might try to
find counterexamples, that is, words that end in -isive. Good luck with
that. Second, you might think of semantic or pragmatic explanations.
Perhaps *generalisive ‘in a generalising way’ is not a particularly useful
concept to have. This may or may not be the case, but it is a fact that
many rather marginal concepts are nonetheless expressible with ad hoc
morphological constructs. Third, you might explain the asymmetry
with the fact that the V-ive construction is, after all, not as productive
as we might have thought, since *discussive ‘in a discussing way’ and
*thinkive ‘thoughtfully’ are not possible either. This is not a bad argu-
ment, but it fails to explain why native speakers of English will never,
even in a jocular fashion, produce an adjective ending in -isive. A rather
more elegant theory that has been suggested as an explanation goes by
the name of the level-ordering hypothesis (Siegel 1974). The theory
assumes that there are two levels of affixes in English. The suffix -ive
belongs to the first level, the suffix -ise to the second level. Plag (2003:
168) offers the following overview.
(17) Level 1 suffixes: -al, -ate, -ic, -ion, -ity, -ive, -ous
Level 1 prefixes: be-, con-, de-, en-, in-, pre-, re-, sub-
Level 2 suffixes: -able, -er, -ful, -hood, -ist, -ise, -less, -ly, -ness,
-wise
Level 2 prefixes: anti-, de-, non-, re-, sub-, un-, semi-
What the theory predicts is that words with Level 1 affixes may serve as
input for words with Level 2 affixes, but not vice versa. Hence, not only
*generalisive is ruled out by the theory, but also *Mongolismian, *atomlessity,
*pre-undress, or *specialisic. In other words, a single theoretical stipulation
(having two levels of affixes) explains a large number of data in one
fell swoop. However, the theory is not without its problems. First, the
theory has nothing to say about how affixes from the same level may or
may not be combined. The theory hence does not explain why heartless-
ness is fine but *darknessless ‘completely illuminated’ is not. Furthermore,
you may find examples that run counter to the predictions. The words
naturalistic or colonisation should technically be ruled out, yet they are
perfectly fine. And last, it could be objected that the theory perhaps
gets most of the facts right, but does not explain why there are these
two levels of affixes. Hay and Plag (2004) therefore propose a different
Table 4.3 Frequencies of government, discernment, and their bases

govern discern
568 259
-ment 59,988 56
Table 4.4 Ratio of parsed types for fifteen suffixes

Suffix Parsed types (%) Suffix Parsed types (%)
-ly 24 -ish 58
-th 33 -ling 62
-er 50 -ship 62
-dom 50 -hood 80
-ness 51 -less 86
-ee 53 -fulA 94
-en 56 -fulN 98
-ess 57
theory based on psycholinguistic considerations and very much in line

with central principles of Construction Grammar. The basic idea of
that theory is the complexity-based ordering hypothesis, which Hay
(2002: 527) expresses in the following way: ‘an affix that can be easily
parsed out should not occur inside an affix that cannot’. Affixes that
are not easily ‘parsed out’, that is, distinguished from their hosts, are
affixes such as -al or -ate, which Siegel (1974) classified as Level 1 affixes.
Affixes that are more transparent are Level 2 affixes such as -ness or -able.
How easy or hard it is cognitively to separate an affix from its host can
be estimated on the basis of corpus data. Consider the frequencies from
the BNC in Table 4.3.
When hearers encounter the word government, they are likely to
process it holistically, without separating it into govern and -ment. The
reason for this is that the word government is much more frequent than
the word govern. Conversely, the word discernment is less frequent than
its base discern, which makes it likely that hearers process the complex
word by parsing it into its components. Hay and Plag (2004) analysed
fifteen suffixes, determining for each one how many of its types were
likely to be parsed (in the way that discernment is likely to be parsed).
Table 4.4 shows their results, with the suffixes shown in increasing order
of parsed types.
Words such as really or finally are very frequent, even when compared
with their bases real and final. Many types show this kind of distribution,
so that only 24 per cent of the types ending in the suffix -ly are parsed.
Conversely, words such as mouthful or shovelful are infrequent in com-

parison with their bases. If the complexity-based ordering hypothesis is
right, the results from Table 4.4 mean that elements which appear later
in the table should never be suffixed with elements that appear earlier
in the table. To take an example, a word ending in -ness should never
be used as input for a word ending in -ly. In order to test this predic-
tion, Hay and Plag (2004) again use corpus data and retrieve all words
that combine affixes from Table 4.4. Predictably, many combinations
that are logically possible never appear in actual language use. Those
combinations that do appear can be used to arrange the suffixes in a
hierarchy that visualises the order in which suffixes may appear. This
hierarchy is shown below.
(18) Corpus-based suffix hierarchy
-th >> -en >> -er >> -ling >> -ee >> -ess >> -ly >> -dom >>
-hood >> -ship >> -ish >> -less >> -fulA >> -ness >> -fulN
The hierarchy reflects the fact that there are words such as lengthen
(-th >> -en), thankfulness (-fulA >> -ness), or leadership (-er >> . . .
>> -ship). The fact that corpus data reveal a hierarchy of this kind is
already a remarkable empirical observation. The crucial question for
the complexity-based ordering hypothesis is whether the hierarchy is in
agreement with the order of suffixes that is shown in Table 4.4. A com-
parison of the two lists shows a strong correlation, which is visualised
in Figure 4.1.
On the whole, a strong positive correlation lends strong support to
the complexity-based ordering hypothesis. Only two suffixes, -ness and
-ly, stray considerably from the diagonal; the rest of the suffixes behave
largely as expected. Hay and Plag thus conclude that the more easily
an affix can be separated from its base in processing, the more freely
it attaches to words that contain other affixes. This conclusion ties in
rather nicely with the constructional view of morphology, as outlined
in the earlier sections of this chapter. On this view, productivity is
a characteristic of morphological constructions, such as the Adj-ness
construction or the N-ful construction. These morphological construc-
tions will have multiple instantiations in the form of lexical construc-
tions. To illustrate, greatness, sweetness, and flawlessness instantiate the
Adj-ness construction. These lexical constructions are connected to the
overarching morphological construction via instantiation links. Now, if
there are many lexical constructions with low frequencies, that means
that these instantiation links are activated very often, thus strengthening
the node that represents the abstract construction in the construct-i-con.
Speakers are habituated to the idea that there is a pattern with an open,
1.0
-fulN
-fulA
-less
0.8
-hood
ratio of parsed types
-ling -ship
0.6
-ess -ish
-en
-ee
-er -dom -ness
0.4
-th
-ly
2 4 6 8 10 12 14
rank in the suffix hierarchy
Figure 4.1 Correlation between the ratio of parsed types and rank in the
suffix hierarchy
schematic slot. This corresponds to Hay and Plag’s notion of an affix

being easily parsed out: speakers know, albeit subconsciously, that there
is a pattern with distinct parts. Conversely, a morphological construc-
tion that has mostly instantiations of moderately high frequency, and
few low-frequency instantiations, will not receive this kind of analysis.
Mid-frequency lexical constructions such as princess or depth will often
not activate their respective instantiation links because their conven-
tionalised meanings render the schema unnecessary. These words are
thus interpreted directly, without recourse to the more general con-
struction. This corresponds to the case in which an affix is difficult to
parse out from its base. What follows from this is that nodes such as
the N-ess construction or the Adj-th construction barely exist in the
construct-i-con. In speakers’ knowledge of English, it is only vaguely
represented that there is an N-ess construction with a slot for a noun.
To summarise the argument, what Hay and Plag (2004) discuss as
parsability of base and affix is recast here as the strength with which an
abstract morphological construction is represented in the construct-

i-con. The technical term for this idea is entrenchment (see Bybee
2010). The more easily speakers can identify the parts of a construc-
tion, the more easily that construction will accommodate other con-
structions into its open slots. Coming back to the examples that this
section started out with, the fact that relativise is a word but *specialisive
is not has to do with the fact that the adjective slot in the Adj-ise
construction is reasonably transparent and therefore well represented
in speakers’ knowledge of language. By contrast, the generalisation that
speakers may make across all adjectives ending in -ive (active, creative,
depressive, etc.) does not yield a transparent verb slot for the V-ive
construction, which as a consequence remains only weakly represented
in the construct-i-con.
4.3.2 Compounding
On the face of it, compounding in English appears to be a highly regular
process. Two independent elements, a modifier and a head, are com-
bined to yield a form that combines their meanings in such a way that
the compound refers to the kind of thing expressed by the head, bearing
a relation to the kind of thing expressed by the modifier. This regular-
ity is commonly discussed as endocentric compounding. Endocentric
compounds such as watchmaker, swimsuit, smartphone, angel dust, or contract
killer instantiate the following schema (adapted from Booij 2009: 201).
(19) [A B] – ‘a kind of B that has a relation to A’
This schema, which we could call the Endocentric Compound
construction, is highly general, since it does not even specify parts of
speech for its component parts. Constructions such as the Noun–Noun
Compound construction (contract killer), the Noun–Present Participle
Compound construction (flesh-eating), or the Phrasal Compound con-
struction (over the counter drug) would be subpatterns of the general con-
struction that are connected to it via instantiation links. The subpatterns
inherit aspects of the general construction, such as prosodic stress on
the non-head element and the interpretation of the rightmost element
as the semantic head. Importantly, though, the subpatterns also exhibit
characteristics of their own that cannot be explained through inherit-
ance. For instance, the Noun–Noun Compound construction allows
a certain amount of recursivity, such that existing compounds can be
used as input for the formation of larger compounds. The same cannot
be said of other compounding constructions. Compare the following
sets of words.
(20) child language

child language acquisition
child language acquisition research
child language acquisition research group
child language acquisition research group member
squeaky clean
?squeaky clean shiny, ?sterile squeaky clean
*sterile squeaky clean shiny
stir fry
*stir fry simmer, *chop stir fry
Clearly, recursive compounding works better with nouns than with
adjectives or verbs, let alone prepositions. A general compounding
schema would not predict this; hence constructional schemas at lower
levels are needed.
These lower-level schemas impose constraints of their own and are
thus productive to different degrees. As in syntactic constructions, con-
straints can be statistical, rather than absolute. For example, an apparent
statistical constraint on the Noun–Noun Compound construction is
that the non-head can be in the plural only under certain conditions
(Bauer 2006: 490). In the following examples, some compounds with
plural non-heads are more acceptable than others.
(21) boy choir boys choir
skill development skills development
claim department claims department
reservation desk reservations desk
suggestion box ?suggestions box
citizen participation ?citizens participation
car factory *cars factory
watchmaker *watchesmaker
It is difficult to explain on semantic grounds alone why there should not
be a word such as *cars factory. After all, there are many cars involved,
often even several different types. To cut a long story short, the puzzle
of compounds with plural non-heads is as yet unsolved, but a construc-
tional approach at least provides a couple of leads that might be useful in
a proper analysis. For instance, it is possible to identify heads such as the
noun desk, which are particularly ready to accept plural non-heads. The
compounds reservations desk, admissions desk, communications desk, complaints
desk, special orders desk, and IT services desk thus illustrate a low-level con-
struction, the Plural desk Compound construction. Hence, if it were
your job to install a desk for dog licences in a local town hall, you might
consider calling it the dog licences desk rather than the dog licence desk. By
contrast, a head such as factory is heavily biased towards singular non-
heads. It is instructive to look at the exceptions to this tendency: munitions
factory, arms factory, and plastics factory are the three most frequent ones.
The nouns munitions and arms barely have proper singulars. For all three,
the plural has acquired a conventionalised meaning, so that plastics is
not just ‘several plastic materials’ but rather ‘industrially used plastic
materials’. Hence, it is plastics industry, manufacturing, plant, and company,
but plastic bags, bottles, tubes, and chairs. So, speakers know that a noun such
as factory will predominantly combine with singular nouns, unless such
a noun is unavailable. Any analysis of plural non-heads in compounding
would have to resort to low-level schemas that model speakers’ knowl-
edge of individual words and their combinatorics. The construct-i-con
provides a natural setting for this kind of endeavour.
A final problem case in the analysis of compounding is illustrated
by forms that combine attributive adjectives with nouns referring to
persons. Spencer (1988) offers examples like the following.
(22) moral philosopher
neural scientist
transformational grammarian
electrical engineer
serial composer
For ease of reference, forms like these will be called attributive com-
pounds. What is special about these forms? It turns out that there are
three characteristics that motivate the recognition of an Attributive
Compound construction. First of all, it can be noted that these forms
have meanings that deviate from ordinary combinations of attributive
adjectives and nouns, such as famous actor. A moral philosopher is ‘someone
who studies moral philosophy’, not ‘a philosopher who acts morally’.
Second, this kind of meaning suggests that the internal structure of moral
philosopher is such that the adjective takes scope only over the stem of
the noun, while the final nominalising suffix takes scope over the entire
compound. This structure differs from the kind of structure that is usu-
ally found in the Noun–Noun Compound construction, as illustrated
by loudspeaker.
(23) [[moral philosoph] -er]
[loud [speak -er]]
Third, Spencer (1988: 673) notes that his examples correspond to
nominal expressions that can be viewed as compounds or at least as
conventionalised set phrases, namely moral philosophy, neural science,

transformational grammar, electrical engineering, and serial composition.
Compare this with famous actor or loudspeaker, for which there are no cor-
responding expressions. Spencer therefore suggests an analysis of these
compounds that is very close in spirit to the constructional analysis of
paradigmatically related words such as alpinism – alpinist that has been
proposed by Booij (2010). Specifically, Spencer proposes that speakers
arrive at formations such as transformational grammarian or serial composer
through correspondences between lexical items that partially instanti-
ate one another. In the parlance of Construction Grammar, these would
be subpart links. Spencer (1988: 675) proposes the following lexical
networks.
(24) grammar ———————————— grammarian
| |
| |
transformational ————————— ?
grammar
(25) compose ———————————— composer
| |
composition |
| |
serial composition ————–———— ?
Spencer points out that these networks can only function if the expres-
sions in the lower left corner are in fact lexicalised, that is, in the terms
of Construction Grammar, represented as lexical constructions in the
construct-i-con. Consider an expression such as secret language, which
we can assume to be a compositional phrase, rather than a compound
or set expression. Someone who studies secret languages cannot be
referred to as a *secret linguist, although the structure would be exactly
parallel to moral philosopher or transformational grammarian. On the con-
structional view of morphology, the unacceptability of *secret linguist is
expected. In order to form that expression, speakers would need to have
secret language as an established node in the construct-i-con. Without
that node, there are no subpart links that would allow the formation of
*secret linguist.
4.4 Summing up
This chapter has left the area of syntax to discuss how Construction
Grammar deals with phenomena that concern morphology, as advanced
by Booij (2010, 2013). Morphological constructions were defined as

form–meaning pairs that require an analysis of word-internal structures.
Morphological constructions can be divided into several larger groups.
One such group is represented by inflectional constructions such as the
Plural construction, the Past Tense construction, or the S-Genitive
construction. These constructions mark grammatical distinctions, and
there are not many of them in English. The largest group of morpho-
logical constructions in English is the one of derivational constructions,
that is, constructions that are used to coin new words on the basis of
existing words. Derivational constructions subsume all phenomena that
other approaches to morphology describe as word formation processes
or word formation rules. Many such processes involve affixation, that is,
the combination of a host structure with an affix. On the constructional
view of morphology, such word formation processes are represented as
partially schematic constructions in the construct-i-con. The chapter
discussed the V-er construction (baker, smoker) and the V-able construc-
tion (foldable, washable), among several others. Another derivational
construction type is the Blend construction (spork, guesstimate), which
is a construction that exhibits phonological constraints at its formal
pole. A large family of morphological constructions works on the basis
of compounding. At the most general level, a generalisation that could
be called the English Endocentric Compound construction would
specify that individual words can be combined to form new words.
An adequate understanding of how compounding works in English
does require the analyst to posit multiple compounding constructions
at lower levels of abstraction in the construct-i-con. For instance, the
Endocentric Compound construction would be connected to the
Noun–Noun Compound construction (watchmaker), the Noun–
Present Participle Compound construction (doctor-recommended), or
the Phrasal Compound construction (over the counter drug) via instan-
tiation links. At an even lower level of abstraction, the Plural desk
Compound construction (admissions desk) connects to the Noun–Noun
Compound construction with an instantiation link.
Morphological constructions can be analysed in terms of several
properties that were discussed in this chapter. A first important charac-
teristic is morphological productivity, which was defined as the degree
of cognitive ease with which speakers can produce or process new com-
plex words on the basis of a construction. The words flirtatiousness and
flirtatiosity may describe the same thing and therefore be equally fine on
semantic grounds, but in all likelihood you find flirtatiousness easier to
understand (and much easier to pronounce). This is because the Adj-ness
construction is highly productive, and hence strongly represented as a
node in the construct-i-con, whereas a construction such as the Adj-ity

construction (generality, monstrosity) is not as productive. The productiv-
ity of a construction was shown to be related to its type frequency and to
the ratio of hapax legomena in its types. The fact that speakers produce
and understand newly coined words is a central piece of evidence for the
idea that word formation processes are cognitive generalisations, that
is, constructions. A second characteristic of morphological construc-
tions is their paradigmatic organisation, which boils down to groups of
words being strongly interconnected via subpart links. Morphological
paradigms are typically discussed for inflectional constructions (as in
sing, sings, singing, sang, have sung), but the web of subpart links that
interconnects morphological constructions spreads much further than
that and is just as important for an understanding of relations between
derivational constructions. In particular, subpart links motivate analyses
of stem allomorphy (energy – energetic), paradigmatically related forms
such as alpinism and alpinist, and Attributive Compound constructions
such as moral philosopher. In each case, processes of word formation rely
on the fact that parts of words are mutually connected in the construct-
i-con. A third characteristic of morphological constructions is non-
compositionality in meaning. While many morphological constructions
are transparent in meaning, there are examples of constructions whose
meanings go beyond the meanings of their component parts. At the
level of lexical constructions, a form such as laughable does not just mean
that something ‘can be laughed at’: the actual meaning ‘ridiculous’ goes
further. Also, constructional patterns may convey non-compositional
meanings. The Contrastive Reduplication construction (I don’t want
bubble tea, I want tea-tea!) conveys the idea of a prototypical referent,
which does not necessarily follow from its morphological form. The
fourth characteristic of morphological constructions that was discussed
in this chapter, namely simultaneous affixation, concerned forms that
resist an analysis in terms of cyclic rule application. A word such as
decaffeinate cannot be derived from either ?caffeinate or *decaffein. Instead,
forms like these require a constructional schema in which both affixes
are attached to the base in one fell swoop.
The chapter finished with a discussion of two morphological puzzles
that receive a satisfactory explanation in a constructional analysis. The
first phenomenon was the one of affix ordering in English. In response
to the question of why, for instance, the suffixes -ive and -ise can be
combined in the verb relativise but not in a word such as *generalisive,
one could propose a solution that groups affixes into different categories
which can only combine in a fixed order. Since such a theory suffers
from a number of theoretical and empirical problems, Hay and Plag
(2004) propose a psycholinguistically motivated account that fits very

well with the constructional view of linguistic knowledge: their pro-
posal is that highly parsable morphological constructions will have a
greater tolerance towards complex words as bases. In a highly parsable
construction such as the Adj-ness construction, speakers find it easy to
distinguish the base adjective and the suffix -ness. Therefore, complex
adjectives may also enter the construction to yield forms such as flir-
tatiousness. Conversely, the Adj-ity construction is not as transparent,
so that flirtatiosity remains marginal for many speakers. As a second
problematic phenomenon, the chapter discussed minor compounding
processes, namely compounds with plural non-heads (claims depart-
ment) and Attributive Compound constructions (urban sociologist),
which deviate both structurally and semantically from more general
compounding constructions. In both cases, it was argued that low-level
constructional schemas and subpart links in the construct-i-con were
crucial instruments for the analysis of these phenomena.
Study questions
1. What are the inflectional morphological constructions of English?
2. What are non-concatenative morphological constructions?
3. What is meant by the terms ‘type frequency’ and ‘hapax legomena’?
4. What can you conclude if half the types of a construction occur only
once in a large corpus?
5. Why are phrasal compounds (a what-the-heck-is-wrong-with-you
look) a problem for the dictionary-and-grammar view of linguistic
knowledge?
6. What is remarkable about words such as three-legged, curly-haired, or
red-faced?
7. Why is monstrosity a word but *authoritious not one?
8. It is an empirical fact that English derivational suffixes never occur
to the right of inflectional suffixes. Drawing on the findings of Hay
and Plag (2004), can you explain why that is the case?
Further reading
The constructional approach to morphology is developed in Booij
(2010); the summary given in Booij (2013) is an excellent primer. Plag
(2003) offers a general overview of word formation in English which is
highly compatible with the constructional agenda and which lays out
many of the empirical phenomena that a constructional account would
have to deal with. An empirical approach to the analysis of blending
is offered in Gries (2004), while compounding is discussed in Bauer

and Renouf (2001), Giegerich (2004), and Booij (2009). Regarding the
morphological problem cases that were reviewed in this chapter, it is
instructive to consult the original sources, that is, Hay and Plag (2004)
on affix ordering, and Spencer (1988) on attributive compounds.
5 Information packaging
constructions
5.1 The pragmatic side of Construction Grammar

If a fellow student of linguistics asked you what grammatical construc-
tions were good for, what would you say? An answer that comes to mind,
when considering examples such as the Ditransitive construction or
the Resultative construction, would be that grammatical constructions
serve to express fundamental conceptual scenes, or very basic concepts.
Chapter 2 discussed the scene encoding hypothesis (Goldberg 1995: 39),
which states that basic sentence types, that is, basic syntactic construc-
tions, encode as their central senses event types that are fundamental
to human experience: acts of giving and receiving, events in which
something changes, situations in which there is a cause and an effect,
and so on. A related purpose of grammatical construction would be the
expression of important concepts such as ‘possession’ (the S-Genitive
construction) or ‘difference’ (the Comparative construction) and
the expression of important distinctions, such as ‘one vs. many’ (the
Plural construction), ‘now vs. then’ (the Past Tense construction),
or ‘definitely vs. maybe’ (Modal Auxiliary constructions). Extending
the scene encoding hypothesis, we could thus summarise these observa-
tions and say that grammatical constructions are good for expressing
basic meanings that are fundamental to human life. But is that true
of all grammatical constructions? This chapter will discuss a number
of constructions that serve a different purpose, namely the purpose of
relating what is being said to what has been said before. In this book, this
function is called information packaging (Prince 1981). Consider the
following list of examples.
(1) As for John, he lost his wallet.

He lost his wallet, John.
What happened was that John lost his wallet.
What John did was lose his wallet.
information pack aging constructions 103
It was John who lost his wallet.

What John lost was his wallet.
It was his wallet that John lost.
As for his wallet, John lost it.
What happened to John’s wallet was that he lost it.
You will probably agree that each of the examples can be roughly para-
phrased with the sentence John lost his wallet. This is because each of
the examples is linked to the Transitive construction via a subpart
link, and that construction contributes the most important semantic
substance to these utterances. Yet the grammar of English affords its
speakers an apparent luxury by offering a broad range of syntactic con-
structions to express that semantic substance in slightly different ways.
Of course, rather than being a luxury, this has a purpose, namely the
packaging of information.
Successful communication depends in a large measure on presenting
new information in such a way that hearers can easily integrate that
information with things that they already know. Information packaging
constructions, which are sometimes also called information structure
constructions, serve the function of organising and arranging meanings,
relating new meanings to old meanings, rather than conveying mean-
ings themselves. Speakers will choose a given information packaging
construction in a given situational context depending on their assump-
tions of what the hearer already knows, what the hearer may infer, and
what is completely new to the hearer. Hence, the discussion of infor-
mation packaging constructions leads us towards the pragmatic side
of Construction Grammar. Pragmatics (Griffiths 2006) is understood
in this book as the study of context-dependent meanings in linguistic
utterances. If you have taken an introductory linguistics class, you will
probably have heard of concepts such as indirect speech acts (such as
Could you pass me the salt?, which is not a literal request for information) or
conversational maxims (such as what is called the maxim of relevance,
which asks speakers to make their contributions thematically relevant).
Typically, these discussions of pragmatics have little to say about lin-
guistic forms, that is, constructions. Rather, pragmatics is taken to be
the study of those meanings that are relatively independent of linguistic
forms, and conversely, dependent on the situational context. So how do
Construction Grammar and pragmatics fit together?
To illustrate that relationship consider again the example What John
lost was his wallet. This utterance instantiates a construction that is called
the Wh-Cleft construction. Imagine the communicative situation in
which this construction might be used. Clearly, not every situation is
equally suitable. For instance, it is utterly unlikely that you, later today,
will get a phone call from your mother that she begins with the words
Hi, it’s me. What John lost was his wallet. There is nothing syntactically odd
about this utterance, but hearing it would probably make you wonder
whether your mother should see a doctor. By contrast, the utterance
would be perfectly in order if you had been on the phone earlier that
day, and your mother had filled you in on the talk of the town, namely
that your old friend John lost his mullet (that is, he finally went to the
hairdresser and got rid of his embarrassing haircut). As it turns out,
though, your mother had misheard. John’s mullet is as mighty as ever;
what he lost was in fact his wallet. Now she is calling you to correct her
story. Comparing the two scenarios, three things are different in the
second one. First, you and your mother had already talked about John.
Second, you had already talked about John losing something. Third,
there is a contrast between the lost thing that you talked about and the
thing that was actually lost. These three contextual features are typical
conditions for the use of a Wh-Cleft.
Consider the following examples, which are taken from internet sites.
In each of them, the person losing something is mentioned in the prior
context of the Wh-Cleft, as is the act of losing things, as is a lost item
that contrasts with the lost item mentioned in the cleft itself.
(2) Even during the darkest years Churchill never entirely lost the
affection of his countrymen; what he lost was their confidence.
When Charlie states that he lost money during the crash, but
everything during the boom, he realizes that what he lost was his
family and that they are important.
Rodriguez may not have lost a job or dealt with financial burdens
but what he lost was his own pride of being a Mexican-American
while pursuing his life dream of becoming an English Professor.
That being the case, the respondent therefore could not be said
to have suffered any deprivation of the use of the money. In fact
he lost no money at all. What he lost was only the opportunity
to acquire a shophouse at $49,500. We therefore think that the
learned trial judge was correct in awarding the interest to com-
mence from the date of the judgment until the date of satisfaction.
In order to explain how information packaging constructions work, this

chapter will first offer a definition of information packaging construc-
tions and introduce a number of distinctions that allow us to talk about
the ‘context’ of an utterance in more precise terms. With those distinc-
tions in place, we will move on to a discussion of the actual constructions

that speakers can use to package the information they want to get across.
5.1.1 Information packaging: the basics

The question of why speakers express the same idea with different
grammatical constructions under different communicative circum-
stances has been investigated in detail in the work of Lambrecht (1994),
who defines the subject of this chapter in the following way (1994: 5):
Information structure: That component of sentence grammar in which
propositions as conceptual representations of states of affairs are paired
with lexicogrammatical structures in accordance with the mental states of
interlocutors who use and interpret these structures as units of informa-
tion in given discourse contexts.
This dense definition needs some unpacking. To start with, Lambrecht
is talking about lexicogrammatical structures: those are the informa-
tion packaging constructions that will be discussed in this chapter. We
have already seen one example, namely the Wh-Cleft construction.
Then, Lambrecht views these constructions as a component of sentence
grammar. This simply means that information packaging constructions
typically are syntactic constructions that form entire sentences, rather
than phrases or words. (We will see exceptions to this generalisation.)
With the description ‘propositions as conceptual representations of
states of affairs’ Lambrecht refers to the complex meanings that whole
sentences convey. A word meaning such as ‘wallet’ is relatively simple
in comparison with the meaning of the sentence John lost his wallet,
which expresses a proposition (Kintsch 1998), that is, a meaningful
relation between the verb lost and its arguments John and his wallet. In
understanding that sentence, you build up a conceptual representation,
a cognitive model if you like, of John having lost his wallet. The most
important part of Lambrecht’s definition is the phrase ‘in accordance
with the mental states of interlocutors’. When speakers choose a given
information packaging construction, they have previously engaged in
some mind-reading: their choice represents their best guess as to what it
is that the hearer already knows, and what it is that is new information.
Think again of your mother calling you out of the blue, saying Hi, it’s me.
What John lost was his wallet. What would worry you about this conversa-
tion opening is that your mother ventures an extremely poor guess at
what you already know at this point. Keeping track of other people’s
minds is no hocus-pocus activity; rather, we expect this of our fellow
human beings, even complete strangers, as a matter of course. Failure
to do so is interpreted as being rude at best, and having mental health

problems at worst.
Coming back to Lambrecht’s definition of information structure, we
can reuse his ideas to construct a characterisation of information pack-
aging constructions that involves three aspects.
(3) Information packaging constructions
are sentence-level constructions [1]
that speakers use to express complex meanings [2]
in a way that shows awareness of the current knowledge of the
hearer. [3]
In order to apply this characterisation to the analysis of information
packaging constructions, we need to flesh out its aspects, especially the
second and third, in some more detail.
5.1.2 Presupposition and assertion

Lambrecht points out that propositions, that is, complex meanings,
typically combine elements that are already known to the hearer with
elements that are not already known (1994: 51). The information that is
contained in a sentence-level construction is thus partially old and par-
tially new. This can be illustrated with an example such as I finally met
the woman who moved in downstairs. The speaker of such a sentence does
not want to inform the hearer that there is a new female neighbour one
storey below the speaker’s flat. That is already taken for granted. What
is new in the sentence is that the speaker has finally met that neighbour.
Now you might wonder, if it is old information that there is a new
female neighbour downstairs, why does the speaker bother the hearer
with yesterday’s news? The reason for including old information is that
hearers have a much easier time processing new information when it
is properly connected to things they already know. Information struc-
ture constructions thus have the purpose of making new information
intelligible by connecting it to old information. Lambrecht (1994: 52)
proposes the terms pragmatic presupposition and pragmatic asser-
tion for the distinction that we have up to now discussed informally as
old and new information.
(4) Pragmatic presupposition: The set of propositions lexicogram-
matically evoked in a sentence which the speaker assumes the
hearer already knows or is ready to take for granted at the time the
sentence is uttered.
Pragmatic assertion: The proposition expressed by a sentence

which the hearer is expected to know or take for granted as a result
of hearing the sentence uttered.
The distinction of pragmatic presupposition and pragmatic assertion
relates to linguistic forms, that is, constructions. Information packaging
constructions consist of several parts, and these parts are conventionally
associated with either old information or new information. This has
an obvious advantage for language processing: as soon as hearers can
identify a given information packaging construction, they know imme-
diately which part of that construction will convey new information to
which they should pay the most attention. Consider a construction such
as the Tough-Raising construction, which combines a noun phrase, a
predicate adjective, and a to-infinitive into sentences such as A good man
is easy to kill. Mair (1987) has studied the Tough-Raising construction
on the basis of corpus data, finding that the construction typically fol-
lows a recurring pattern of old and new information. A few authentic
examples of the construction are offered below.
(5) Until the last few years the paper was a modestly profitable busi-
ness, but it had had structural problems for some time. Like so
much else in Britain, these are hard to understand unless you
know the history.
Pieces of nerve can be removed completely from the body and yet
retain their ability to conduct nerve-impulses. Physiologists have
therefore preferred to study these convenient objects, rather than
the very soft brain tissue, which is difficult to handle and changes
its characteristics when its supply of blood is interfered with.
Her part-time legal transcribing service didn’t come close to
providing the income she needed. The Victorian she’d inherited
from her grandmother was so expensive to maintain, the repairs
so constant, the taxes so outrageous, it took every penny she made
each month just to stay ahead of her creditors.
Contrary to the initial example A good man is easy to kill, most authentic
instances of the Tough-Raising construction involve noun phrases that
refer to old information. This is plainly evident in the first two exam-
ples, in which the respective noun phrases are realised pronominally.
What is new is the information that is expressed in the combination of
adjective and to-infinitive. In the third example, the noun phrase The
Victorian she’d inherited from her grandmother exemplifies what Lambrecht
describes as information that the hearer ‘is ready to take for granted at
the time the sentence is uttered’. At the time of the utterance, the hearer
need not have known the proposition that someone (she) inherited a
house (The Victorian). Note that the noun phrase is definite, rather than
indefinite, which signals that the speaker expects the hearer to treat
it as old information. Again, the new information in the sentence is
expressed in the adjective and the to-infinitive: the phrase expensive to
maintain is the new piece of information that relevantly connects to the
previous sentence, elaborating on and explaining the financial difficul-
ties of the protagonist.
5.1.3 Activation
It may have never occurred to you, but the fact that you know in what
kinds of situation you may use a Wh-Cleft construction (What John
needs now is a double espresso), a Tough-Raising construction (That is hard
to believe!), or a Restrictive Relative Clause construction (I finally
met the woman who moved in downstairs) is evidence that during ordinary
conversation, you continuously simulate the cognitive model of the
current situation that your interlocutor entertains. Furthermore, you
structure your speech accordingly, by using constructions that present
some pieces of information as new, and others as old, in accordance
with what is going on in the hearer’s cognitive model. But that is not
all. Crucially, you simulate not only the hearer’s knowledge, but, as
Lambrecht points out (1994: 53), also the hearer’s consciousness and
awareness of things in the current situation.
Consider the following example; again, let us assume that it is uttered
by your mother during a telephone conversation.
(6) John speaks excellent Finnish although he never lived there.
You probably did not have any difficulty understanding that the little
word there refers to Finland. This is remarkable, as the word Finland is
not mentioned once, and has not been mentioned before during your
conversation. Hearing the first part of the example, John speaks excellent
Finnish, would lead you to construct a cognitive model in which John
has the skill of speaking Finnish. That would be the proposition that
your mother could expect you to know as a result of hearing that part of
her utterance. In addition, however, the word Finnish brings a number
of associations into play, among them, quite trivially, the country where
Finnish is spoken. In your mother’s simulation of your cognitive model
of the speech situation (you see that this is getting a little complicated),
she assumes that you are to some degree conscious of the idea ‘Finland’.
That being the case, she can refer to that idea with the pronoun there,
rather than with a full lexical item. In this way, your mother is treating
‘Finland’ as old information that need not be formally introduced. And
in assuming that ‘Finland’ is old information to you, she’s of course
right, as always.
A term that has been established for the ideas that are more or
less present in the hearer’s consciousness is activation. The metaphor
here is of ideas being more or less activated in the hearer’s mind. In
the example above, your mother correctly estimated that the idea
‘Finland’ would be activated in your mind, which led her to choose a
pronoun for its linguistic expression. The relation between activation
and linguistic expression is explained by Chafe (1987: 26) in the fol-
lowing way:
Those concepts which are already active for the speaker, and which the
speaker judges to be active for the hearer as well, are verbalized in a spe-
cial way, having properties which have often been discussed in terms of
‘old’ or ‘given’ information. The general thing to say is that given concepts
are spoken with an attenuated pronunciation. The attenuation involves,
at the very least, weak stress. Typically, though not always, it involves
either pronominalization or omission from verbalization altogether.
Besides pronominal coding, which is perhaps the clearest evidence
that the speaker assumes an idea to be active, the grammatical cat-
egory of definiteness should also be mentioned. In order to capture
the idea that there are degrees of activation, Chafe (1987: 25) not only
distinguishes active and inactive referents, but adds a third category,
namely that of semi-active referents, which are also called accessible
referents. Referents become semi-active in the hearer’s mind through
associations that are sparked by an utterance. For instance, let us imag-
ine that your mother surprises you with yet another phone call and says
Hi, it’s me. Mary is pregnant again. This opening causes a number of ideas
to become semi-active referents in your mind, most obviously perhaps
the ideas that there is a baby and a father, but also several others.
Semi-active referents can be expressed in the subsequent discourse
with definite noun phrases, or even pronouns. Hence, your mother can
continue her story by telling you that The doctor saw on the ultrasound that
it’s a boy, bringing no fewer than three previously semi-active ideas (an
obstetrician, ultrasound examinations, the baby’s gender) to the centre
of attention. The activation status of a given referent is transient: as the
conversation goes on, active referents that are not further discussed
gradually fade back into a state of being semi-active, and ultimately
inactive.
5.1.4 Topic and focus

A further distinction that is crucial for the analysis of information pack-
aging constructions is the contrast between the notions of topic and
focus. These terms are problematic because they are used with several
meanings in everyday language and in different linguistic frameworks,
which necessitates a clarification. In an everyday understanding of the
term, a topic is a characteristic of texts or conversations. A news article
might report on the topic of an election, or a public meeting might
be held on the topic of, say, the construction of a new sports stadium.
Lambrecht (1994: 118) uses the term ‘topic’ not on the level of texts
or conversations, but exclusively on the level of sentences. A topic,
as understood in this chapter, is the subject matter of a sentence, that
is, that which a sentence is about. In conversation, the topic of a given
sentence is thus a matter of current interest, and the pragmatic assertion
that is made in that sentence is informative for the hearer by virtue of
making a statement that is relevant with respect to the topic. Lambrecht
points out that it is not always possible to identify a particular constitu-
ent of a sentence as its topic: the topic itself need not even be mentioned
in the sentence as long as it is understood as the relevant background.
This means that the topic of a sentence and its pragmatic presupposition
(i.e. that which the hearer is expected to know already or to take for
granted) do not necessarily coincide. Consider the following example.
(7) Personally, I don’t even eat chicken; I prefer my protein to come
from eggs, fish, and cheese.
What is the topic of the second sentence, which begins after the semico-
lon? If you had to answer what the sentence is about, you would be likely
to agree that it is about eating habits, which, however, is not explicitly
mentioned in the sentence itself. The pragmatic presupposition of the
sentence invites the hearer to take for granted that the speaker, and
humans in general, include proteins in their diet. The crucial distinction
here is that proteins are not the topic: the sentence is not about proteins,
it is about eating habits.
While the topic of a sentence may thus occasionally be difficult to pin
down to a particular form, we will see that there are certain informa-
tion packaging constructions in which a given part of the construction
is conventionally used to express the topic. The following examples
illustrate three of them.
(8) As for John, he lost his wallet.
The coolest guitar I own, it’s a black US Stratocaster from the 80s.
Most heavy metal I don’t really like.
These sentences instantiate different topicalisation constructions,

which have syntactic parts that are reserved for the expression of topics.
In the As-for-Topicalisation construction, the constituent that is
being introduced by as for sets up a topic, simultaneously raising the
expectation that the rest of the sentence will offer a proposition that
conveys relevant new information about that topic. The second exam-
ple instantiates the Left-Dislocation construction. Again, the topical
constituent appears initially, and the subsequent full sentence offers
a relevant elaboration. The third example is commonly talked about
as the Topicalisation construction, despite the fact that other con-
structions also serve this function. The reason that the Topicalisation
construction enjoys this privileged status is that it merely rearranges the
word order of the Transitive construction such that the topicalised
object constituent appears initially.
Given the notion of a topic, as introduced in the previous paragraphs,
it may be tempting to think of the focus of a sentence as ‘that which is
not the topic’ or ‘the new information that is offered about the topic’.
The latter idea would be identical with the pragmatic assertion of a
sentence, as defined above. As you may expect, Lambrecht views the
notion of focus as something more specific than that. Just as the topic
relates to the pragmatic presupposition of a sentence without being the
same thing, the idea of focus only relates to the pragmatic assertion of a
sentence. Specifically, the focus of a sentence forms the most important
part of the pragmatic assertion. Lambrecht (1994: 207) defines it as
‘the element of information whereby the presupposition and the asser-
tion differ from each other’. Lambrecht offers the following example to
elaborate on that definition.
(9) Q: Where did you go last night?
A: I went to the movies.
Clearly, the presupposition of the answer is that the speaker went
somewhere last night, and the assertion differs from that preposition in
specifying a certain place where the speaker went, namely the movies.
Lambrecht (1994: 209) is, however, careful to point out that the word
movies conveys focal information only by virtue of its relation to the
proposition that the speaker went somewhere, which is what Lambrecht
calls a focus relation. It is this relation that ultimately constitutes new
information. Reconsider the above example, with the slight difference
that the question would be phrased as Where did you go last night, to
the restaurant or to the movies? After that question, the word movies in
the answer does not constitute new information, but what is new is the
identification of the movies with the place that the speaker went to.
Concerning the formal realisation of focus, Lambrecht (1994: 213)

points out that there is often no conventionalised correspondence
of pragmatic meaning and syntactic form, not least because senten-
tial prosody, that is, the placement of sentence accent, can heavily
modulate the interpretation of what the focus of a given sentence is.
Depending on different sentence accents, the same sentences may differ
with regard to their focal information, and so may serve as answers
to different questions. Imagine that you overhear the following three
mini-dialogues.
(10) Q: What happened to your car?
A: My car broke down.
Q: I heard your motorcycle broke down?
Q: Why are you late?
In your imagination, the three answers will probably have sounded
a little different, with the sentence accent placed differently in each
answer. Lambrecht (1994: 223) uses the term predicate focus for the
first kind of answer, which conveys focal information that is expressed
by the entire verb phrase broke down. The second answer carries argu-
ment focus, which means that an argument of the verb, here the subject
my car, represents the focus. Lastly, the third answer is said to carry
sentence focus because all of the information conveyed by the answer
differs from what is pragmatically presupposed. With these distinctions
in place, we can move on to a discussion of how information packaging
is conventionally associated with grammatical form.
5.2 Information packaging and grammar

In ordinary conversation, speakers are facing common communicative
tasks with regard to information packaging. For instance, a speaker
might want to make a point about something that has not as yet been
part of the conversation. In order to do that, she needs to establish the
new topic in such a way that the hearer recognises it. Another common
task would be to clear up a misunderstanding. The hearer may have
understood one half of a message correctly while misunderstanding the
other half. The speaker’s job now is to clarify which half is which. If situ-
ations of this kind are recurrent enough, linguistic forms will establish
themselves as conventionalised means to deal with these situations. The
following sections will discuss several information packaging construc-
tions that pair a syntactic or morphosyntactic form with a particular

arrangement of information.
5.2.1 Cleft constructions

An important family of information packaging constructions in English
is the family of Cleft constructions (Lambrecht 2001a). The main
characteristic that distinguishes cleft constructions from other complex
syntactic constructions is that clefts are bi-clausal constructions that
tend to have a simple monoclausal counterpart, as illustrated in the
examples below.
(11) It is the wife who decides. The wife decides.
What I want is a gin and tonic. I want a gin and tonic.
That’s what I’m talking about. I’m talking about that.
Different cleft construction types serve to package information in
different ways, but it is nonetheless useful to consider the syntactic
and pragmatic aspects that these construction types have in common.
Lambrecht (2001a: 467) offers the following definition as a generalisa-
tion across cleft constructions:
A cleft construction is a complex sentence structure consisting of a matrix
clause headed by a copula and a relative or relative-like clause whose
relativized argument is coindexed with the predicative argument of the
copula. Taken together, the matrix and the relative express a logically
simple proposition, which can also be expressed in the form of a single
clause without a change in truth conditions.
Unpacking this definition, we can state that at the basis of cleft construc-
tions we have a Predicative construction of the form ‘X is Y’. This
construction instantiates what Lambrecht calls the matrix clause. The
principal parts of that matrix clause, X and Y, are connected by a copula,
that is, a form of the verb to be or a functionally equivalent verb. Now,
one of the principal parts either instantiates or connects to a Relative
Clause construction. Consider the sentence It is the wife who decides. The
relative clause in this sentence is who decides, which connects to the wife.
The relativised argument of that relative clause, expressed by the rela-
tive pronoun who, refers to the wife, which is captured by Lambrecht’s
requirement that the relativised argument should be co-indexed with
the predicative argument of the copula (which could be formally ren-
dered as It is the wifei whoi decides). The second part of Lambrecht’s
definition states that a sentence such as It is the wife who decides expresses
a meaning that is, from a purely logical standpoint, identical to the
meaning of The wife decides. This definition captures aspects of form and
meaning that are shared by the three cleft construction types that were
used as examples above, and which are given their proper labels below.
(12) It is the wife who decides. It-Cleft construction
What I want is a gin and tonic. Wh-Cleft construction
That’s what I’m talking about. Reverse Wh-Cleft construction
What now are the conventionalised characteristics of cleft constructions
with regard to information packaging? In order to answer this ques-
tion, we need to apply the analytical tools that were developed in the
previous sections. Lambrecht (2001a: 475) uses the following example to
analyse the information packaging in Wh-Clefts.
(13) Q: What do you need?
A: What I need is a sheet of paper and a pencil.
Pragmatic presupposition: ‘the speaker needs X’
Pragmatic assertion: ‘X is a sheet of paper and a pencil’
Focus: ‘a sheet of paper and a pencil’
The different pieces of information that are listed above map onto the
structure of a Wh-Cleft in a systematic way. The pragmatic presup-
position (‘the speaker needs X’) is expressed in the initial relative clause
What I need. The copula links that relative clause with the predicative
argument of the Wh-Cleft, which expresses the focus (‘a sheet of paper
and a pencil’). The predicative argument of a Wh-Cleft is therefore
also called the focus phrase.
Lambrecht points out that a pragmatic presupposition such as ‘the
speaker needs X’ is strictly speaking not a sufficient condition for the
use of a Wh-Cleft. Let me illustrate this point with a personal anec-
dote. At the time I’m writing this, my 5-year-old son is a big fan of
Star Wars. He has repeatedly asked for a toy light sabre for his sixth
birthday, so I know that he wants a light sabre, and he knows that I
know that he wants a light sabre. (He frequently checks that I have not
forgotten.) But crucially, despite this mutual knowledge it would be
odd for him to come up to me and specify his wish with a Wh-Cleft
such as What I want is a green light sabre. Lambrecht (2001a: 476) offers
an explanation for why this is the case. In order for a speaker to use a
Wh-Cleft, it is not enough to have mutual knowledge with the hearer.
Crucially, the speaker must be sure that this knowledge is currently
active in the hearer’s mind (see Section 5.1.3), and the speaker must
be sure that the hearer considers it to be a matter of current inter-
est, that is, a topic (see Section 5.1.4). The comparison of It-Clefts,
Wh-Clefts, and Reverse Wh-Clefts in the following examples

shows that these criteria are identical across the three construction
types.
(14) It’s the use of clefts that he wants to explain. It-Cleft
What he wants to explain is the use of clefts. Wh-Cleft
The use of clefts is what he wants to explain. Reverse Wh-Cleft
Pragmatic presupposition: ‘he wants to explain X’
Pragmatic assertion: ‘X is the use of clefts’
Focus: ‘the use of clefts’
Given these similarities between the constructions, you may wonder
what the differences are that motivate speakers to choose one construc-
tion type over the other two in a particular speech situation. Lambrecht
(2001a: 497) discusses four factors that affect speakers’ choices between
different cleft constructions.
The first factor concerns the relative length of the focus phrase and
the relative clause. As a general rule of thumb, speakers will try to
organise their utterances in such a way that long (or ‘heavy’) constituents
are placed towards the end. This tendency, which is known as the end-
weight principle (Behaghel 1932; Quirk et al. 1985), can be explained
in terms of processing ease. Compare the following two examples.
(15) It’s the use of clefts in English medical writings from the sixteenth
to the eighteenth century that he wants to explain.
What he wants to explain is the use of clefts in English medical
writings from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
The chances are that you found the second sentence much easier to read
and understand. In order to process the It-Cleft, you have to keep in
mind the entire noun phrase (the use of clefts in English medical writings from
the sixteenth to the eighteenth century) before the final relative clause allows
you to understand its syntactic role in the sentence. In a Wh-Cleft,
there are no such difficulties. The initial relative clause, followed by the
copula (What he wants to explain is) already tells you that what follows
is a noun phrase that has the function of a subject complement. As
will be discussed in subsequent sections of this chapter, the end-weight
principle not only affects the choice of cleft constructions. It influences
speakers’ syntactic choices across many pairs of constructions, including
the Ditransitive and the Prepositional Dative construction, as well
as the S-Genitive and the Of-Genitive construction.
The second factor that distinguishes the three cleft constructions
concerns the activation of the pragmatic presupposition in the relative
clause. As was discussed above, ideas can be more or less active in

a given speech situation. The speaker keeps a continuous record of
what ideas are currently active, semi-active, or probably inactive in the
hearer’s mind, choosing information packaging constructions accord-
ingly. Imagine that you are taking a trip to London where you would
like to visit the British Museum. After leaving the Underground at
Tottenham Court Road, you wonder where to turn. Armed with a map,
but unable to work out where to go, you approach someone. Which of
the sentences below would you choose?
(16) Excuse me, I’m looking for the British Museum.
Excuse me, what I’m looking for is the British Museum.
Excuse me, it’s the British Museum that I’m looking for.
Clearly, the first option is the most appropriate one, since it does not
make any pragmatic presupposition. But what about the second and
third examples? Both of those would signal to the hearer that ‘I am
looking for X’ is a shared piece of knowledge, which might be a reason-
able guess, given that you are confusedly waving a map of London
and perhaps have a camera dangling across your chest. Still, you will
probably agree that the Wh-Cleft is somewhat more appropriate than
the It-Cleft. This is because It-Clefts are restricted to contexts in
which the pragmatic presupposition is strongly activated. By contrast,
Wh-Clefts tolerate pragmatic presuppositions that are only semi-
active at the time of the utterance.
Topicality is the third factor that plays a role in the use of clefts. Both
It-Clefts and Wh-Clefts are usable in contexts where the relative
clause expresses an established topic. To illustrate this point, in the
example below, a question can be answered with either an It-Cleft or
a Wh-Cleft. In both cases, the relative clause reiterates the topic that
has been set up by the question.
(17) Q: Where did you meet your wife?
A: It was in Paris that I met my wife.
A: Where I met my wife was in Paris.
If we alter the question so that ‘meeting one’s wife’ is no longer an
established topic, a difference in the acceptability of the two answers
emerges. Specifically, the It-Cleft still constitutes an appropriate
answer, whereas the Wh-Cleft sounds out of place.
(18) Q: Why are you so interested in Paris?
A: It was in Paris that I met my wife.
A: ?Where I met my wife was in Paris.
The difference between It-Clefts and Wh-Clefts revealed by the

two answers is that It-Clefts tolerate non-topical relative clauses
whereas Wh-Clefts do not. This tolerance of It-Clefts is sometimes
used for rhetorical purposes in examples such as the following, which
may introduce lectures or newspaper articles.
(19) It was Cicero who once said that the greatest of all virtues is
gratitude.
It was just about 50 years ago that Henry Ford gave us the weekend.
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its
creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Lambrecht analyses examples such as these, which are also called
informative presupposition clefts (Prince 1978), as rhetorical exploita-
tions of the information packaging that It-Clefts conventionally evoke.
The speakers of the above examples in no way assume that their hearers
already have the information that is expressed in the respective relative
clauses. However, they invite their hearers to take this information as
something that is not to be challenged. The term that Lambrecht (2001a:
485) uses to label this phenomenon is pragmatic accommodation.
The fourth and final factor concerns restrictions that result from
more general morphosyntactic characteristics of English. For instance,
the use of Wh-Clefts is naturally restricted by the range of wh-words
that exist in English: what, who, where, when, why, and how. Two issues
are worth noting. First, whereas what and who are freely usable for the
construction of Wh-Clefts, the remaining ones are less felicitous, as
the following examples illustrate.
(20) It is champagne that I like.
What I like is champagne.
It was John who we saw.
Who we saw was John.
It was behind the books that I hid it.
?Where I hid it was behind the books.
It is in ten minutes that the train will depart.
?When the train will depart is in ten minutes.
It was for personal reasons that he left.
??Why he left was for personal reasons.
It was with relief that she heard the door close.
??How she heard the door close was with relief.
Second, It-Clefts commonly occur with focus phrases that do not

match an existing wh-word in English. A focus phrase such as It is cham-
pagne clearly matches what, the focus phrase It was John clearly matches
who, but how about the focus phrases in the following examples?
(21) It was under protest that the kids ate their vegetables.
It was in no time that they had finished their ice creams.
It was despite his best efforts that things took a turn for the worse.
The English lexicon does not contain wh-words with the meanings
‘while doing what’, ‘how fast’, or ‘despite what’. Hence, the It-Clefts
in the examples above do not have Wh-Cleft counterparts in the way
that It was John we saw matches Who we saw was John.
Summing up, how do speakers select one particular cleft construction
when several choices are available in the grammar of English? The
choice of an information packaging construction is first of all influenced
by the assumptions that the speaker makes about the current knowl-
edge of the hearer. Beyond that, influences include processing-related
factors such as the end-weight principle, constraints relating to other
constructions in the grammar, such as the availability of a wh-word, and
construction-specific constraints, such as the tolerance for non-topical
ideas or ideas that have only a low degree of current activation.
5.2.2 Dislocation and related constructions

A second important family of information packaging constructions
in English goes by the name of dislocation constructions. Two major
constructions that have been discussed in the literature are the Left-
Dislocation construction and the Right-Dislocation construction,
which are illustrated below. As is shown in the respective corresponding
examples, both constructions can be paraphrased by canonical declara-
tive sentences.
(22) My brother, he rarely calls me these days. Left-Dislocation
My brother rarely calls me these days.
I love that, being a father. Right-Dislocation
I love being a father.
Again, one might wonder why the grammar of English provides speak-
ers with different syntactic constructions for the expression of largely
identical meanings. By now, you are trained to notice that what is
different between the members of each pair is how new information
is integrated into previously shared information. You would perhaps
point out that the notion of topicality plays a role. An analysis of the
Left-Dislocation construction would have to address how the initial,
left-dislocated constituent (here: my brother) sets up a topic, so that the
subsequent clause can provide relevant information about that topic (he
rarely calls me these days). The example of the Right-Dislocation con-
struction that is given above differs from the canonical clause in such a
way that we know that the idea ‘fatherhood’ must have figured somehow
as a topic in the previous context. Hence, the speaker initially opts for
the pronominal form that, but as the idea might only be semi-active in
the hearer’s mind, the speaker backs up and adds the phrase being a father.
Dislocation constructions have been analysed in the Construction
Grammar literature not only in contrast to canonical sentence patterns,
but crucially also in contrast to other information packaging construc-
tions that superficially look very similar. Consider the following pairs
of examples.
(23) Their cat, they feed it steak tartare. Left-Dislocation
Their cat they feed steak tartare. Topicalisation
Whereas the difference between a dislocation construction and a
canonical sentence may be relatively straightforward to determine,
contrasts such as the one illustrated above are more intricate. Gregory
and Michaelis (2001) investigate the functional contrast between the
Left-Dislocation construction and the Topicalisation construc-
tion, which are formally and functionally very similar: first, both can be
characterised as fronting constructions, since they differ from canonical
sentences with regard to their initial constituent. Second, the construc-
tions share similar prosodic characteristics. In both of the examples
above, the words cat and steak tartare form prosodic peaks. Third, in both
constructions the focus is associated with the second prosodic peak.
A formal difference concerns the fact that the preclausal noun phrase
(their cat) corresponds to a pronominal expression (it) in the Left-
Dislocation construction, whereas there is no such correspondence in
the Topicalisation construction. This means that the Topicalisation
construction is restricted to preclausal noun phrases that instantiate an
object of the main verb – the subject of a canonical sentence such as
Their cat eats steak tartare is already located sentence-initially. Another
formal difference is that the Left-Dislocation construction allows
coreference across what are called long-distance dependencies (see
Sag et al. 2003; Sag 2010), whereas the Topicalisation construc-
tion is more heavily restricted in this regard (Gregory and Michaelis
2001: 1668). This observation relates to the phenomenon of island
constraints (Ambridge and Goldberg 2008), which will be discussed
in the final section of this chapter. In the following examples, Left-

Dislocation is acceptable whereas the Topicalisation construction
yields an ungrammatical sentence.
(24) Their cat, you will hear fantastic stories what stuff they feed it.
*Their cat you will hear fantastic stories what stuff they feed.
A functional difference that Gregory and Michaelis make out is that
Topicalisation frequently involves anaphoric pronouns as preclausal
noun phrases. In such contexts, Left-Dislocation is unacceptable.
(25) A: You are such a gifted singer, you should make a career of it!
B: That I’m not so sure about.
B: *That, I’m not so sure about it.
In order to find out more about the conditions under which speakers use
the two constructions in ordinary conversation, Gregory and Michaelis
turn to corpus data of telephone conversations, retrieve examples of
the two constructions, and annotate them for several characteristics,
which reveals two contrasts (2001: 1695). First, the referents of pre-
clausal noun phrases in Left-Dislocation constructions are rarely
topical or active, whereas this is typically the case in Topicalisation.
This is consistent with the proposal that the main function of Left-
Dislocation is to assign topical status to a discourse-new referent
(Lambrecht 1994). Second, the referents that are highlighted in the
preclausal noun phrases of Left-Dislocation constructions tend to
persist longer as topics in the conversation than do the preclausal noun
phrases in Topicalisation. In other words, if a speaker utters a sen-
tence such as Their cat, they feed it steak tartare, you can be fairly certain
that there is more cat-related information coming up. The cat is likely
to be mentioned again at least once or twice in the following conversa-
tion. By contrast, Their cat they feed steak tartare does not warrant an
expectation of this kind. This contrast with regard to topic persistence
illuminates an aspect of information packaging constructions that up to
now has escaped the discussion in this chapter: information packaging
constructions are not only good for organising meanings in a way that
facilitates the integration of old and new information, but crucially also
set up expectations in the hearer about what will be coming up in the
immediate future. Speakers use these constructions to signal whether
they are going to elaborate on a topic or whether the current topic is a
mere sidetrack to something else that they want to communicate. This
function of constructions has been discussed under the heading of pro-
jection (Auer 2005). A phenomenon that you will frequently encounter
in everyday conversation is that speakers finish each other’s sentences,
often very accurately expressing what their interlocutors had in mind.

The fact that this is so commonplace, even between speakers that do not
know each other extremely well, suggests that projection is a function
that is fundamental to a wide range of grammatical constructions.
Let us consider another pair of contrasting information packaging
constructions. Michaelis and Lambrecht (1996) study a construction
that they call Nominal Extraposition. This construction shares
structural and functional characteristics with the Right-Dislocation
construction, but there are also clear differences that suggest that both
constructions are separately represented in speakers’ knowledge of lan-
guage. The following examples illustrate the two constructions.
(26) It’s amazing, the things children say. Nominal Extraposition
They’re amazing, the things children Right-Dislocation
say.
Both examples above consist of an initial Predicative construction (it’s
amazing, they’re amazing) and an extraposed or dislocated postclausal
noun phrase (the things children say). This structural similarity is, how-
ever, only superficial: whereas in Right-Dislocation the dislocated
nominal must be coreferential with the subject of the Predicative
construction (they = the things children say), this is not the case with
Nominal Extraposition. As the above example shows, the initial
subject (it) and the extraposed nominal (the things children say) differ in
number, one being in the singular, the other in the plural. Michaelis and
Lambrecht (1996: 222) thus bring out a first important characteristic of
the Nominal Extraposition construction: its clausal subject is non-
referential, as in constructions such as It seems you’re right or It is impor-
tant to wash your hands. Another difference concerns the conventional
prosody of the two constructions. Whereas the dislocated noun phrases
in Right-Dislocation tend to receive a low and flat intonation, the
extraposed noun phrase in Nominal Extraposition must be stressed
and pronounced with a rising and falling intonation. This prosodic dif-
ference reflects the fact that the two constructions differ with regard
to information packaging. Specifically, in Right-Dislocation, the
dislocated nominal is not involved in the presentation of new, focal
information. Section 5.1.4 above introduced the term ‘focus relation’
to capture how newly offered information is made informative. In the
Nominal Extraposition construction, the speaker establishes a focus
relation between the adjective in the Predicative construction and the
focal part of the extraposed noun phrase. Both of these constituents tend
to receive stressed pronunciation. The following examples illustrate
that idea.
(27) It’s UNBELIEVABLE the money she spends on DOG FOOD.

It’s IMMEASURABLE the TOLL it has taken on him.
It’s STAGGERING the number of BOOKS that pile up.
Yet another syntactic difference between the two constructions is that
Right-Dislocation may appear in syntactically subordinate contexts
whereas Nominal Extraposition is restricted to main clauses. The
examples below show that a right-dislocated noun phrase may mean-
ingfully complement an adverbial clause with although. By contrast, if
there is a secondary stress that identifies the sentence as an example
of the Nominal Extraposition construction, the example becomes
essentially uninterpretable.
(28) Although it’s AMAZING, the movie he did with Pacino, they
never collaborated again.
*Although it’s AMAZING, the movie he did with PACINO, they
never collaborated again.
Michaelis and Lambrecht (1996: 224) explain this contrast with reference
to the pragmatic function of the construction. Nominal Extraposition
is an exclamative construction, and like utterances such as How cool!,
What a ridiculous idea!, or That’s insane!, it serves the function of pre-
senting focal information, which clashes pragmatically with the typical
function of subordinate clauses, which is to flesh out topical informa-
tion. This then appears to be the primary distinction between Right-
Dislocation and Nominal Extraposition: whereas the postclausal
noun phrase has to be at least semi-active for the use of either construc-
tion, the noun phrase is topical in Right-Dislocation but contains
focal information in the Nominal Extraposition construction.
Using the conceptual distinctions introduced by Lambrecht (1994),
we can now dissect the information packaging characteristics of an
authentic example of the Nominal Extraposition construction.
(29) Pilar Sander’s baby girl is showing her face to the world. The
actress revealed little Sharon at LAX on Tuesday, carrying her
in her arms as she walked through the airport. Sander previously
covered her daughter with a towel for trips around town, ensur-
ing no photographers or onlookers caught a glimpse of her baby
girl. The 36-year-old Oscar winner adopted Sharon in April. In
a recent interview on ABC she said her life’s ‘changed a tiny
bit’ since becoming a mom. ‘I now travel with a lot of luggage –
diapers, bottles, toys, you name it.’ ‘Look, it’s been amazing the
amount of emails and congratulations,’ she added. ‘Everyone’s
just been so lovely.’
Pragmatic 1: ‘Pilar and her new baby are topical’

presuppositions: 2: ‘new parents receive congratulations’
3: ‘2 is semi-active in the hearer’s mind’
Pragmatic assertion: ‘the amount of congratulations has been
high’
Focus: ‘the amount of congratulations has been
high’
Michaelis and Lambrecht (1996: 234) point out that in Nominal

Extraposition the pragmatic assertion and the focus are identical.
Remember that the focus is defined as the difference between what
is pragmatically presupposed and what is pragmatically asserted. In
the example above, the pragmatic presupposition does not contain any
information about the amount of congratulations that new parents com-
monly receive. Hence, the focus contains two ideas: first, that there is a
scale of how many congratulations are typically received, and second,
that Pilar’s reception of congratulations has ranked high on that scale.
Summing up the discussion of dislocation constructions and related
information packaging constructions, we can take away the following
points. First, even pairs of constructions that may look rather similar in
terms of their structure may exhibit functionally motivated differences
with regard to information packaging. Second, the contrasts between
pragmatically presupposed and pragmatically asserted, between topic and
focus, and between active, semi-active, and inactive are instrumental in
working out the conditions under which speakers use these constructions.
And third, the intricate relations between form and pragmatic meaning
show that pragmatics must be more than a set of general guidelines for
communication. A conception of pragmatics that continues to be popular
is the idea that speakers follow conversational maxims (Grice 1975), so
that they say things that are true and relevant and present information
in an orderly fashion. Ordinary conversation can certainly be interpreted
as showing the effects of such maxims, but at the same time, the maxims
are not specific enough to predict any difference between two construc-
tions such as Right-Dislocation and Nominal Extraposition. It is
therefore necessary to assume that speakers mentally represent syntactic
constructions not only together with their constructional semantics, but
also with their pragmatic characteristics.
5.3 Island constraints

Imagine once more that you are on the phone talking to your mother.
This time she tells you a story about John and his girlfriend Mary.
Mary, as you will remember from a previous conversation, is pregnant

again, so the smell of certain foods gives her terrible nausea attacks. In
the middle of her episode, your mother says The smell of the scrambled eggs
already made her a little queasy. And then, she had to run out of the kitchen because
John was starting to fry – when the phone line is suddenly crackling. What
was it that John was frying? What was it that made Mary run out of the
kitchen? Interestingly, the grammar of English does not seem to allow
you to ask for a specific clarification. The following question is clearly
ungrammatical.
(30) *What did Mary run out of the kitchen because John was starting
to fry?
Syntacticians have for a long time been troubled by the question of
why examples such as the one above should be impossible. An explana-
tion that you might consider is that perhaps the length of the sentence
plays a role. There is a considerable distance between the wh-word what
and the verb fry, which is crucial here because the thing that we are
questioning with what is an argument of the verb fry, namely its object.
Perhaps it might also play a role that between what and fry we have an
entire clausal structure that intervenes, namely did Mary run out of the
kitchen. These are valid concerns, but there are examples of comparable
length and complexity that nonetheless seem to be much more accept-
able. Consider the following question.
(31) What did your mother say that Mary’s boyfriend John was starting
to fry?
It appears that the distance between what and fry is roughly the same, and
we also have an intervening clause, namely did your mother say. Ambridge
and Goldberg (2008) suggest an explanation for the unacceptability of
the first example, and as you may already guess, that explanation has to
do with information packaging.
Before we go into the details of that explanation, we first need to
discuss the overall phenomenon a little more thoroughly. What we are
dealing with goes by the name of island constraints in the syntactic lit-
erature. The term goes back to Ross (1967), who coined it as a metaphor:
the formation of a Wh-Question construction requires that the thing
that is questioned ‘moves’ from its canonical position into the position of
the wh-word. So, in order to form the question What did John start to fry?,
speakers were thought to transform the canonical sentence John started
to fry XY by replacing XY, the ‘gap’, with the wh-word and moving that
wh-word to the front of the sentence, with do-support (Huddleston and
Pullum 2002: 93) as an attendant procedure. Now, the fact that some
questions are ungrammatical can be interpreted in such a way that the

gap is in a place from where it ‘cannot move’. Such places Ross called
syntactic islands, presumably because words cannot swim. Syntactic pris-
ons or syntactic mousetraps might have been equally appropriate terms,
but admittedly the idea of an island is more pleasurable. Several phrase
types are syntactic islands in English. The following examples illustrate
them through comparisons of canonical sentences with ‘failed’ questions.
(32) Complex object noun phrases
She saw [the documentary that was about Churchill]NP.
*Who did she see [the documentary that was about __ ]NP?
Complex subject noun phrases
[That he kept smoking marijuana]NP bothered her.
*What did [that he kept smoking __ ]NP bother her?
Adverbial clauses
She left the room [because John started to fry bacon]AdvCl.
*What did she leave the room [because John started to
fry __ ]AdvCl?
Complement clauses of factive verbs
He regretted [that he didn’t bring an umbrella]ThatCl.
*What did he regret [that he didn’t bring __ ]ThatCl?
Complement clauses of manner-of-speaking verbs
He muttered [that he didn’t bring an umbrella]ThatCl.
*What did he mutter [that he didn’t bring __ ]ThatCl?
The traditional explanation of why these phrase types are syntactic
islands and hence cannot contain the gap is not too far off the considera-
tion that was initially proposed above: if certain kinds of phrases inter-
vene between the wh-word and the gap, those phrases act as boundaries
that are impossible to overcome. (The metaphor of a syntactic prison
might have been more consistent after all.) Noun phrases and clauses in
particular have been seen as such boundaries. However, this explanation
faces a problem. There is an apparent difference in acceptability between
manner-of-speaking verbs and regular speaking verbs such as say. Despite
identical syntax, the second example below is fully acceptable.
(33) *What did he mutter [that he didn’t bring __ ]ThatCl?
What did he say [that he didn’t bring __ ]ThatCl?
The explanation that Ambridge and Goldberg (2008: 356) offer
to account for the behaviour of syntactic islands takes the shape of
a hypothesis, which they call the backgrounded constructions are
islands hypothesis, or BCI for short. What this hypothesis boils down to
is the following. The previous sections have established that informa-
tion packaging constructions have parts, some of which express old,
pragmatically presupposed information, whereas others express new,
pragmatically asserted information. Now, when information packaging
constructions are used to form part of a Wh-Question, via multiple
inheritance and subpart links (see Chapter 3), there is one fundamental
constraint. The thing that is asked for in Wh-Questions, the gap, must
not be situated in a part of a construction that is conventionally associ-
ated with pragmatically presupposed information.
Let us illustrate this with a concrete example. Section 5.2.1 has dis-
cussed the use of It-Clefts, which present focal information in the
initial Predicative construction and topical information in the final
Relative Clause. Consider the following example.
(34) It is the smell of bacon that bothers Mary.
If you would like to question a particular part of the It-Cleft, your
knowledge of English grammar, as represented in the construct-i-con,
allows you to combine the It-Cleft with the Wh-Question construc-
tion. However, what the BCI hypothesis predicts is that this kind of
combination will only work if the questioned element coincides with
that part of the It-Cleft that encodes focal information, not with parts
that encode topical information. As the following examples show, this is
indeed the case. You can question the smell of bacon, but not Mary.
(35) What is it that bothers Mary?
*Who is it the smell of bacon that bothers?
Ambridge and Goldberg (2008: 358) propose a reason for this: the
wh-word in a Wh-Question construction is its primary focus. If that
Wh-Question is combined with an information packaging construction
that presents the gap as backgrounded information, the result will be a
mixed message: a piece of information is presented as new and old at the
same time. This, Ambridge and Goldberg suggest, is communicatively
dysfunctional and hence does not occur.
The phrase types that have been identified as syntactic islands all
have in common that they express backgrounded information. But, you
may wonder, what about the difference between complement clauses of
mutter and say? Here, the syntax is identical and yet there is a difference
with regard to island status. Ambridge and Goldberg (2008: 357) point
out that verbs such as mutter, shout, or mumble tend to be used primarily
in contexts where the manner of speaking constitutes focal information
whereas the content of what is spoken constitutes pragmatically presup-
posed information. This is not the case with the verb say. Consider the
following two examples.
(36) I wasn’t saying that you should apologise. I merely suggested that
you leave her alone for a while.
I wasn’t mumbling that you should apologise. I said that loud and
clear.
This difference between say and manner-of-speaking verbs brings the
latter into the fold of the BCI hypothesis.
To conclude, the fact that backgrounded constructions disallow
questioning of their parts receives an explanation that is pragmatic
and syntactic at the same time. The explanation is pragmatic because
information packaging reflects the knowledge and consciousness of
interlocutors in the speech situation. It is also syntactic because speak-
ers’ knowledge of constructions includes knowledge about what kind
of information can be expressed with what kind of syntactic structure.
5.4 Summing up
This chapter has introduced information packaging constructions, which
are sentence-level constructions that serve the purpose of organising
and presenting information in such a way that hearers can successfully
connect pieces of new information to already shared pieces of informa-
tion. Speakers choose a given information packaging construction on
the basis of assumptions about the hearer’s knowledge. In order to make
an adequate and communicatively successful choice, speakers have to
keep close track of what it is that the hearer knows and what it is that
the hearer will be able to work out.
The first sections of the chapter introduced theoretical notions that
Lambrecht (1994) develops for the analysis of information packaging
constructions. The notions of pragmatic presupposition and pragmatic
assertion largely map onto what can informally be called old and new
information. The former terms are, however, somewhat more inclusive.
Pragmatically presupposed information also includes ideas that the
hearer is merely invited to take for granted from previous utterances,
and pragmatically asserted information includes those ideas that are
merely evoked, not necessarily expressed, by the current utterance.
A second distinction that is crucial for information packaging is the
contrast between active, semi-active, and inactive referents. Referents
that are currently talked about are active, related ideas are semi-active,
and unrelated ideas are inactive. As the subject matter of a conversation
changes, so does the activation status of the referents. Lambrecht (1994)
further offers definitions of the terms ‘topic’ and ‘focus’, which he views
as characteristics of sentences, not texts. In the simplest of terms, a
topic is what a sentence is about. The focus of a sentence is defined
technically as the difference between the pragmatic presupposition and
the pragmatic assertion. Often, these two overlap in multiple elements.
The set of non-overlapping elements constitutes the focus. If there is
no conceptual overlap between pragmatic presupposition and prag-
matic assertion, then the focus is identical to the pragmatic assertion.
Lambrecht distinguishes between predicate focus, argument focus, and
sentence focus to account for these respective possibilities.
The main point of the chapter was to illustrate how syntactic con-
structions are conventionally associated with specific information
packaging characteristics. Speakers’ knowledge of English grammar
thus includes knowledge of syntactic constructions that have the main
purpose of managing information, packaging it in ways that facilitate
processing by the hearer, and signalling that the speaker is aware of
the current knowledge of the hearer. A family of constructions that
does just that is the family of English cleft constructions. The chapter
distinguished It-Clefts, Wh-Clefts, and Reverse Wh-Clefts, dis-
cussing similarities and differences between these constructions. It was
shown that It-Clefts and Wh-Clefts are similar with regard to prag-
matic presupposition and pragmatic assertion, but that they differ, for
instance, with regard to the issues of topicality and activation. The end-
weight principle was identified as another factor influencing the choices
between cleft constructions. A second group of constructions discussed
in the chapter was that of the Left-Dislocation construction and the
Right-Dislocation construction, which were contrasted with super-
ficially similar constructions. Left-Dislocation and Topicalisation
share syntactic and prosodic features but differ with regard to topicality:
the topic of the Left-Dislocation construction has a greater tendency
to persist in the following discourse. Right-Dislocation and Nominal
Extraposition differ with regard to their respective postclausal noun
phrases. It is only in the Nominal Extraposition construction that this
constituent conveys focal information.
The third section of the chapter examined the classic problem of
syntactic island constraints. Syntactic islands are phrase types whose
parts cannot be questioned in a Wh-Question construction. Whereas
previous explanations of island constraints have been syntactic, iden-
tifying specific syntactic phrase types as obstacles to question forma-
tion, Ambridge and Goldberg (2008) suggest an explanation in terms
of information packaging. Specifically, they argue that backgrounded
constructions are islands. If a part of an information packaging construc-
tion is conventionally associated with the expression of pragmatically

presupposed information, the parts of that construction are not available
for questioning.
Study questions
1. What are information packaging constructions and what is their
purpose?
2. Define pragmatic presupposition, pragmatic assertion, and focus.
3. How can an idea become semi-active in the hearer’s mind?
4. What kinds of Cleft constructions do you know and how do they
differ?
5. What is the end-weight principle and how would you explain it?
6. What is meant by the term ‘pragmatic accommodation’?
7. Which answer to the following question do you prefer and why?
Q: Why do you like surfing so much?
A: It is surfing that my father taught me when I was young.
A: What my father taught me when I was young was surfing.
8. Discuss the structural and functional differences between Left-
Dislocation and Right-Dislocation.
9. What are syntactic islands?
10. Discuss how Ambridge and Goldberg’s BCI hypothesis differs from
previous accounts of island constraints.
Further reading
For a first overview of information packaging constructions, Leino
(2013) is a good place to start. The cornerstone reference for this topic
is Lambrecht (1994), which is useful furthermore because it explains
in detail how the constructional approach to information packaging
differs from earlier approaches. Classic treatments of information pack-
aging, which prefigure much of what has been discussed in this chapter,
include Halliday (1967), Chafe (1976), and Prince (1981). Besides the
studies on information packaging constructions that were covered in
the text of this chapter (Ambridge and Goldberg 2008; Gregory and
Michaelis 2001; Lambrecht 2001b; Michaelis and Lambrecht 1996),
important constructional studies of information packaging in English
include Goldberg (2001) on Causative constructions, Goldberg and
Ackerman (2001) on obligatory adjuncts, and Wasow and Arnold (2003)
on postverbal constituent ordering. A paper that proposes a cognitive-
linguistic explanation of island constraints that differs from the one
given by Ambridge and Goldberg (2008) is Da˛browska (2008).
6 Constructions and language
processing
6.1 The quest for behavioural evidence

If you are reading this sentence, that could mean one of two things. Either
you found the preceding chapters on constructions and their properties
convincing enough to read on, or you were so enraged by them that you
have to keep reading in order to find out what nonsense comes next.
This chapter has been written with the second type of reader in mind, a
reader who remains sceptical about Construction Grammar as a useful
theory of linguistic knowledge. If someone like that asked you to list
the two or three strongest arguments for Construction Grammar, what
would you say? Armed with what you have read in the preceding five
chapters, you could come up with the following talking points:
• Speakers must know constructions: ordinary language contains a
large number of idiomatic expressions (by and large, all of a sudden,
etc.) that show formal peculiarities and/or non-compositional mean-
ings. It is a useful assumption that these patterns are stored in a large
network, the construct-i-con.
• There are coercion effects: constructional patterns can override lexi-
cal meanings, for instance when count nouns are used in mass noun
contexts (Could I have a little more kangaroo, please?) Viewing construc-
tions as schematic form–meaning pairs elegantly explains effects of
this kind.
• Even general syntactic patterns have idiosyncratic constraints: a pat-
tern such as the Ditransitive construction must be endowed with
meaning, as is evidenced by failed examples such as *I brought the
table a glass of water. Modelling this with syntactic rules is difficult; a
constructional approach accounts naturally for it.
A sceptic might listen to those points, nod at regular intervals, and
then put on a sly smile, saying So all of your best arguments are based on
anecdotal observations? There is nothing wrong in principle with a theory
constructions and l anguage processing 131
that is based on careful considerations of individual linguistic examples.

However, someone who is not convinced by three such examples is
unlikely to change their mind after the fourth, fifth, or sixth example.
What is needed is a different sort of empirical evidence, namely behav-
ioural evidence that is gathered in reproducible ways under controlled
laboratory conditions. The fundamental difference between evidence
from casual observation and evidence from experimentation is that in
gathering the latter the researcher actively manipulates the factors that
are hypothesised to be at work. To offer an analogy, say that you want to
know what foods are good for people’s health. One way to do this would
be to choose a group of your friends, take note of what they eat during
a given week, and then look whether differences in food consumption
correspond in some ways to your friends’ health, as measured by body
mass index, pulse at rest, performance in a 100-metre sprint, a self-
assessment of how healthy they feel, or some other measure of your
choice. Now imagine that you present your results to a friend who has
a job doing clinical studies for a pharmaceutical company. The chances
are that this friend would shake her head in disbelief. The way to find
out whether some food makes a difference, she would explain to you, is
to have two groups of subjects, and to feed them different things. If you
are interested in finding out something about the factor ‘food’, you need
to manipulate that factor. Have two groups of friends, feed one group
broccoli and the other lasagna, and see if after a month there are reliable
differences in the results of the 100-metre sprint. In a way, the evidence
for Construction Grammar that this book has presented up to now has
been gathered with an approach that resembles the first way of analys-
ing food and health more than the second. We have been collecting
observations, individual pieces of evidence, and taken together, those
pieces of evidence appear to be largely compatible with the idea of a
construct-i-con that represents speakers’ knowledge of language. An
inherent danger in this approach is that we unconsciously turn towards
such pieces of evidence as conform to our theory, and disregard other,
more problematic pieces. Counterintuitive as it may seem, what we
would need to do in order to find support for Construction Grammar is
to try to prove it wrong. Scientific advances can only be made if we try
to disprove our current theories, finding out in the process what ideas
we need to revise and what other ideas might replace them. If we fail to
find counterevidence, we should still view our theory critically, but we
are entitled to the conclusion that no better alternatives are currently
available.
As the following sections will discuss, there is actually a substan-
tial body of psycholinguistic work that has been carried out with the
express purpose of trying to test Construction Grammar as a theory.

Psycholinguistics is usually thought of as covering the areas of language
comprehension, language production, and language acquisition. This
chapter will focus on work that has examined aspects of language com-
prehension and production; the topic of language acquisition will be
dealt with separately in Chapter 7. The main purpose of this chapter
will be to bundle together those pieces of behavioural evidence that
would allow you to respond to the critic’s question, saying Well, since
you’re asking, the illustrating examples that I have given you are backed up by
several types of behavioural evidence, both in language comprehension and in
language production. For example, it has been shown that . . .
6.2 Evidence from language comprehension
6.2.1 Constructions explain how hearers understand novel

denominal verbs
English is notorious for its highly productive use of morphological con-
version, that is, the use of nouns as verbs (water a plant), verbs as nouns
(have a drink), or adjectives as verbs (calm the baby). The fact that speakers
use conversion productively means that you are likely to come across
examples that you have never encountered before, which raises the
question of how you understand these examples. To take an instance,
how do you interpret an innovative denominal verb such as to monk?
Looking at the verb in isolation, several interpretations seem possible,
for instance ‘turn someone into a monk’, ‘behave like a monk’, or ‘popu-
late some place with monks’; depending on how imaginative you are,
you might come up with further meanings. A commonsensical approach
to the question of how denominal verbs are understood would be that
it is the immediate linguistic context that determines the interpreta-
tion. More specifically, the constructional view of linguistic knowledge
would predict that in cases where there is no established verb meaning,
it is the morphosyntactic form of the construction in which it appears,
that is, the linguistic context of the verb, that lends its meaning to the
verb via the principle of coercion.
(1) It was not before his twenty-fourth birthday that Luther was
monked.
Hey hey we’re the monks. We’re just monking around.
In the thirteenth century the Catholic church started to monk
Northern Europe.
What the constructional approach would have to say about these exam-
ples is that the respective differences in the interpretations of to monk are
influenced by the Passive construction, the Progressive construction,
and the Transitive construction. This, however, is a claim that does not
follow as a matter of course. An alternative explanation might be that
the interpretations are determined by lexical elements in the context
and general world knowledge. So, a hearer might know that Luther was
a German Augustinian monk who hence must have been ‘monked’ at
some point. By the same token, if a hearer triangulates the ideas ‘Catholic
church’, ‘Northern Europe’, and ‘monk’, there remain few other inter-
pretations than the one that implies sending out missionaries. In keep-
ing with the aim of trying to test Construction Grammar, what kind of
evidence could we gather to decide between these two possibilities?
Kaschak and Glenberg (2000) devised a series of experiments to
test whether constructions measurably influence the interpretation of
denominal verbs. In particular, these authors intended to answer the
question of whether or not adult speakers of English are sensitive to
the relationship between abstract syntactic forms and basic conceptual
scenes that is posited by Goldberg (1995) as the scene encoding hypoth-
esis (see Chapter 2). In a first experiment, participants were exposed to
pairs of sentences such as the following.
(2) Lyn crutched Tom the apple so he wouldn’t starve.
Lyn crutched the apple so Tom wouldn’t starve.
In terms of the lexical material, the two sentences are identical. In terms
of the syntax of their main clauses, they differ: the first instantiates
the Ditransitive construction, while the second is an example of the
Transitive construction. The presentation of the two sentences was
followed by what is called an inference task. Participants were shown
a sentence such as Tom got the apple or Lyn acted on the apple and were
asked to indicate which of the original sentences would be semantically
consistent with the test sentence. As you may expect, the sentence Tom
got the apple was matched most often with the Ditransitive construc-
tion whereas speakers paired Lyn acted on the apple with the Transitive
construction. This demonstrates an effect of syntax and hence of
constructions.
In a second experiment, Kaschak and Glenberg tested whether this
effect would also be apparent when participants were asked to give
definitions of novel denominal verbs. Participants were exposed to
short stories that ended in a critical sentence with a verb such as crutch.
Crucially, the syntactic form of that sentence was varied across groups
of participants. Consider the following text.
(3) Tom and Lyn competed on different baseball teams. After the
game, Tom was teasing Lyn about striking out three times. Lyn
said: ‘I was just distracted by your ugly face. I can hit anything to
any field using anything!’ To prove it, she took an apple that she
had brought as a snack, and a crutch that belonged to the baseball
club’s infirmary.
Lyn crutched Tom her apple to prove her point.
Lyn crutched her apple to prove her point to Tom.
Participants were asked to define the denominal verb in the critical
sentence. Kaschak and Glenberg determined whether the partici-
pants explicitly attributed the idea of a transfer to the verb meaning.
If someone wrote ‘to crutch means to hit something to someone
using a crutch’, that response was counted as referring to a transfer.
Definitions such as ‘to crutch means to make something move by
hitting it with a crutch’ were counted as non-transfer responses. The
central question was whether the constructional form of the critical
sentences has an impact on participants’ responses. Indeed, Kaschak
and Glenberg found that transfer definitions are significantly more
frequent when the critical sentence instantiates the Ditransitive
construction. Taken together, the results of the two experiments show
that the syntactic form of constructions guides the comprehension
of newly coined words. This result does not preclude the possibility
that world knowledge and lexical items in the immediate context also
have an influence; indeed, this is very likely to be the case. But besides
these, constructional form is a force to be reckoned with in language
comprehension.
6.2.2 Constructional meanings are routinely accessed in sentence

comprehension
One of the core ideas presented in this book is the notion that con-
structions are symbolic units that pair a morphosyntactic form with a
meaning. That meaning may concern the semantic integration of the
formal parts (as in the Noun–Noun Compound construction), it may
represent a basic situation type (as in the Caused Motion construc-
tion), or it may assign the status of new or old information to the formal
parts (as in the Wh-Cleft construction). What unites these different
kinds of meanings is that they are independent of the lexical material
that enters the specific constructs, that is, the concrete instantiations of
those constructions. The claim that there are these constructional, lexis-
independent meanings can be pitted against the hypothesis that hearers
build up the meaning of a sentence by accessing the meanings of the

component lexical items and bringing those meanings into a coherent
configuration.
To take a concrete example, the sentence John eats a cookie would, on
that theory, be understood in such a way that hearers access the lexical
meaning of eat, which involves two arguments, an animate agent who
eats and a patient argument that is eaten, the first of which is assigned
to the subject John and the latter to the object a cookie. Let us refer to
this hypothesis as the verb-centred view of sentence comprehension.
On this view, it is the verb that is the main determinant of sentence
meaning. This is a very reasonable idea, given that verbs express mean-
ings that are intrinsically relational by involving several participants.
There is, furthermore, psycholinguistic evidence for the primacy of
verb meaning over other determinants of sentence meaning. Healy and
Miller (1970) presented speakers of English with a list of sentences,
asking them to sort those sentences into sensible categories. Given this
task, the participants were more likely to sort sentences according to
their main verbs than according to the subject argument. However, the
verb-centred view may not be the whole story. Bencini and Goldberg
(2000: 641) point out two problematic issues. First, it is an empirical
fact that verbs are usually not restricted to a single pattern of argument
structure. As is shown below, even a verb such as kick, which might
be considered a rather typical transitive verb, is not restricted to the
Transitive construction.
(4) Pat kicked the ball.
Pat kicked at the ball.
Pat kicked the ball out of the stadium.
Pat kicked Bob the ball.
Pat kicked and kicked.
Pat kicked his way into the Champions League.
A second problem relates to the observation that different argument
structure patterns impose different constraints on the kinds of argu-
ments that a given verb can take. As the examples below illustrate, the
Ditransitive construction is restricted to animate recipients whereas
the Prepositional Dative construction takes animate and inanimate
goal arguments.
(5) I brought the patient a glass of water. Ditransitive
I brought a glass of water to the patient. Prepositional Dative
*I brought the table a glass of water. Ditransitive
I brought a glass of water to the table. Prepositional Dative
On the verb-centred view of sentence comprehension, the only way

to account for this would be to posit two different senses of the verb
bring, one with a theme and a recipient argument and a second one
with a theme and a goal argument. The main arguments against such
a multiple-sense approach is that there is no independent reason for
adopting it apart from preserving the idea of one-to-one mappings
between verb senses and argument structure patterns (Goldberg 1995;
see also the discussion in Chapter 2). The constructional view of sen-
tence comprehension thus suggests itself as an alternative.
But how can it be empirically tested whether or not the meaning
of argument structure constructions plays a role in sentence compre-
hension? Bencini and Goldberg (2000) adopt the same methodology
that Healy and Miller (1970) used to uncover the importance of verb
meanings for sentence comprehension, but they extend it with another
variable, namely the variable of constructional form. Again, the task
that participants had to accomplish was to sort sentences into sensi-
ble categories, according to overall sentence meanings. Bencini and
Goldberg designed sixteen sentences with four different main verbs,
namely throw, take, get, and slice. The crucial twist to the methodology
is that each of these verbs appeared in four sentences that represented
four different constructions, namely the Transitive construction, the
Ditransitive construction, the Caused Motion construction, and the
Resultative construction. This design creates a tension: it gives par-
ticipants the option to sort by verb, but also by syntactic form. Table 6.1
shows the stimuli that Bencini and Goldberg used.
You will notice that the sentences in the columns share the same
syntax, but not at all the same semantic content. Their similarity is
abstract and relational, rather than lexical. At the same time, the sen-
tences in the rows differ in everything except the verb. Bencini and
Goldberg have thus made sure that the variables that participants could
rely on are narrowly defined as either the lexical verbs or the argument
structure constructions. Bencini and Goldberg (2000: 644) administered
the task of sorting the sentences to seventeen participants, who were
asked to produce four categories. Seven participants produced perfect
constructional sortings, the remaining ten produced mixed sortings, and
no participant sorted after the verbs. An analysis of the mixed sortings
revealed that these were closer to a constructional sorting than to a
verbal sorting: Bencini and Goldberg determined this by counting the
number of changes that were necessary to transform a mixed sorting
into either a constructional or a verbal sorting. These results suggest
that sentence comprehension is not entirely driven by the verb, but
there are other factors at play. Constructional meaning is one of those
Table 6.1 Sentences used by Bencini and Goldberg (2000: 650)

Construction
Caused
Verb Transitive Ditransitive Motion Resultative
throw Anita threw the Chris threw Pat threw the Lyn threw the
hammer. Linda the ball. keys onto the box apart.
roof.
get Michelle got Beth got Lyn an Laura got the Dana got the
the book. invitation. ball into the net. mattress inflated.
slice Barbara sliced Jennifer sliced Meg sliced the Nancy sliced the
the bread. Terry an apple. ham onto the tyre open.
plate.
take Audrey took the Paula took Sue Kim took the Rachel took the
watch. a message. rose into the wall down.
house.
factors. Bencini and Goldberg (2000: 645) consider the possibility that
perhaps the verbs that were chosen in the task were highly general, so
that the participants did not recognise them as powerful clues to sen-
tence meaning. However, this only applies to the verbs take and get, and
not to throw and slice. The results do not reveal any more verbal sortings
with the latter than with the former. Bencini and Goldberg therefore
conclude that constructional meanings are routinely accessed during
sentence comprehension.
6.2.3 Constructions explain knowledge of grammatical

unacceptability
Speakers’ knowledge of language includes the ability to judge whether
or not a given utterance is part of that language. Many approaches to
linguistic analysis exploit this and rest on the analyst’s ability to distin-
guish acceptable and unacceptable sentences. Current work on syntax
is highly critical of using acceptability judgements of the analyst as the
sole source of evidence (Schütze 1996; Da˛browska 2010; Gibson and
Fedorenko 2010). The problems are manifold. First, the researcher’s
awareness of the research question may introduce a certain bias. Second,
individual constructed sentences may be unacceptable for a wide range
of reasons, which are usually not properly controlled for. Third, there
is considerable variation in the acceptability judgements. The same
analyst will judge the same example in different ways at different times.
Furthermore, some acceptability judgements are hard to validate for
non-native English linguists. Still, it will not have escaped your notice
that this book has been making rather generous use of starred examples,
like the following.
(6) *What did Mary run out of the room because John started to fry?
*The magician vanished Mary.
*Mary explained him the news.
*Mary considered to go to the store.
*Mary guitarred a song.
As a suggestion for best practice, Chapter 1 encouraged the use of
unacceptable examples as a heuristic: it is fine to use them as ‘educated
guesses’ about how a construction may be constrained. The crucial
issue is that these guesses should be followed up by corpus-based or
experimental validation.
However, regardless of whether and how acceptability judgements
are used, the fact remains that speakers have intuitions that reflect
constraints on constructions. Construction Grammar, as a theory of
linguistic knowledge, needs to account for those intuitions. Phrasing
this in more concrete terms, we have to find out how speakers know
what not to say. A possible explanation would be that speakers, espe-
cially at a young age, are corrected when they say something that does
not conform to conventional norms. This explanation is easily refuted
on empirical grounds, since direct negative evidence is very sparse in
language use. Another explanation would be that speakers are creatures
of habit and are thus critical of utterances that they have not heard
before. Again, the empirical evidence refutes this. There are creative
uses of language that are even recognised as such but that are judged as
fully acceptable. If you read in a children’s book that The dinosaur swam
his friends to the mainland you recognise that the verb swim is used in a
somewhat creative way, but you will not write to the publisher to say
that you found a grammatical error in the book. Boyd and Goldberg
(2011) propose a third explanation that is in line with the constructional
view of linguistic knowledge and that is amenable to empirical testing.
Their explanation rests on a concept that they call statistical pre-
emption. The basic premise of statistical pre-emption is that speakers
unconsciously accomplish two things.
First, speakers form generalisations over sets of constructions that are
comparable with regard to their meanings, as for instance the following
pairs of constructions.
(7) John gave Mary a book. Ditransitive
John gave a book to Mary. Prepositional Dative
the blue book Attributive Adjective

the book that is blue Relative Clause
The chef melted the cheese. Transitive
The chef made the cheese melt. Make-Causative
It is difficult to catch trout. It-Extraposition
Trout are difficult to catch. Tough-Raising
Second, it is assumed that speakers keep a detailed record of the lexical
elements that they hear in these constructions. More specifically, for any
given lexical element, they will keep track of its absolute text frequency
and of its relative frequencies in each member of the construction pair.
Take, for instance, the verb recommend. If you were to guess the text fre-
quency of recommend on a scale from one (very rare) to seven (extremely
frequent), the chances are that you would give it a three or four, feeling
that it is reasonably frequent – less frequent than give, but more frequent
than assign. You know furthermore that recommend is commonly used in
the Prepositional Dative construction (John recommended the book to
Mary) while you do not easily recall hearing it used in the Ditransitive
construction. Or do you? What do you think of the following examples?
(Spoiler alert: they are in fact attested.)
(8) He wondered what to order, I recommended him the steak
tartare.
App Man is here to recommend you the best apps of the week.
John complained that I should have recommended him the book
earlier.
Maybe you are warming up to the idea that recommend can, on certain
occasions, be used ditransitively, but for many speakers of English,
this is completely out of the question. According to the idea of sta-
tistical pre-emption, speakers staunchly reject ditransitive recommend
because given its overall text frequency, and given its frequency in the
Prepositional Dative construction, recommend is astonishingly infre-
quent in the Ditransitive construction. In their mental record of the
two constructions, speakers perceive a statistical imbalance, and they
interpret that imbalance as meaningful: if a lexical item rarely or never
appears where it would be expected with a certain base frequency, then
it is absent because of a constructional constraint.
In order to test whether speakers rely on statistical pre-emption
when they learn constructional constraints, Boyd and Goldberg (2011)
designed a series of experiments that involved English A-Adjectives
such as afraid, afloat, and alive. A special characteristic of these adjectives
is that they cannot be used attributively (*the afraid child, *the alive fox).
This constraint is not motivated by semantic characteristics (the scared
child, the living fox) or by phonological characteristics (the adult male,
the astute remark); A-Adjectives thus pose something of a challenge to
language users. How do speakers acquire the knowledge that some
adjectives are for predicative use only? Boyd and Goldberg presented
participants with visual scenes on a computer screen. The scene showed
three elements, namely two identical animals in the lower half of the
screen and a star at the top of the screen. Each scene was described with
a short sentence, such as Here are two cows. In the experimental trials, one
of the animals moved across the screen, towards the star. Both animals
were labelled with a word, for instance an adjective such as vigilant or
sleepy. The task that speakers had to accomplish was to identify verbally
which of the two animals had moved. The grammar of English holds
two basic possibilities for doing this: speakers could use an Attributive
Adjective construction and say The sleepy cow moved to the star or they
could use a Relative Clause construction to say The cow that is sleepy
moved to the star. Both variants were used in a short training phase that
familiarised participants with the experimental procedure. In order to
elicit both construction types, Boyd and Goldberg included filler trials
of two kinds. In the first kind, animals were labelled with verbal attrib-
utes such as smokes or gambles. Faced with such an attribute, participants
had to resort to the Relative Clause construction and respond The cow
that gambles moved to the star. The second kind consisted of very frequent
adjectival attributes such as slow or fast. These adjectives have a natural
disposition to occur prenominally, so that speakers would be biased
towards using the Attributive Adjective construction.
In a first experiment, Boyd and Goldberg investigated whether
speakers would avoid attributive uses of common A-Adjectives such
as asleep or afraid, and more importantly, whether they would treat
novel A-Adjectives, that is, coinages such as ablim or adax, in the same
way. The results showed the expected effect for known A-Adjectives:
the participants used the Relative Clause construction in the large
majority of cases. A significant effect, albeit weaker, was also observed
with novel A-Adjectives. This observation is evidence that speakers
of English entertain a generalisation, the A-Adjective construction,
and that they will consider novel adjectives such as adax as falling
under that generalisation. However, the weaker preference of novel
A-Adjectives for the Relative Clause construction suggests that
some speakers were uncertain whether or not to view the novel stimuli
as A-Adjectives. After all, there are forms such as adult or astute that
are not A-Adjectives.
To solidify these insights, Boyd and Goldberg implemented a

second experiment that was identical in procedure to the first one,
but which differed in how participants were trained for the experi-
mental task. In the explanation of the experimental procedure, par-
ticipants were given examples that included novel A-Adjectives,
for which the experimenter offered the Relative Clause construc-
tion as a description. Hence, participants saw screens with animals
and heard the experimenter say The lizard that is adax moved to the
star. Does an exposure of this kind alter the subsequent responses
to previously unheard A-Adjectives? The responses that Boyd and
Goldberg obtained show that participants were quick to generalise
from one attested novel A-Adjective to other potential A-Adjectives.
Whereas the first experiment showed a substantial difference between
common and novel A-Adjectives, that difference disappeared
in the second experiment. What encourages hearers to treat novel
A-Adjectives as such is the process of statistical pre-emption: hearing
a novel A-Adjective in a Relative Clause construction, where an
Attributive Adjective construction would be expected as a default,
leads hearers to infer the presence of a constraint. The Relative
Clause construction serves as a cue for this, and Boyd and Goldberg
call this cue the pre-emptive context.
If you think about it, identifying a construction as a pre-emptive
context is not trivial; it involves quite sophisticated counterfactual
reasoning. The hearer observes the speaker choose a construction,
the hearer knows that there are other constructions that serve similar
functions, and depending on the relative frequencies of the alternative
constructions the hearer constructs an explanation for why the speaker
would not have chosen a more frequent construction. The activity of
mind-reading, which informed much of the discussion in Chapter 5
on information packaging, is again visible in this kind of reasoning. To
investigate this process more closely, Boyd and Goldberg carried out a
third experiment that introduced another small but crucial variation.
The training phase of the second experiment was altered in such a way
that novel A-Adjectives appeared in contexts where they were coordi-
nated with a complex adjectival phrase. Hence, participants watched a
screen with two hamsters and heard the experimenter say The hamster
that is ablim and proud of itself moved to the star. The subsequent experi-
mental task remained the same as in the two previous experiments.
What results do you expect? Do you think that the participants took
the relative clause as a cue that ablim is an A-Adjective? In all likeli-
hood, you do not, and you are right. The participants discounted that
cue because any two coordinated adjectives would require a relative
clause. The length of the coordinated adjective phrase is the simplest

explanation for the speaker’s choice. Accordingly, the results resembled
those of experiment one rather than those of experiment two: whereas
the participants were hesitant to use adjectives such as ablim or adax
attributively in experiment two, they were much more ready to do so in
experiments one and three.
To draw a conclusion from these observations: the constructional
view of linguistic knowledge holds an explanation for the fact that
speakers intuitively know when an utterance is grammatically unac-
ceptable. All utterances that hearers process are categorised in terms of
the constructions that they instantiate, and relations between construc-
tions allow hearers to notice when one alternative is chosen despite the
availability of another, more basic alternative. When such pre-emptive
contexts are noticed, it leads hearers to infer constraints. Hearers inter-
pret speakers’ choices as meaningful, as reflecting grammatical conven-
tions. A grammatically deviant sentence thus evokes the gut feeling that
given the circumstances, the speaker ought to have chosen a different
construction.
6.2.4 Constructions explain incidental verbatim memory

Most current models of language comprehension make the assumption
that once a hearer has heard and understood a sentence, it is the general
meaning of the sentence that is retained in memory while the specif-
ics of its structure are quickly forgotten (e.g. Loebell and Bock 2003).
Only in exceptional circumstances – say, in situations where it is clear
that specific wordings have to be memorised or where an utterance is
particularly funny or shocking – will hearers retain verbatim memo-
ries. This consensus, which is backed up by a substantial literature of
empirical findings, is something of an embarrassment to Construction
Grammar. If constructions are meaningful, and if meanings are memo-
rised, why do hearers not keep a memory record of the constructional
forms? What the constructional view of linguistic knowledge would
predict is that forms are remembered along with meanings. In order to
test whether or not this is the case, Gurevich et al. (2010) reopened the
case for verbatim memory in language.
In a first experiment, they presented participants with thirty-two
illustrated pages of the children’s book I Am Spider-Man. Each picture
was accompanied by three to four sentences that were presented audi-
torily, as recorded by a male narrator. The presentation of the entire
story took around four minutes. Crucially, Gurevich et al. prepared
two versions of the story that were identical in content but that differed
with regard to the constructions that were used. The examples below
illustrate parts of the different stories.
(9) Story version 1: My fingers can stick to anything.

Story version 2: I can stick my fingers to anything.
Story version 1: I am strong enough to fight four bad guys at
once!
Story version 2: Fighting four guys at once is easy for someone
as strong as me.
Immediately after hearing the story, the participants were asked to

perform a recognition task in which written sentences were presented
on a computer screen and the participants had to decide whether or
not the sentences had been part of the story. Before each sentence, a
picture from the story was shown for one second. The pictures were
either related to the sentence in question or unrelated. Upon reading
the sentences, subjects pressed one of two keys to indicate whether
they recognised a previously heard sentence. Gurevich et al. (2010:
52) found that their participants performed this task with great accu-
racy. Furthermore, the researchers replicated this result with a second
experiment in which the story versions differed only in terms of func-
tion words. Notice that the sentences in the second pair given above
contain different elements, such as bad in the first one and easy in the
second one. In order to exclude possible effects due to lexical elements,
all sentence pairs were constructed like the first one given above, where
the only difference lies in word order and the grammatical element I.
In a third experiment, different participants heard the Spider-Man story
and were subsequently asked to retell the story while being prompted
with the pictures. Retold sentences were counted as a match if they
differed by no more than one word from the original. Again, Gurevich
et al. obtained substantial evidence for verbatim memory.
It could be pointed out that in all of these experiments, the time
between exposure and recall was relatively short and that this may have
inflated the effect. In a final experiment, Gurevich et al. tested whether
verbatim memory would still show an effect after a delay of several
days. Participants were exposed to a narration of a video clip showing
an episode of Felix the Cat. The narrator was an experimenter in the
disguise of a fellow participant. Listeners were encouraged to return
for another experiment after six days. On that occasion, the listeners
were shown the same video clip and were asked to narrate the clip to
another participant, again an experimenter in disguise. Transcriptions
of the spontaneous narrations reveal a substantial ratio of sentences
that fully match the utterances that the participants had heard during
the first experimental session. Gurevich et al. thus maintain that ver-
batim memory is retained even for prolonged periods of time. This of
course does not go against the finding that the extraction of general
meanings also takes place, but it reconciles the constructional view of
linguistic knowledge with the empirical findings of whether and how
linguistic structures are memorised. On a dictionary-and-grammar
view of linguistic knowledge, it would seem natural that memory of
syntactic structures is quickly discarded. A constructional view predicts
that verbatim memory should be retained to a substantial degree, and
it explains speakers’ ability to retain these memories with reference to
constructions as pairings of meaning with morphosyntactic form.
6.3 Evidence from language production
6.3.1 Constructions explain reduction effects in speech

How carefully speakers enunciate their words is a matter of consider-
able variation. You are more likely to articulate your words carefully in
situations that are formal, when your addressees are unknown to you
or socially superior, or when there is ambient noise that impairs audi-
tory comprehension. Besides these language-external variables, crucial
linguistic variables concern the frequency and the predictability of the
words that you are using. A word such as and is very frequent, which
means that you have a lot of practice pronouncing it and with routine
typically comes reduction. Moreover, in some contexts the word and
is highly predictable. If a sequence of three words begins with gin and
ends with tonic, the chances are that you can work out which word
occurs in between. Phonetic reduction as a consequence of frequency
and predictability is very well documented (e.g. Jurafsky et al. 2001).
This section will make the case that this effect is observed not only on
the level of words, but also on the level of constructions. That is, words
are pronounced in a more reduced fashion if they occur in a construc-
tion of which they are highly typical.
Empirical evidence for this claim is presented by Gahl and Garnsey
(2004), who asked their participants to read out sentences such as the
following.
(10) The director suggested the scene should be filmed at night.
The director suggested the scene between Kim and Mike.
The confident engineer maintained the machinery of the whole
upper deck.
The confident engineer maintained the machinery would be hard

to destroy.
All sentences included a complement-taking predicate such as suggest or

believe; what was varied was the construction that represented the verb’s
complementation pattern. In the examples above, one pattern following
the verbs is the That-less Complement Clause construction, while
the other one is a complex noun phrase, so that the overall sentence
instantiates the Transitive construction. Crucially, the verbs that were
used as stimuli co-occur with these constructions to different extents.
For instance, the verb suggest co-occurs with complement clauses more
often than with direct objects, so that the first sentence given above
is more likely than the second one. Conversely, the verb maintain is
more strongly associated with the Transitive construction, so that the
sentence with the complement clause would be less likely. Gahl and
Garnsey told the participants that they were recording stimuli for a dif-
ferent experiment and asked them to read the sentences. The research-
ers then measured the length with which the verbs in question were
pronounced. The main result is that the constructional bias of the verbs
significantly correlates with reduced production (2004: 763). Verbs such
as argue, believe, claim, conclude, confess, or decide are pronounced shorter
when they occur in the That-less Complement Clause construction,
and they are longer if they occur with a direct object. Conversely, verbs
such as accept, advocate, confirm, or emphasise are reduced when occurring
with a direct object, but not when they take a complement clause. Gahl
and Garnsey draw the conclusion that speakers’ knowledge of language
includes the probabilities of co-occurrence between verbs and construc-
tions, and that this knowledge affects reduction in speech (2004: 768).
The effects that Gahl and Garnsey observe would be difficult to explain
as purely collocational relations between individual words. Note that
the lexical items surrounding the verbs in the stimuli sentences are
exactly the same. The results only make sense in the light of construc-
tions and their association with lexical elements.
6.3.2 Constructions explain syntactic priming, and exceptions to

syntactic priming
Priming is a psychological concept that describes how the mental acti-
vation of one idea facilitates the subsequent activation of another idea.
Hearing a word such as chicken will prime a semantically related word
such as egg, as can be shown empirically by comparing how fast hear-
ers react to this word, for instance in a lexical decision task that asks
them to verify whether egg is a proper word of English. Primed with

chicken, a word such as egg is verified faster than a semantically unrelated
word such as bag (Neely 1976). The term syntactic priming refers
to something similar, namely the phenomenon that speakers tend to
repeat syntactic structures that they have recently heard or produced.
Other commonly used labels for this phenomenon are structural prim-
ing or syntactic persistence. Experimental evidence for syntactic prim-
ing includes the finding that speakers who are primed with either the
Active construction or the Passive construction are likely to reuse the
respective construction in a subsequent picture description task.
Bock (1986) devised an experiment that was presented to the partici-
pants as a memory task, in which they were asked to repeat sentences
such as the following.
(11) One of the fans punched the referee.
The referee was punched by one of the fans.
In critical trials, these sentences were followed by a picture that the par-
ticipants were asked to describe. The pictures would show scenes that
lent themselves to verbalisation through either an Active construction
or the Passive construction. For instance, one of the pictures showed a
church with lightning hitting the church steeple. Hence, the participants
were able to produce an active description such as Lightning is striking the
church or a passive description such as The church is being hit by lightning.
Bock (1986: 364) observed an asymmetry in the responses that cor-
responded to the syntactic prime. If the participants had been primed
with a passive sentence, the likelihood of a passive picture description
increased significantly. An exactly parallel effect was obtained through
priming with the Ditransitive construction and the Prepositional
Dative construction. Repeating a sentence such as The undercover agent
sold some cocaine to the rock star increased the likelihood that the partici-
pants used the Prepositional Dative construction for the description
of a scene in which a grandfather is reading a book to his grandchild.
Bock’s results are consistent with the idea that speakers’ knowledge of
language consists of a network of constructions which can be activated
to greater or lesser extents at a given point in time. If a construction has
been activated through recent usage, and speakers encounter a situation
that is compatible with the meaning of that construction, they are thus
likely to use the construction in verbalising their experience.
Syntactic priming does not only occur in the psychological labora-
tory, but can be observed in naturally occurring language use as well.
Gries (2005) presents an analysis of corpus data in which he analyses
whether the use of a Ditransitive construction or a Prepositional
Dative construction has a measurable effect on the subsequent ver-

balisation of ‘dative’ events, that is, events in which either of the two
constructions could be used. Gries retrieved several thousand pairs
of dative sentences from the British component of the International
Corpus of English (ICE-GB) and annotated each pair for a number of
variables. The central variable, of course, was whether or not the mem-
bers of the pair were structurally identical. Beyond that, it was noted
whether the respective sentences were produced by the same speaker
or writer, whether the main verb was the same or not, and how many
sentences intervened between the sentences. These annotations allow
a more detailed view on the factors that operate in syntactic priming.
Gries finds, first of all, a strong effect of syntactic priming (2005:
372). After the occurrence of a Ditransitive construction, speakers
reuse that construction more often than would be expected if it were
by chance. With regard to the remaining variables, Gries reports that
syntactic priming is especially strong if the two members of the pair
contain the same main verb. This phenomenon is referred to as the lexi-
cal boost in the literature on syntactic priming (Pickering and Ferreira
2008). Furthermore, the priming effect is stronger when a single speaker
produces both members of a pair. Priming is thus more intensive from
production to subsequent production than from hearing to subsequent
production. Gries also notes that the strength of priming wears off with
increasing distance between the prime and the target, which is to be
explained as the fading of the constructions’ cognitive activation. Lastly,
an important finding that emerges from the analysis is that some verbs
are much more sensitive to syntactic priming than others. Gries com-
pares the verbs give, hand, lend, sell, send, show, and offer and finds that
there are substantial differences with regard to the effect strength of
syntactic priming:
• show, offer, and give typically occur in Ditransitive sentences,
regardless of the construction that is used in the prime
• sell and hand typically occur in Prepositional Dative sentences,
regardless of the construction that is used in the prime, and
• send and lend typically occur in sentences that instantiate the con-
struction that is used in the prime.
This result is an important qualification of the overall idea of syn-
tactic priming. Some verbs have construction-specific preferences and
therefore resist priming. The effect of syntactic priming is thus car-
ried by those verbs that alternate relatively freely between the two
constructions. This result naturally integrates into a constructional
view of linguistic knowledge in which constructions have collocational
references (see Section 1.3.4). A verb such as show is strongly associated

p
with the Ditransitive construction. If a speaker wants to verbalise
a scene of showing – say, a boy showing his mother a scratch on his
knee – speakers are inherently biased towards using the Ditransitive
construction. Having heard a Prepositional Dative construction in
the preceding context may act as a competing force, but this force
would have to overcome the strong association between show and the
Ditransitive construction. More often than not, the priming effect will
be neutralised.
6.3.3 Constructions explain how speakers complete sentences

Chapter 5 briefly discussed the notion of projection (Auer 2005). The
fact that speakers are able to finish each other’s sentences shows indi-
rectly that their processing of language involves constant anticipation
of the material that will come up next. Constructions have a rather
central role to play in this process. A phrase such as The more I read about
Construction Grammar leads hearers to anticipate the second half of the
The X-er the Y-er construction, as, for instance, the less I understand
about it. By the same token, the study by Gahl and Garnsey (2004) that
was discussed above showed that in a string such as The director suggested
the verb is produced in a more reduced fashion if the string is followed
by a That-less Complement Clause construction, which is the option
that hearers can project with greater confidence. A question of interest
with regard to projection is what exactly counts as a cue for projection
and how reliable those cues are. Whereas the first half of a The X-er
the Y-er construction predicts the future occurrence of a second half
with almost complete certainty, most cues are not as reliable. Verbs
such as suggest or maintain only allow tentative predictions with regard
to their complementation patterns. How can we measure and compare
the strength of different cues?
A straightforward answer to that question would be that we should
look at usage frequencies in order to determine what lexical and gram-
matical constructions are likely to co-occur. In the case of suggest, it is
easy to measure on the basis of corpus data in how many of all instances
the verb is followed by a That-less Complement Clause construction.
If that were the case in 60 per cent of all cases, that would translate into a
rather strong expectation. Measurements of simple relative frequencies
would thus represent estimates of cue validity, a term that designates
how safely you can make an assumption, given the presence of a cue.
To illustrate: if I am asking you to guess what animal I am currently
thinking of, the feature ‘it has a trunk’ has a rather high cue validity, as
compared with ‘it has eyes’. However, with linguistic constructions, the
issue is often a little more complicated than that. Consider an auxiliary
verb construction such as English shall followed by an infinitive. Take
any corpus of English, and the most frequent verb to follow shall will be
the verb to be (see Hilpert 2008: 43). Does that mean that hearing shall
leads hearers to expect that be will be next? It has to be pointed out that
be is a very frequent form to begin with, and it is found frequently not
only after shall, but also after other auxiliary verbs.
Stefanowitsch and Gries (2003) make the case that the cognitive
associations between constructions and the lexical elements occurring
in those constructions should be measured not in simple relative fre-
quencies, but rather in terms that show whether an element occurs with
surprisingly high frequency in a construction. Consider the following
contrast between the collocations shall be and shall consider. The former
occurs some 2,000 times in the BNC, the latter only roughly 200 times.
That is a difference of ten to one. Yet it could be argued that the col-
locational bond of shall consider is relatively stronger, because consider is
a much less frequent verb than be: the BNC contains some 7,600 infini-
tive forms of consider, but more than half a million infinitives of be. The
bottom line is that the collocation shall consider is surprisingly frequent,
given the frequencies of its parts, whereas shall be is not. In fact, if the
high text frequency of be is taken into account, then it turns out that
2,000 instances of shall be are significantly fewer than would be expected
if it were by chance. Taking these probabilities into account would
translate into the hypothesis that hearers who are exposed to the string
The international committee shall . . . would project verbs such as consider,
examine, discuss, or continue, which are not the most frequent verbs to
follow shall, but which are verbs that follow shall with surprisingly high
frequency (Hilpert 2008: 37).
Not everyone takes this view. Goldberg et al. (2004: 308) and more
recently Bybee (2010: 97) argue that simple relative frequencies most
accurately reflect cognitive associations between constructions and
lexical elements. In order to investigate the issue, Gries et al. (2005) car-
ried out a study of the As-Predicative construction, which is illustrated
in the examples given below.
(12) The proposal was considered as rather provocative.
I had never seen myself as being too thin.
California is perceived as a place where everything is possible.
We are dealing with a Predicative construction because an entity
X is being given the characteristic or quality Y, as in the Predicate
Nominal construction (Jane is a doctor) or the Predicative Adjective
Table 6.2 Verbs in the As-Predicative and their frequencies

Relative frequency
High Low
Surprisingly high define, describe, know, acknowledge, class,
frequency in the recognise, regard, see, use, conceive, denounce, depict,
As-Predicative view diagnose, hail, rate
Surprisingly low keep, leave, refer to, show build, choose, claim, intend,
frequency in the offer, present, represent,
As-Predicative suggest
construction (The coffee is too hot). Whereas these more basic pre-
dicative constructions include a simple copula as their main verb, the
As-Predicative construction features a verb of perception (see, per-
ceive, view) or cognition (consider, regard, know). These verbs occur in
the construction with different frequencies. The most frequent verb is
see, but crucially, the cue validity of that verb for the As-Predicative
construction is relatively low. A string such as I had never seen . . . could
be continued in many ways that do not involve that construction.
By contrast, a string such as The idea was hailed . . . strongly cues the
As-Predicative construction, despite the fact that the verb hail occurs
much less frequently in the construction than see. Gries et al. extracted
all examples of the As-Predicative construction from the ICE-GB,
identified the verb types that occurred in the construction, and analysed
their frequencies statistically in order to group the verb types into the
four categories that are shown in Table 6.2 (Gries et al. 2005: 657).
Gries et al. (2005) then generated stimulus sentence fragments with
each of the verbs in Table 6.2. Since the As-Predicative construction
commonly involves the Passive construction, both active and passive
stimuli were created for each verb, such as the following.
(13) The biographer depicted the young philosopher . . .
The young philosopher was depicted . . .
On the basis of these stimuli, Gries et al. conducted an experiment in
which participants were asked to complete the sentence fragments in
the way that seemed most natural to them. The participants were told
that the experiment investigated ‘the kinds of English sentences that
people produce’. What Gries et al. wanted to find out, of course, was
which factor would lead the participants to produce an As-Predicative.
The results indicate that surprisingly high frequency is a much better
predictor for this than high relative frequency (Gries et al. 2005: 659).
This is evidence that speakers of English do some rather sophisticated
statistical book-keeping of the frequencies of lexical items across differ-

ent constructions. A view of linguistic knowledge without reference to
constructions would be at a loss when trying to explain these patterns.
On a view of the construct-i-con as a repository of interconnected con-
structions, these results are expected as a matter of course.
6.4 Summing up
The discussion in this chapter started with the distinction of two types
of evidence that could be used to support theoretical claims. First,
there is evidence that we gather through the careful observation of
individual linguistic forms. For instance, we might observe that the
statement That’s too good a deal to pass up contains a noun phrase that
deviates from canonical noun phrase patterns, which would lead us to
posit a construction (more specifically, the Big Mess construction; see
Van Eynde 2007). It is this kind of evidence that has primarily been at
issue in the first five chapters of this book. The second type of evidence
is called behavioural evidence. As the name suggests, it reflects speaker
behaviour, more specifically speaker behaviour under controlled exper-
imental conditions. In order to gather evidence of this kind, researchers
typically design experiments in which one or more factors are actively
manipulated. The introduction to this chapter offered an analogy in
which the participants of an experiment are divided into two groups,
each of which receives food of a different kind. Differences that are
measured in a subsequent test could be related to the foods in question.
Many linguistic experiments aim to find differences between groups of
participants in this way, but it is also possible to work with a single group
of participants. There, the manipulation concerns the experimental task
itself, so that each participant carries out two slightly different versions
of the same task. For instance, an experiment might investigate whether
participants recognise English words faster if they have been primed
with semantically related words. All participants in such a study would
perform under two different conditions: there are trials in which prime
and target are related (chicken – egg), and trials in which prime and
target are unrelated (chicken – bag). Both evidence from observation and
behavioural evidence are necessary for the development of linguistic
theories, and even though neither can be viewed as inherently superior,
behavioural evidence has one decisive advantage: if statements are to
be made about cause and effect, mere observation does not yield con-
clusive evidence. Conversely, if the researcher manages to switch the
effect on and off through active manipulation in an experiment, then
she has actually identified the cause. The main point of this chapter was
to review the pieces of behavioural evidence that are consonant with

the constructional view of linguistic knowledge. Two major types of
evidence were discussed, namely evidence from language comprehen-
sion and evidence from language production.
Experiments that investigate language comprehension present the
participants with some linguistic stimulus and measure a reaction to
that stimulus. Sometimes that reaction is non-linguistic, such as the
press of a button; sometimes it is linguistic, as for instance the formula-
tion of a response sentence. A first piece of evidence for Construction
Grammar from language comprehension is that hearers routinely use
constructions to understand the meanings of novel denominal verbs
such as to crutch, to saxophone, or to envelope. Kaschak and Glenberg (2000)
investigated how participants understood these verbs and found that
the respective interpretations were strongly influenced by the construc-
tional context. A second piece of evidence is provided by Bencini and
Goldberg (2000), who demonstrated an influence of constructions on
sentence comprehension. Participants were given the task of sorting
a set of sentences according to their overall meanings, and the results
showed that syntactic form had a measurable influence on the sort-
ings. Third, knowledge of constructions relates to meta-linguistic tasks
such as rating the acceptability of phrases and sentences. Using the
example of A-Adjectives as a test case, Boyd and Goldberg (2011) show
that knowledge of grammatical unacceptability is the result of hearers’
categorising utterances as constructions, which allows them to notice
when one alternative is chosen despite the availability of another, more
basic alternative. When hearers notice speakers making such choices,
it triggers what Boyd and Goldberg call statistical pre-emption, that is,
the inference of grammatical conventions from hearing a construction
other than the one that would be expected if it were by default. A fourth
piece of evidence for the constructional view of linguistic knowledge
is the observation that verbatim memory is more persistent than has
been generally thought. Whereas most current models of language
comprehension assume an abstraction process which transfers the gist
of sentences into memory but discards specifics of the morphosyntactic
structure, Gurevich et al. (2010) show that hearers retain a substantial
amount of verbatim memory, even when they are not explicitly asked to
do so. On the view that constructions are pairings of meaning and form,
that result is to be expected.
Experiments that investigate language production prompt the par-
ticipants to offer a linguistic response that is audio-recorded and typi-
cally further analysed. Sometimes the task of the experiment may be
just that participants are asked to read out written words or sentences;
in other cases the task might be to describe a picture or a video. The

chapter reviewed three pieces of evidence for Construction Grammar
from language production. First, Gahl and Garnsey (2004) got par-
ticipants to read sentences with complement-taking predicates such as
The director suggested the scene should be filmed at night. One central finding
of the study was that verbs were produced in a more reduced fashion
if they were followed by a construction that typically co-occurs with
them. Verbs such as argue or suggest are pronounced shorter when they
are followed by a complement clause, and they are longer if they occur
with a direct object. This result makes sense if linguistic knowledge is
viewed as a repository of constructions that have associative links to
lexical elements, whereas in the absence of that assumption it is hard to
explain. Second, the assumption of constructions and their associations
with lexical elements is consonant with findings on syntactic priming.
Gries (2005) finds that use of the Ditransitive construction in corpus
data increases the likelihood of that construction in the expression of
a following dative event. However, this effect is neutralised when the
following dative event involves verbs such as sell or hand, which are
strongly associated with the Prepositional Dative construction. The
lexical specificity of syntactic priming is problematic for accounts that
aim to explain syntactic priming as a matter of form only, but the finding
is fully expected on the constructional view. Third, knowledge of con-
structions explains how speakers complete sentence fragments. Gries et
al. (2005) asked experiment participants to complete fragments such as
The young philosopher was depicted, and noted which of their stimuli were
completed with the As-Predicative construction. The results indicate
that such continuations were especially likely if the main verb given in
the stimulus was strongly associated with the construction.
In summary, there is a growing body of research that addresses lan-
guage comprehension and language production from a constructional
point of view. That said, since this line of work is a relatively recent
enterprise, many of the findings presented in this chapter still await
further substantiation through studies that replicate and extend them.
Also, the thematic focus of the constructional psycholinguistic work
that has been done so far is relatively narrow. Whereas quite a few stud-
ies address argument structure constructions, less work is done on mor-
phological constructions or information structure constructions. Hence,
students who are interested in the psycholinguistics of Construction
Grammar will discover that this particular area offers a wealth of new
and interesting dissertation topics.
Study questions
1. What does it mean to ‘manipulate a factor’ in a psycholinguistic
experiment?
2. Describe the set-up of the experimental tasks used by Kaschak and
Glenberg (2000).
3. What is the verb-centred view of sentence comprehension and what
are its problems?
4. Explain the concepts of statistical pre-emption and define what a
pre-emptive context is. You can use the following ungrammatical
example to illustrate your explanation.
*I recommend you the white wine.
5. Compare the following two sentences. Considering the findings pre-
sented by Gahl and Garnsey (2004), what would you expect with
regard to the pronunciation of the adjective easy in these sentences?
I found the z-score easy to interpret.
I found the scene more easy to interpret.
6. Which finding in Gries (2005) goes beyond the results of Bock (1986),
and what does this finding imply with regard to the constructional
view of linguistic knowledge?
7. How do Gries et al. (2005) investigate whether simple relative fre-
quencies or unexpectedly high frequencies capture more accurately
speakers’ cognitive associations between constructions and lexical
items?
Further reading
Like the present chapter, Goldberg and Bencini (2005) offer a survey
of experimental studies that yield evidence for Construction Grammar
on the basis of behavioural data from language production and language
comprehension. Bencini (2013) approaches the role of psycholinguistics
in Construction Grammar more generally and explains a number of
central issues in language processing. The concept of statistical pre-
emption is further elaborated in Goldberg (2011) and Stefanowitsch
(2011). On the issue of relative frequencies vs. surprisingly high
frequencies, chapter 5 in Bybee (2010) presents several criticisms of
Stefanowitsch and Gries (2003), to which Gries (2012) offers responses.
7 Constructions and language
acquisition
7.1 Construction Grammar for kids

As the previous chapters have discussed, linguistic theories can make
very different assumptions about how knowledge of language is organ-
ised in the speaker’s mind. In particular, the discussion presented the
constructional view of linguistic knowledge, which equates knowl-
edge of language with a large repository of constructions, namely the
contruct-i-con, and this view was contrasted with the dictionary-and-
grammar view of linguistic knowledge, which separates knowledge of
grammatical rules from knowledge of lexical items. These two theories
not only differ with respect to the linguistic knowledge of competent
adult speakers, but also make very different predictions about how chil-
dren learn a first language, and how this process should be reflected in
the things that young children say.
On the face of it, there appears to be quite a bit of evidence in favour of
an account that equates language acquisition with the learning of words
and rules. If you have taken an introductory linguistics class, you will
have encountered the statement that young children do not just repeat
what their caretakers say; instead, they combine words into new and
original utterances that they cannot possibly have heard before. Chapter
4 has already offered the example of the wug study (Berko Gleason
1958), which demonstrated that young children routinely master the
allomorphy rules of the Plural construction, so that they can talk about
wugs, heafs, and gutches, choosing the right plural ending for words that
they have never encountered before. Many more examples of this kind
can be adduced. Consider the following authentic utterances.
(1) a. Want other one spoon, Daddy.

b. It noises.
c. I becamed to be Spiderman.
d. She unlocked it open.
155
From the perspective of adult language, these utterances deviate from

conventional norms, but at the same time, they reveal some rather
sophisticated reasoning about linguistic generalisations. Take the first
example, in which the child uses other one in the place of a demon-
strative determiner such as that. The respective functions of other one
and demonstrative that are clearly related, so that the child’s utterance
represents a reasonable guess as to what the grammar of English could
be like. Likewise, the second example It noises betrays a generalisation
across words such as buzz, crash, roar, or cough, all of which denote
sounds and are used as both nouns and verbs. This kind of error is
called an overgeneralisation error, and it is important because it sig-
nals that the child has acquired something more than just a fixed string
that it can repeat. An overgeneralisation error shows that the child has
learned a regularity about language. At the same time, the error shows
that the child has still to acquire certain constraints on that regularity.
Overgeneralisation errors are also in evidence in the third and fourth
example; the form becamed represents a compromise between the child’s
having heard the irregular form became and knowing that regular past
tense forms take a dental -ed suffix. The last example is a use of the verb
unlock in the Resultative construction, which is not conventionally
possible in adult usage of the construction.
Importantly, the constructional view and the dictionary-and-
grammar view agree on the fact that children acquire generalisations,
be they called rules or constructions. However, the two views make
different predictions about the process that leads up to the adult state of
linguistic knowledge. These differences are discussed in the following
sections.
7.1.1 Item-based learning

On a rule-based account of language acquisition, the child has to master
formal schemas that are abstract, that is, based on syntactic and part-of-
speech categories. As an example, you might think of the Predicative
Adjective construction, which in adult usage consists of a subject noun
phrase, a copula, and an adjective. During early phases of acquisition,
the child may produce utterances such as towel wet, which are missing
certain features of the adult construction, but which are nonetheless
clearly modelled on the adult construction. What the rule-based account
assumes is that the child has in fact acquired the adult schema, even if
the realisation of that schema is still hampered by the child’s as-yet
imperfect mastery of language production. This assumption is called
the continuity hypothesis, and it states that the language of children is
constructions and l anguage acquisition 157
mentally represented by the same syntactic rules and categories as adult

language (Pinker 1984). Knowing an abstract schema enables the child
to formulate new and original utterances. In such utterances, a schema
such as the Predicative Adjective construction is fleshed out with
lexical words that are retrieved from the mental dictionary. Note that
this process requires the child to have a grasp of word classes: in order to
select the words for an utterance such as towel wet it has to be aware that
towel is a noun and wet is an adjective. When learning new words, the
child thus has to mark up each new word for its part-of-speech category,
so that it knows how that word can be inserted into the formal schemas
of its language.
The constructional account offers a very different perspective on
early language learning. Most importantly, perhaps, the formal sche-
mas that children acquire are viewed as intimately connected with the
lexical material that occurs in them. It is thus assumed that children
start out by learning concrete phrases that only gradually become more
abstract, as the child recognises similarities across different concrete
phrases. The child’s mental representations of language structures are
thus assumed to be different from adults’ mental representations. Also
on the constructional account, children are thought to acquire abstract
schemas, but these are believed to be the outcome of hearing many
similarly structured utterances, and they emerge only in a gradual,
piecemeal fashion. This way of acquiring generalisations is referred to
as item-based learning of linguistic schemas (Tomasello 2000a). The
constructional, item-based view of language acquisition implies that
children’s constructions have to be studied on their own terms. The
adult grammar is not to be seen as the standard that somehow underlies
children’s utterances; rather, the constructional view holds that chil-
dren’s utterances directly reflect their knowledge of language. Rather
than projecting adult-like structures into the child’s linguistic compe-
tence, the constructional view thus holds that what you see is what you
get. This has fundamental consequences for the way in which research
on language acquisition is carried out. What is studied in constructional
approaches to language acquisition is how children gradually build up
their construct-i-con and how that construct-i-con is restructured over
the course of language acquisition.
A large part of this chapter will be devoted to the discussion of
case studies that empirically test whether the item-based nature of lan-
guage learning makes the right predictions about children’s linguistic
behaviour. We will consider how children learn abstract constructions,
what factors facilitate construction learning, and how children form
generalisations that eventually even go beyond single constructions.
We will furthermore reassess the question of how original and creative

early child language really is. A robust finding across many empirical
studies of language acquisition is that children are rather conservative
users of language. With child language not being as creative as usually
advertised, much of the initial plausibility of rule-based approaches to
language acquisition is lost.
7.1.2 The sociocognitive foundation of language learning

Another fundamental difference between the constructional view and
a dictionary-and-grammar view concerns the sociocognitive founda-
tions of language learning. The formal schemas of the dictionary-and-
grammar approach are in no way connected to the social environment
of young children, which necessarily brings up the question of how their
acquisition is possible at all. How are children supposed to work out that
there are grammatical categories such as subject and object, verbs, adjec-
tives, and prepositions, and syntactic schemas such as Tough-Raising
or Subject–Auxiliary Inversion? When the question is phrased in this
way, the most realistic answer seems to be that they cannot possibly
work out these things from the utterances they hear. The language
input is too messy for that. The language that babies hear is for the most
part imperfect, riddled with false starts and inaccuracies, and much too
unsystematic to provide reliable and unambiguous evidence to distin-
guish all the grammatical structures from the possible but ungrammati-
cal structures. This is the argument from the poverty of the stimulus,
that is, the idea that the language input is insufficient for the acquisition
of language (Chomsky 1959). If the structures of language cannot be
learned from the input alone, that means that human beings must be
born with an innate cognitive capacity that already specifies general
grammatical principles that guide the process of language acquisition.
This idea is known as the theory of universal grammar, which has been
entertained in different versions and which is still part of current views
of language acquisition (Hauser et al. 2002). Since human communica-
tion differs considerably from animal communication (Hockett 1966;
Hauser 1996), universal grammar is thought to be completely discon-
nected from animal communication systems in evolutionary terms.
The constructional view of language acquisition does not dispute the
fact that human beings are innately equipped with the ability to learn
language. After all, the ability to acquire language is distinctly human.
The communication systems that animals use differ in multiple respects
from human language, and beyond that, humans are the only species
that have developed an array of communication systems that are mutu-
ally unintelligible (Tomasello 2003: 1). Whereas animal communication

systems tend to be shared across an entire species, humans can only
communicate effectively with certain subgroups of their own species.
Regrettably, knowing English does not automatically enable you to
understand Sinhala, Finnish, or Quechua. It is thus evident that there
is something special about human beings, and there is no disagreement
about this point. Where the constructional approach differs from the
dictionary-and-grammar view of linguistic knowledge is with regard to
the question of whether this special innate quality is language-specific.
The assumption that is entertained by the constructional approach is
that language learning depends on a set of sociocognitive abilities that
are specific to humans, but not to language (Tomasello 2003: 3). As will
be discussed in more detail below, these abilities make it possible for
the child to acquire language in a socially grounded fashion. On the
constructional view, the item-based schemas that children acquire are,
via their lexical elements, tied to specific situations and situation types.
This observation harks back to Goldberg’s scene encoding hypothesis,
but it is more encompassing than that, since Goldberg’s hypothesis is
about argument structure constructions only whereas the item-based
schemas that characterise early child language are much more lexically
specific and much less syntactically complex. On the constructional view
then, children’s acquisition of language is grounded in common scenes
of experience that are socially shared, usually with caretakers, siblings,
or peers. In order for language learning to take place, the child needs to
experience these scenes and it needs to have the general sociocognitive
abilities that are discussed in more detail in the following paragraphs.
The first of these abilities is the child’s aptitude to engage in what
is called joint attention. In order for language to become meaningful,
the child has to be in a situation in which both the child and a caretaker
focus on an object and are mutually aware of this. An everyday example
of this would be a baby and her mother playing with a stuffed toy, with
both alternating their eye gaze between each other and the toy. A situa-
tion of this kind is referred to as the formation of triadic joint attention,
because there is a triad between the baby, the mother, and the object of
joint attention. Babies start to engage in this kind of behaviour at around
9 months of age; before that they focus either on the toy or on the
caretaker, but not on both at the same time (Oates and Grayson 2004).
Why is this ability important? In a situation in which the baby is aware
that it is experiencing the same thing as the mother, the baby associates
linguistic sounds that the mother utters with the mutually shared expe-
rience. Triadic joint attention thus enables the learning of words such as
teddy. Tomasello and Todd (1983) empirically showed that the amount
of time that babies between 12 and 18 months of age spend in episodes

of triadic joint attention correlates positively with the amount of vocab-
ulary that they learn. Tomasello and Farrar (1986) further established
that during episodes of triadic joint attention, both babies and caretakers
talked more and for longer stretches of time than outside such episodes,
and caretakers used shorter sentences and more comments. Tomasello
and Farrar interpret this as a mutually reinforcing effect: joint attention
provides a frame for language use, and language enables the dyad to
maintain joint attention. The ability to maintain longer episodes of
triadic joint attention seems uniquely human, but it has evolutionary
predecessors. Dyadic joint attention, that is, affectionately looking into
each other’s eyes, is common, for example, in chimpanzees. Several
primate species exhibit the behaviour of following gaze, which can be
seen as another form of joint attention. Finally, dog owners have long
known that their best friends understand pointing gestures, and this has
been empirically substantiated (Kirchhofer et al. 2012). The common
game of throwing a stick that a dog may then fetch even has elements of
triadic joint attention.
A second sociocognitive ability that underlies language acquisition
is intention reading, that is, babies’ predisposition to interpret other
people’s actions as purposeful and goal-directed. Commonly used in
connection with this idea is the term theory of mind, which denotes
babies’ understanding that other people have mental states such as
intentions, desires, or beliefs. Toddlers around 16 months of age under-
stand other people’s intentions, which is evidenced by the observation
that they selectively imitate actions that they see as purposeful, but not
actions that produce accidental results (Carpenter et al. 1998). Intention
reading is crucial for language learners because they have to interpret
utterances as expressions of what other people think, want, like, or
dislike. The association of linguistic sounds with communicative inten-
tions motivates the early use of phrases such as bye-bye daddy or more
juice, and as the child becomes familiar with phrases of this kind, it
enters a position in which it can analyse these phrases into their com-
ponent parts and thus acquire productive schemas, rather than just fixed
strings. The question of to what extent non-human species are capable
of intention reading has yet to receive a final answer. However, there
are experiments comparing reactions of apes and 2-year-old children
to novel communicative signs that show children’s unparalleled readi-
ness to attribute communicative intentions to other people (Tomasello
et al. 1997). Primates do, however, show some capacity to distinguish
intentional from non-intentional actions (Call and Tomasello 1998).
Suffice it to say here that mind-reading is something that human beings
can hardly suppress whereas it is not done as a matter of course by

non-human species.
Third, the ability of schematisation allows children to see the simi-
larities between phrases such as more juice, more apple, and more noodles and
to abstract from these phrases a pattern such as more X, which contains
an open ‘slot’ into which other linguistic elements can be inserted. This
element need not always be a noun, as attested utterances such as more
sing or more hot illustrate. A few schemas with open slots that are typi-
cally found in the early construct-i-con of English-speaking children
are listed below (see Braine 1976; Tomasello 2007; Diessel 2013).
(2) Schema Examples
all X all done, all wet
where’s X where’s daddy?, where’s cookie?
let’s X let’s go!, let’s find it!
I’m X-ing it. I’m holding it, I’m pulling it.
Varying the items that can fill those slots is what linguistic creativity
is like in children between 2 and 3 years of age (Lieven et al. 2003;
Da˛browska and Lieven 2005). The empirical observation that creative
utterances of young children usually just vary a single element of a well-
established pattern is evidence for the piecemeal construction of gener-
alisations. Isolated examples of child language may give the appearance
that the child has mastered an abstract pattern such as the Passive con-
struction, the Ditransitive construction, or even Subject–Auxiliary
Inversion, but when these examples are seen in the context of the
utterances that the child has previously heard and produced, it turns out
that the child produces variations on a known theme. Schematisation of
this kind is fundamental to human cognition. Human beings use their
ability to form schemas not only in language but, in fact, in a wide array
of activities. For instance, the act of unlocking a door with a key and
opening it is a complex activity that has a number of open variables, that
is, what specific key is necessary, whether the door is opened by pulling
or pushing, whether I need to press a handle or turn a knob, and so on
and so forth. If I have formed a concept of ‘opening a door’, I have in fact
generalised over all of these variables and created a cognitive schema.
Given the pervasiveness of schematisation in non-linguistic thought,
it should not be surprising that it is found even in animal species that
are not closely related to human beings. For instance, dogs that have
learned to retrieve a ball or a stick have mentally abstracted over the
individual balls or sticks they have been trained with. The trick will
thus work just as well with a new, similar object that the dog owner
throws in the right way.
Fourth, role reversal and imitation play a decisive role for the
maintenance of triadic joint attentional frames and by extension for
the early acquisition of language. Communication by means of lin-
guistic signs is bi-directional, so that both communicating parties are
simultaneously both senders and receivers of messages. This design
feature of human language makes it differ from most systems of animal
communication (Hockett 1966). The ability to imitate the linguistic
sounds produced by others is quite trivially a fundamental prerequisite
for learning language, but less trivially the child also has to have the
ability to understand and reverse the respective roles of sender and
recipient in order to engage in true communication. That is, at some
point young children understand that they, too, can name an object and
thus direct someone else’s attention to it. What this boils down to is the
insight that language is symbolic: it consists of form–meaning pairs that
are intersubjectively shared, that is, mutually known to a speaker and
a hearer. As a consequence, these symbolic units can be used to direct
other people’s attention towards things and issues that need not even be
present in the current extralinguistic context. Non-human primates and
human infants before the onset of triadic joint attention seem to lack this
insight. For instance, Tennie et al. (2012) show that chimpanzees fail to
imitate others’ actions, such as raising their clasped hands or turning
their back towards a wall, even if they have observed other chimpanzees
receiving a reward for those actions. The chimps are perfectly capable
of realising that they, too, would like a reward. What is missing is the
ability to imagine themselves in the role of the trained chimpanzee who
performs the necessary behaviour. The somewhat surprising conclusion
is that apes are not ‘aping’ quite as naturally as humans are.
Fifth, language learning could not happen without the general cogni-
tive skill of pattern recognition. This concerns in particular the ability
of young infants to detect statistical regularities in the language that
they hear. As it turns out, infants that do not yet themselves produce
linguistic sounds are already extremely attentive listeners. By listen-
ing to the speech that is produced in their immediate environment
they learn which sounds tend to occur in sequence. Hence, long before
children begin to produce their native language, they already have a
robust understanding of its phonotactic properties. This knowledge is
then available to the child during the phase of early word learning,
where it can help the child to detect word boundaries. To illustrate:
Saffran et al. (1996) demonstrate that 8-month-old infants learn sta-
tistical patterns of an ambient auditory speech stream even from very
short episodes of exposure. In an experiment, babies were exposed to
2-minute recordings of nonce trisyllabic words such as bidaku, padoti,
golabu, tupiro, and so on. Importantly, the speech stream provided no

acoustic cues to word boundaries, so that the only cues to ‘wordhood’
were the transitional probabilities from one syllable to the next: the syl-
lable bi was always followed by da, but the syllable ku was only followed
by pa one time out of three. During a subsequent test phase, Saffran et
al. presented the infants with words that they had heard before and with
new words that ‘violated’ the transitional probabilities that the infants
had heard, for instance pabiku (pa should have been followed by do, not
by bi). The infants showed greater interest towards these ‘non-words’,
as measured by looking times in a conditioned head-turn experiment.
Evidently, the infants were surprised to hear the word pabiku. What
this finding suggests is that infants perform some rather sophisticated
book-keeping on the transitional probabilities of neighbouring sounds.
Having knowledge of this kind makes the later process of word learn-
ing much easier, and thus the need to posit innate, language-specific
learning mechanisms is lessened. Unlike capabilities such as intention
reading or imitative learning, pattern recognition in the auditory speech
stream has also been documented for tamarin monkeys (Ramus et al.
2000), so again, this human capability has evolutionary predecessors.
Summing up this section, the constructional view of language acqui-
sition is based on the assumption that language learning depends on
and emerges out of the interaction of several domain-general cognitive
abilities. Some of these abilities, for instance schematisation and audi-
tory pattern recognition, are shared by non-human species, while other
abilities, like triadic joint attention, intention reading, and imitative
learning, are distinctly human. All of them are necessary for language
learning to occur. The next section discusses in more detail the actual
process of language learning, as illustrated by a number of case studies
from children who acquire English as their first language.
7.2 Evidence for the item-based nature of language learning

The part of language acquisition that is of particular interest from a
constructional perspective is the one that takes place in the period
between 18 and 24 months of age, which is when children start to
produce multi-word utterances. As discussed above, these utterances
take place in triadic joint attentional frames in which both the child and
a caretaker jointly focus on an object or an activity. Children’s early
multi-word utterances thus have the purpose of directing the care-
taker’s attention to particular aspects of the joint activity. For example,
in the joint activity of a meal time, the child might utter constructs such
as the following.
(3) more juice

juice in there
my noodles
noodles hot
These four particular examples can be analysed as pivot schemas,

which represent the first internally complex constructions that chil-
dren master when starting to use language productively. Pivot schemas
consist of a fixed, unchanging part and an open slot into which different
elements can be inserted. In an utterance such as my noodles the element
my is the pivot, while the element noodles fills the slot that can, on other
occasions, be filled with elements that designate items to which the
child claims ownership, as in my shoe, my doll, my key, and so on. Pivot
schemas thus represent linguistic generalisations, and there is even evi-
dence that children between 18 and 24 months of age generalise across
multiple pivot schemas. Tomasello et al. (1997) exposed children to
novel nouns in contexts such as Look! The wug!, which were then sponta-
neously reproduced by the children in several other pivot schemas such
as Wug did it or I see wug. The adult syntactic category of nouns can thus
be seen to emerge from successive generalisations across very simple
constructions that at first have strong lexical restrictions. Tomasello et
al. (1997) further found that the adult syntactic category of verbs poses
greater difficulties with regard to generalisations across multiple pivot
schemas. When the children were prompted with novel verbs, as in
Look what Ernie’s doing to Big Bird! It’s called meeking!, the children did not
reproduce meeking in pivot schemas that were in their active construct-
i-con. Conceivable responses such as Ernie meeking or I’m meeking Big Bird
were simply not produced.
Why do the linguistic elements that we, in the description of adult
syntax, refer to as nouns and verbs pattern so differently in child lan-
guage? Tomasello (1992) proposes an explanation that he calls the
verb island hypothesis. The verb island hypothesis states that verbs
during early language acquisition form islands of organisation, so that
each verb is limited to a single argument structure pattern (see Chapter
3 on verbal argument structure). Tomasello bases this hypothesis on
data from a longitudinal case study of a single child. The data show that
while the child mastered multiple pivot schemas that involved verbal
elements, the child tended to create one-to-one mappings of verbs
and argument structure patterns that were only gradually extended
to allow multiple argument structure patterns for the same verb. The
general nature of Tomasello’s findings has been corroborated by other
studies (e.g. Lieven et al. 1997). What the verb island hypothesis sug-
gests is that it may be relatively easy for the child to come up with a
category that generalises over the noun slot in pivot schemas such as
there’s X, my X, more X, X in there, and so on, while it is relatively difficult
to generalise across pivot schemas such as I’m X-ing, don’t X me, I X-ed it,
and so on. Furthermore, the restrictions of verbs to particular argument
structure patterns suggests that young children do not form abstract
generalisations such as subject and direct object; rather, they operate
with more concrete roles, such as ‘sitter’ and ‘thing to sit on’ for the
verb sit.
Eventually of course, children do learn that verbs can be used across
several patterns of argument structure. Brooks and Tomasello (1999)
studied this process on the basis of an experiment in which they trained
children between 2 and 4 years of age to use the Passive construction.
Under natural conditions, the Passive construction is a late-comer in
the construct-i-con of a learning child: full passives with a by-phrase
are rarely produced before the age of 4 years, while shorter forms such
as The bunny got caught do appear earlier, but are also rare. The Passive
construction is an interesting test case for the constructional, item-
based view of language acquisition, since the constructional view and
the dictionary-and-grammar view predict different patterns of learning.
Specifically, if knowledge of the Passive construction is conceived of
as a grammatical rule, then the child should, upon hearing a verb in the
Passive, understand that this verb can also be used in the Active con-
struction. To take a concrete example, an utterance such as Look! Big Bird
is getting zibbed by Ernie should lead the child to conclude that Ernie zibbs
Big Bird is a possible sentence of English. To test this hypothesis, Brooks
and Tomasello exposed children to scenes in which the experimenter
performed transitive actions that were described as meeking and tamming.
In meeking actions, a puppet was using a rope to pull a toy up a ramp. In
tamming actions, another puppet swung on a suspended rope, knocking
a toy off a pedestal. The children were divided into two groups that
were exposed to different linguistic descriptions of these actions. One
group heard descriptions that were exclusively instantiating the Active
construction, and the other group only heard instances of the Passive
construction. The examples below illustrate the descriptions produced
by the experimenter.
(4) Active training

Look, Big Bird is going to meek something
Big Bird is going to meek the car!
Who’s going to meek the car?
Did you see who meeked the car?
Passive training
Look, the car is going to get meeked!
The car is going to get meeked by Big Bird.
Yes, the car is getting meeked by Big Bird.
What’s going to get meeked?
In a subsequent test phase, the experimenter tried to elicit descrip-

tions of the same actions from the children, using three different kinds
of question. In a neutral condition, the experimenter simply asked a
question such as What happened? In the patient-focused condition the
questioned element corresponded to the undergoer of meeking or tam-
ming, yielding questions such as What happened to the car? Finally, the
agent-focused condition involved questions such as What did Big Bird
do?, which focused on the participant who was actively meeking or tam-
ming. These questions were designed to elicit different constructions
as answers. The best match for an agent-focused question in terms of
information packaging (see Chapter 5) is the Active construction. So,
given a discourse situation that calls for an Active, did the Passive-
trained children also offer that construction?
Brooks and Tomasello report that only some of the Passive-trained
children generalised the verbs meeking and tamming to the Active
construction (1999: 34). In a group of children that were around 3.5
years of age, roughly half of the group offered Active responses;
younger children around 2.5 years of age did so in only 15 per cent of
all cases. What makes these results remarkable is that they cannot be
explained in terms of knowledge of grammatical rules, or the absence
thereof. The children that were tested had an active command of the
Active construction, and they had received training in the Passive
construction. Yet many of them did not generalise from the Passive
to the Active. Predictably, the results for the reverse condition were
even more drastic. Children who learned a new verb in the Active
construction would, in the overwhelming majority of cases, reproduce
the verb exclusively in that construction, no matter what type of ques-
tion was asked. The study thus shows that children are using verbs
conservatively, even at advanced stages of language learning, and it
further shows that there are asymmetries with regard to generalisa-
tions from one construction to another. Specifically, a generalisation
from the Passive to the Active appears to be cognitively easier than
the reverse. This, of course, reflects the greater basicness of the Active
construction, and also its greater type frequency, that is, the range
of different verbs that children have already encountered in that
construction.
Further evidence for the item-based nature of language learning

comes from a series of studies by Elena Lieven and colleagues, who
investigated just how creative and original young children’s utterances
really are. Recall that the purported creativity of child language is a
main argument for the idea that children acquire productive syntactic
rules, and by extension for the claim that children must be endowed with
innate language-specific knowledge so that they are able to acquire those
abstract rules. In order to assess the creativity of child language, Lieven et
al. analysed longitudinal corpus data consisting of recordings of a 2-year-
old child that were made at closely spaced intervals, one hour per day,
five days a week, for six weeks (2003: 336). All of the child’s multi-word
utterances during the last recorded hour – 295 in total – were identified
and taken as a representation of the child’s linguistic competence. For
each of those utterances, Lieven et al. investigated whether it was newly
and originally constructed from a syntactic rule, or whether the previous
recordings contained ‘predecessors’, that is, utterances that were either
completely identical or that differed in only minor ways. An exhaustive
analysis of the child’s utterances allowed Lieven et al. to quantify how
much of a child’s linguistic output is actually creative.
Given a research set-up of this kind, what would you expect? Take
a guess at the percentage of the child’s utterances that are creative, and
write that number on a piece of paper, or in the margin of this page,
for future reference. Lieven et al. identified predecessors of the child’s
utterances by looking for previous utterances in the corpus that were
produced by either the child or a caretaker. A predecessor was counted
as such if it shared a consecutive sequence of morphemes with the target
utterance; for each predecessor it was determined whether it differed
from the target utterance in terms of morpheme substitution, morpheme
add-on, morpheme drop, morpheme insertion, or morpheme rearrange-
ment, as shown in the examples below.
(5) Change Target Predecessor
substitution I got the butter I got the door
add-on Let’s move it around Let’s move it
drop And horse And a horse
insertion finished with your book? finished your book?
rearrangement Away it goes It goes away
For each target utterance, it was determined how many steps, in terms
of the changes shown in (5), were necessary to relate it to a predeces-
sor. For 63 per cent of the target utterances (n = 186), this was not
even necessary, as they had been produced in completely identical
fashion before. Only 109 of the child’s utterances were novel. Of these,
0 changes 1 change 2 3
0 50 100 150 200 250 300
total number of multi-word utterances
Figure 7.1 Operations required to link target utterances with predecessor

utterances
81 differed from earlier utterances in a single morpheme, with substitu-

tions being the most typical scenario. Only 6 utterances, or 2 per cent of
the entire language output, required three or more steps between target
and predecessor. Figure 7.1 (adapted from Lieven et al. 2003: 344, table
2) visualises these findings.
Note that utterances that require two or more changes do include
examples in which target and predecessor differ in the word length of a
single constituent. For instance, to get from Girl’s playing falling down to
Girl’s not playing tennis here, three steps are needed: one for the insertion
of not, one for the add-on of here, and one for the substitution of tennis
for falling down. The basic conclusion from the quantitative results is
that there was fairly little novelty in the language output of the child.
The largest chunk of utterances with a single change between target
and predecessor involved the process of substitution, which is compat-
ible with the idea of pivot schemas that contain a fixed element and
an open slot. While the results of Lieven et al.’s study represent only
a single child, further studies have yielded highly compatible findings.
For instance, Da˛browska and Lieven (2005) studied the acquisition of
English Wh-Questions in two children at age 2 and 3, respectively.
Again, the data on which the investigation is based are a dense sequence
of recordings, the last of which is searched for target utterances that are
then linked to predecessor utterances from earlier recordings. In line
with what has been discussed so far, many of the target questions were
mere repetitions of questions that the child had heard or uttered before.
Most novel questions could be derived from predecessors with just a
single operation of change (2005: 451), yielding distributions that are
similar to the one shown in Figure 7.1. Again, the most frequent process
of change is substitution, typically the replacement of a nominal con-
stituent with another (2005: 452). As perhaps expected, there is an effect
of age. For both children, the ratio of creative questions is lower at age 2
than at age 3. Is this perhaps the onset of syntactic, rule-based creativity?
Analysing those questions that resist an explanation in terms of pre-
decessor utterances, Da˛browska and Lieven come to a very different
conclusion. Consider some of the questions for which no reasonable

predecessors could be found (2005: 454).
(6) Do you want to football?
Which ones go by here?
What’s called the newsagent man?
Where is Deepa come with you?
Da˛browska and Lieven note that a majority of non-derivable target
questions do not conform to adult-like conventions. Evidently enough,
the children extrapolate from their knowledge of English when they
produce these questions, trying out something new. However, what the
questions show is that they have not, in fact, acquired a rule that can
be used to generate possible grammatical Wh-Questions of English.
Rather, the examples reflect a process of ‘tinkering’ with bits and pieces
that the child has heard before, and which are put together in ways that
are almost right, but not quite. The bottom line is that when children
use language creatively, they do so in ways that are not at all predicted
by the dictionary-and-grammar view of linguistic knowledge.
7.3 From item-based schemas to constructions

How do children get from pivot schemas and verb islands to the abstract
argument structure constructions that were discussed in Chapter 3 of
this book? A necessary prerequisite for this is children’s ability to gen-
eralise across verbs, which in most English-speaking children gradually
develops over the third year of life. Such generalisations are in evidence
when children who are presented with a verb in just one construc-
tional context later use that verb in other constructional contexts, as
in Brooks and Tomasello’s (1999) study of the Passive construction.
A useful research strategy to investigate children’s beginning ability to
use constructions productively involves the use of novel verbs (meeking,
tamming, etc.) and novel constructions, that is, word order patterns that
do not exist in ordinary English and that the child thus does not know.
Applying this strategy, Akhtar (1999) exposed children aged between
2;8 and 4;4 to sentences with novel verbs in three different word orders,
as shown in the examples below.
(7) Elmo dacking the car. subject – verb – object
Elmo the car gopping. subject – object – verb
Tamming Elmo the car. verb – subject – object
These sentences were presented as descriptions of transitive actions: the
verb dacking described knocking a toy down a ramp, gopping was used
for situations in which a toy was catapulted off a platform, and tamming
referred to placing a toy on a surface. All children were exposed to all
of the three word orders. After exposure, the children were prompted to
re-enact the actions and verbalise what they had done. Sentences with
the novel verbs were recorded and analysed with regard to the word
order that the children used.
What Akhtar found was that verbs that were presented in SVO word
order (Elmo dacking the car) were accurately reproduced in that order by
all children, regardless of age. With regard to verbs in the other two word
orders, there was an effect of age: the 4-year-old children most of the
time ‘corrected’ the word orders to SVO, whereas children aged 2 and 3
were more conservative. In roughly half of all trials, they used the novel
verbs in the SOV and VSO orders in which they had heard them; in the
other half of the trials, they produced an SVO order (Akhtar 1999: 346).
What this observation suggests is that even 2-year-olds have formed a
rudimentary concept of the Transitive construction that is available as
an alternative to pivot schemas and verb islands. Their wavering between
the syntactic pattern that was heard and the canonical SVO order indi-
cates a tension between an attested item-based structure and a budding
generalisation. In the 4-year-olds in Akhtar’s study, that constructional
generalisation has become entrenched enough so that the children use it
with transitive verbs that they have heard only in other syntactic contexts.
The Transitive construction thus appears to develop a stronger mental
representation over time. Another observation is important. Across the
three age groups, a substantial number of children showed intra-speaker
variation, so that they reproduced unusual word orders on some occa-
sions and switched to SVO on other occasions (1999: 349). This result is
at odds with the predictions of the dictionary-and-grammar view of lin-
guistic knowledge. On that approach, word order should be acquired as a
grammatical rule that is subsequently applied across the board. Akhtar’s
findings portray the learning of constructional generalisations thus as a
continuation of the gradual, item-based process that characterises early
language acquisition.
The idea that even argument structure constructions emerge as gen-
eralisations over item-based structures that become increasingly more
abstract is fleshed out in a study by Casenhiser and Goldberg (2005),
who note that many constructions that young children regularly hear
show a skewed distribution with regard to the verbs that occur with
them. Constructions such as the Ditransitive construction, the Goal-
Directed Motion construction, and the Caused Motion construc-
tion all occur with a verb that is highly frequent and that represents the
core of the constructional meaning, as shown below.
(8) Construction Most Frequent Example

Verb
Ditransitive give I give you the ball.
Goal-Directed Motion go That goes in the box.
Caused Motion put I put it here.
The main idea that Casenhiser and Goldberg investigate in their study
can be called the skewed frequency hypothesis. What this hypothesis
boils down to is the claim that a skewed distribution of verbs, with a
centre of gravity represented by one highly frequent verb, is a design
feature of constructions that facilitates the acquisition of their form
and meaning. Adopting the research strategy used by Akhtar (1999),
Casenhiser and Goldberg designed novel verbs and a novel construc-
tion for their study, which were put together in sentences such as The
rabbit the hat moopoed. Stimuli sentences such as these were presented to
children between 5 and 7 years of age, delivered as auditory descrip-
tions of short video clips in which toys appeared in a location. As you
might expect, the video for The rabbit the hat moopoed showed a rabbit
coming out of a hat. The monster the cloth keeboed showed a puppet monster
appearing from underneath a blanket. The task that the children had to
accomplish after being exposed to these stimuli was to match a previ-
ously unheard sentence such as The sailor the pond keeboes with one of two
simultaneously playing videos showing a sailor and a pond. Whereas
one showed the sailor appearing, the other showed the sailor moving
continuously across the pond. Trials were counted as successes if the
children selected the scene of appearance. Now, instead of comparing
children of different ages, Casenhiser and Goldberg randomly assigned
the participating children to one of two groups. One group was exposed
to a set of stimuli with a skewed verbal distribution, while the other
group heard a set of stimuli in which the frequency of verb types was
more balanced. The verbs the two groups heard were the following.
(9) Skewed: 4 × moopo, 1 × vako, 1 × suto, 1 × keebo, 1 × fego
Balanced: 2 × moopo, 2 × vako, 2 × suto, 1 × keebo, 1 × fego
A third group of children acted as a control group and watched the
videos without any accompanying sound.
Casenhiser and Goldberg observe that the three groups obtained
different results in the experimental task. Predictably, the control
group performed at the level of chance. The balanced frequency group
performed better, but the best results were obtained by the skewed
frequency group, yielding positive evidence for the skewed frequency
hypothesis. This result is compatible with the view that language
learning involves cognitive mechanisms that are not inherently spe-

cific to language. Casenhiser and Goldberg (2005: 506) review several
psychological studies that indicate that category learning in general is
facilitated by frequent exposure to central, prototypical members of the
respective categories.
7.4 The acquisition of complex sentences

Adult syntax, in written as well as in spoken language, is character-
ised by complex constructions that involve the combination of several
clausal structures. Diessel (2013: 361) distinguishes three main types
that are illustrated below.
(10) Construction Type Example
Complement Clause I think it’s in here.
Relative Clause This is the pig that ran away.
Adverbial Clause We can play if you want.
These three construction types emerge in different ways. Diessel and
Tomasello (2001) study how the first type, Complement Clause,
develops in the speech of English-speaking children between 1 and 5
years of age.
While adult Complement Clause constructions such as I believe John
to be innocent exhibit a hierarchical structure of a superordinate matrix
clause I believe and a subordinate complement clause John to be innocent, it
is questionable that children’s early complement clauses, such as I think
Daddy’s sleeping or See if Mommy’s there, are structured in the same way.
Instead, Diessel and Tomasello argue that strings such as I think and See
if should be seen as the fixed part of pivot schemas that accommodate
a clausal structure in their open slot (I think ___, See if __). Evidence
for this claim comes from longitudinal corpus data that represent the
language output of seven children. The data show that children’s earli-
est complement clauses occur with a limited set of verbs (see, think,
want, etc.) and usually the first person singular pronoun I. Complement-
taking pivot schemas function as epistemic markers (I think, I guess),
modal markers (I wish, I hope), and directives (want, see, look, remember),
so that Complement Clause constructions are grounded in commu-
nicative situations that the child frequently experiences. Over time,
children’s complement-taking structures evolve from formulaic parts
of a pivot schema to the fully-fledged matrix clauses that characterise
adult syntax. So examples such as I know this piece go gradually give way
to examples such as This airplane doesn’t know where it’s going. In contrast
to the former, the latter has a full noun phrase as a subject, it includes a
marker of negation, and the subject is anaphorically referenced in the

complement clause, which is thus clearly hierarchically subordinate
to the matrix clause. On the whole, the acquisition of Complement
Clause constructions thus strongly resembles the item-based learn-
ing process that is at work in the acquisition of argument structure
constructions.
Relative Clauses, as discussed in Chapter 3, are Filler-Gap
constructions which contain a verbal argument that appears in a non-
canonical position. For instance, the direct object in the sentence Bob
didn’t eat the sandwich appears directly following the verb, whereas in
the Relative Clause construction That’s the sandwich that Bob didn’t
eat the direct object actually precedes the verb. The noun phrase the
sandwich, that is, the ‘filler’, thus appears in a non-argument position.
Since the verb eat is not followed by any linguistic material, we speak
of that position as a ‘gap’. Understanding the relationship between filler
and gap has been seen as the prime obstacle that children face in the
acquisition of Relative Clause constructions. A basic psycholinguistic
finding that relates to this issue is the observation that some relative
clauses are more difficult to process than others. Consider the examples
below, which indicate the canonical argument positions of the fillers
with co-indexed blanks.
(11) The detectivei who __i observed John was clever.
The detectivei who John observed __i was clever.
Give me the balli that __i hit the girl.
Give me the balli that the girl threw __i.
When listeners are confronted with constructed examples such as these,
which express all major constituents with full lexical phrases, a robust
finding emerges. Out of the four sentences, listeners find the first one
easiest to process (Wanner and Maratsos 1978, amongst many others).
The first example is called a Subject Relative Clause because the gap
represents the subject constituent of the relative clause: the detective
does the observing. Compare this with the second example, in which
the gap represents the object constituent. Here, the detective is being
observed and the construction is therefore called an Object Relative
Clause. The roles of subject and object in the relative clause are inde-
pendent of the role of the same referent in the matrix clause, as is
shown by the third and fourth examples. Now, why should object rela-
tive clauses be more difficult to process? An explanation that has been
invoked is the relative distance between filler and gap. In the first and
third examples, that distance is considerably shorter than in the second
and fourth. The longer the distance between filler and gap, the longer
the listener has to keep the filler in working memory, until its syntactic
role has become clear. This represents a cognitive effort that might be
too hard for young children, which would explain why children’s first
relative clauses are subject relative clauses.
However, the distance between filler and gap might not be the whole
story. Also among children’s early relative clause constructions are
object relative clauses such as the following.
(12) That’s the yoghurti that I want __i!
What’s thati you have __i?
Diessel and Tomasello (2005) point out that the constructed examples
on which most psycholinguistic studies of relative clause comprehen-
sion have been based are very different from the authentic relative
clauses that children hear and produce. Sentences such as The senator
that the reporter attacked responded immediately are grammatically correct
examples of written English, but you are in fact unlikely to read any-
thing like that outside linguistic research laboratories. What Diessel
and Tomasello question is thus whether research based on constructed
examples accurately reflects what ordinary speakers, including young
children, do when they are processing relative clauses. The technical
term for the idea that experimental tasks should closely reflect naturally
occurring behaviour is ecological validity. The constructional view of
language acquisition makes a very different prediction about children’s
early relative clauses. Children would simply be expected to have the
least difficulties with Relative Clause constructions that they hear
and use frequently. Children’s input contains a large number of subject
relative clauses, but also a large number of Presentational Object
Relative Clause constructions, that is, utterances such as That’s the
one I want or Here’s the block I was looking for. With regard to the latter, a
frequency-based account predicts little difficulty whereas an account
based on the distance between filler and gap would predict substantial
difficulties. In order to test which of these predictions is borne out,
Diessel and Tomasello (2005) presented 4-year-old children with dif-
ferent relative clause constructions, as illustrated below.
(13) Construction Example
Subject Relative Clause There’s the boy who played in the
garden.
Agent Relative Clause There’s the farmer who saw Peter.
Patient Relative Clause That’s the girl who the boy teased.
Indirect Object Relative There’s the girl that he borrowed
Clause a ball from.
Oblique Relative Clause That’s the car that Peter ran away
from.
Genitive Relative Clause
That’s the boy whose cat ran
away.
The task that the children had to do was simple: they were asked to
repeat back to the experimenter what they had just heard. A trial was
counted as a success if the child repeated exactly what it had heard. In
the case of lexical mistakes, such as saying man instead of farmer, the trial
was counted as a partial success.
What Diessel and Tomasello found was that children performed
better with subject relative clauses than with agent relative clauses
(2005: 888). This is inconsistent with the distance-based hypothesis,
since the distance in both construction types is the same. The research-
ers further found that there were no differences across patient relative
clauses and indirect object relative clauses. Again, this is inconsistent
with the distance-based hypothesis, since the distance is greater in the
latter type. Lastly, the researchers observed that children almost invari-
ably failed to reproduce genitive relative clauses, despite a very short
distance between filler and gap. An analysis of the children’s errors
showed that the typical pattern was a shift towards subject relative
clauses. Upon hearing a sentence such as There is the horse that the little cat
jumped on yesterday, some children produced There is the horse that jumped
on the cat yesterday, accepting semantic implausibility in exchange for the
benefit of a well-known structure. In summary, while some of Diessel
and Tomasello’s results are consistent with the distance-based hypoth-
esis, there is evidence to suggest that the frequency of constructions has
a decisive role to play in the learning process. Structures that the child
frequently hears are thus more successfully reproduced.
The last category of complex sentences to be discussed in this sec-
tion is the one of Adverbial Clause constructions. Adverbial clauses
represent perhaps the prototypical idea of subordinate clauses in adult
syntax, which are linked to a full main clause through a subordinating
conjunction such as because, if, or while. In order to understand children’s
acquisition of these structures, it is necessary to come to terms with
the idea that children learn them on the basis of spoken examples, not
the carefully edited examples that occur in writing, and that mostly
shape our idea of what subordinate clauses are like. Diessel (2004: 160)
points out that children start using conjunctions such as because not for
the purpose of linking a main clause with a subordinate clause. Rather,
children’s early utterances with because function as autonomous, stand-
alone answers to questions, as in the following examples.
(14) Adult: Why should they come from Africa?

Child: Because they live in Africa.
(15) Child: You can’t have this.
Adult: Why?
Child: Cause I’m using it.
Diessel studied how five children between 2 and 5 years of age used
conjunctions such as and, because, but, and so, finding that consistently, the
unbound use of conjunctions preceded and outnumbered the bound use
of those elements (2004: 160ff.).
Combinations of main and adverbial clauses continue to pose a major
challenge for young language learners well into childhood. Their pro-
duction only gets under way with children’s growing ability to plan
complex bi-clausal utterances, and even children between 6 and 7 years
of age still show processing difficulties when they are confronted with
sentences such as The boy jumped over the fence before he patted the dog
(Bowerman 1979). Findings about the acquisition of adverbial clauses
thus echo many of the points that have been made earlier in this chapter.
In particular, the result that children’s first uses of adverbial clauses are
not, syntactically speaking, subordinate clauses calls into question the
idea that children might be acquiring a new syntactic rule that would
allow them to construct complex sentences.
7.5 Summing up
Any theory of linguistic knowledge makes predictions about how
children acquire that knowledge. This chapter made the point that
Construction Grammar makes predictions that differ in many ways
from earlier theories that stand more in the tradition of partitioning
linguistic knowledge into a system of grammatical rules and a mental
lexicon that contains words and idioms. On such a view, the task of lan-
guage learning seems almost impossibly hard if the child does not have
recourse to some innate knowledge to fall back on. How is the child to
work out abstract and complex syntactic relations purely on the basis of
patchy and noisy input? The constructional view of language acquisi-
tion holds that this is simply the wrong question to ask. Specifically, it
is the wrong question because a central underlying assumption, namely
the continuity hypothesis, does not hold. The continuity hypothesis
states that the language of children is mentally represented by the same
syntactic rules and categories as adult language. However, children do
not in fact need to work out abstract and complex syntactic relations;
what they do need to work out is what their caretakers and peers have
in mind when they utter linguistic sounds. Empirical data show that
children do so in an item-based fashion, learning bit by bit and gener-
alising gradually from the bits that are in place. Language acquisition,
on this view, rests on a number of sociocognitive skills, including the
ability to form triadic joint attention, intention reading, the ability to
form schemas, imitation, and pattern recognition. Some of these abilities
are shared by humans and several non-human species; others, notably
the ability to sustain longer periods of triadic joint attention, seem to be
distinctive of human beings.
The item-based nature of early language learning is characterised
by the formation of pivot schemas, which can be thought of as mini-
constructions with a fixed pivot and an open slot into which the child
may insert different linguistic elements. At first, the mutual connec-
tions between these pivot schemas are weak or even non-existent,
as posited in the verb island hypothesis. It is only with the child’s
growing experience with language that generalisations across pivot
schemas are formed, which eventually result in an adult-like syntactic
competence.
The chapter reviewed evidence that called into question the idea
that children’s language production is too creative to be learned from
the input alone. Studies that track children’s language production over
time robustly find that children experiment very cautiously with lan-
guage, and that if they do, the results tend to deviate from conventional
adult usage. This result casts doubt on the assumption that children
acquire syntactic rules that allow them to use language productively.
Rather, the item-based strategies that very young children apply in the
acquisition of pivot schemas seem to be continued into the processes
of learning more abstract constructions, such as argument structure
constructions and even complex clausal constructions. The chapter
reviewed evidence for the gradual strengthening of abstract construc-
tions such as the Transitive construction, and it explained the skewed
frequency hypothesis, which views the distributions of verbs in con-
structions as a design feature that boosts learnability. A final section
on complex sentences discussed how children acquire complement
clauses, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses. Studies investigating
these processes have found that the frequency of structures in the input
is an important predictor of children’s early proficiency with these
structures, and it was also shown that children use adverbial clauses
as independent utterances before they integrate them into complex
sentential constructions.
Study questions
1. What is an overgeneralisation error and why are these errors
interesting?
2. What is the continuity hypothesis?
3. Explain the argument from the poverty of the stimulus.
4. Why is the ability to engage in joint attention important for word
learning?
5. Michael Tomasello is equally well known for his work on language
acquisition and his research on primate cognition. Read one of his
studies of non-human behaviour (cooperation, gesture, deception,
etc.) and determine what the results say about differences from the
cognitive skills of human beings (for instance, Hare and Tomasello
2005 is an interesting paper on dogs’ cognitive skills).
6. What is a pivot schema? Give examples.
7. The CHILDES database is a large collection of corpus data, includ-
ing many transcriptions of child language that were used in the
studies described in this chapter. Find the CHILDES database
online, download a batch of files, and familiarise yourself with the
format of the data.
8. What is the verb island hypothesis?
9. What is the skewed frequency hypothesis?
10. Explain how the distance-based account makes different pre-
dictions about the acquisition of relative clauses from those of a
frequency-based account.
Further reading
An authoritative and highly readable introduction to the field of
language acquisition from a constructional perspective is Tomasello
(2003), while two shorter articles (Tomasello 2000a, 2000b) are useful
primers. Diessel’s (2013) chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Construction
Grammar offers another concise overview that summarises the most
important ideas. A book that is highly to be recommended is Ambridge
and Lieven (2011), which presents a comprehensive overview that
contrasts the constructional approach with other approaches, notably
generative grammar. In order to gain a more thorough insight into the
practices of first language acquisition research, it is useful to read a few
experimental and corpus-based studies such as the ones reviewed in
this chapter. Examples of papers that make important points in clear,
student-friendly writing include Brandt et al. (2009), Da˛browska et al.
(2009), Lieven et al. (2009), and Wonnacott et al. (2012).
8 Language variation and
change
8.1 Language myths

Grammar is a subject that in all likelihood has formed part of your
school curriculum. It is also a subject that is almost universally hated
by students. Ask a few friends of yours who are not studying linguistics
what they remember about their grammar lessons, and they will claim
two things. First, they have forgotten every single thing they were sup-
posed to learn. Second, they have made their way through life quite
successfully without knowing any of those things. It is probably true
that your friends do not remember particulars, such as the distinc-
tion between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses and how
to mark that distinction through the use of a comma. However, while
school lessons usually fail to instil a lasting intellectual appreciation
of grammar, they tend to be successful in the propagation of several
fundamental misconceptions about language. Most students will readily
adopt these ideas as their own and remember them throughout their
entire lives. One such idea is that grammar is a set of rules specifying
what is right and wrong in language use. Ignore the rules, and marks in
red ink will follow. The proposal that linguistic variation is a perfectly
normal thing is met with suspicion. If the question comes up whether
it is right to say the man whom I thanked or the man that I thanked, and you
point out that either one is fine, your non-linguist friends will interpret
this as a feeble attempt to cover up the fact that you have forgotten the
proper rule.
Another powerful, almost universally shared belief is that young
people do not know how to speak, let alone write, proper English any
more. People are aware that linguistic change is under way, and usu-
ally this is seen as cause for alarm. The perception of language decay
is voiced over and over again. Whereas once we had Shakespearean
sonnets, we now have text messages whose impoverished linguistic
quality is plainly visible in words such as gr8 or ROFL and of course
179
the complete absence of punctuation and proper orthography. If you

mention to non-linguists that perpetual change is very much the natural
state of a living language, and that all fears of decay, which are docu-
mented across every recorded period of history, have ultimately proved
to be unfounded (see Deutscher 2005: ch. 3), they will tell you that this
time around, things are different. The technological advances of the last
decades, so the argument goes, have changed the way we communicate
more fundamentally than anything else that happened in the past. It
is certainly true that only a generation ago, the prospect of every-
body having small handheld devices that allow the instant exchange
of spoken and written messages with people all across the globe would
have seemed a little futuristic. Nonetheless, there are reasons to believe
that technology of this kind only has a very minor influence on the
way in which language changes (Baron 2008). The idea that gram-
mar unambiguously specifies what is right and wrong and the idea that
language is currently undergoing a decay are language myths, that is,
ideas that are fundamentally at odds with reality, but that nonetheless
remain unchallenged in popular discussions (Bauer and Trudgill 1998).
Linguists of different theoretical persuasions agree on relatively few
issues, but the fact that variation and change are fundamental aspects
of language that are furthermore deeply interconnected is a point on
which everybody in the field agrees. This chapter discusses the role of
variation and change in a constructional model of linguistic knowledge.
It will become apparent that variation and change have a very natural
place in that model and that the very architecture of the construct-i-con
actually predicts that language use should be characterised by variation
and change.
In order to make that argument, this chapter will go over the follow-
ing ideas. Section 8.2 introduces the concept of variation, that is, the idea
that a speaker can say the same thing in different ways. The section dis-
cusses examples of variation within single constructions and examples
of variation across pairs of constructions. Section 8.3 turns to the issue
of variation between different groups of speakers. It is clear that there
is not just ‘the English language’, but rather a multitude of Englishes.
Speakers use English in different ways depending on where they live,
who their peers are, and how they fit into the social order of their com-
munity. The section will explore the implications of inter-speaker vari-
ability for the constructional view of linguistic knowledge. Section 8.4
discusses the role of language change in Construction Grammar. The
section will spell out how historical language change relates to the main
topics of the previous sections, namely intra-speaker and inter-speaker
variability. Section 8.5 focuses on Diachronic Construction Grammar
l anguage variation and change 181
and raises three questions that are currently under debate. Section 8.6
concludes the chapter.
8.2 Constructional variation
8.2.1 There’s more than one way to do it

What does it mean to say that there is variation in a construction? In
the simplest of terms, it means that there is always more than one way
to use a construction. For instance, speakers of English have different
ways of pronouncing a lexical construction such as secretary. Depending
on their speech rate at the time of pronouncing the word, the result
might consist of four syllables, as in /sε.kr.tə.r/, or it might have
only three syllables, as in /sε.kr.tr/. Besides variation in the quantity
or length of how a word is realised, there is of course also qualitative
variation, so that the same phonological segments are produced, albeit
in qualitatively different ways. To illustrate, the same speaker might
say /sε.kr.tə.r/ on some occasions but /sε.kr.tə.ri/, with a higher
final /i/, on other occasions. Different ways of pronouncing the same
word reflect variation at the formal pole of a lexical construction. Recall
that a construction is defined as a generalisation that speakers make: a
certain form corresponds to a certain meaning. Taken together, these
two poles form a symbolic unit. What constructional variation shows is
that generalisations of this kind are not quite as simplistic as a one-to-
one mapping of a single, invariant form to a single, invariant meaning.
Rather, both the formal pole and the meaning pole of a construction
should be seen as containing information on several variants – formal
variants of the construction as well as meaning variants. If I know the
word secretary, that knowledge includes the fact that the word can be
pronounced in different ways, and also, reflecting variation on the
meaning pole, that the word can be used with several different mean-
ings. Besides the meaning of ‘an assistant for office work’, the word has
several other meanings, depending on its context. The term secretary of
state refers to a high political office and a wooden secretary refers to a piece
of furniture. Variation at the meaning pole of a construction is thus very
much at issue in cases of polysemy. The basic take-home message is
that constructions are many-to-many mappings, connecting a set of
related forms to a set of related meanings. This idea might strike you
as a very basic, almost trivial observation: lexical words are associated
with a range of different pronunciations and a range of different mean-
ings. That sounds plausible, but is that really all there is to variation in
constructions?
As the previous chapters of this book have discussed, construc-

tions range from the very simple and specific to the very complex and
abstract, and it is variation in more complex constructions that will
occupy us most in the rest of this chapter. For instance, Chapter 3 has
already pointed to the meaning variation that can be observed in the
S-Genitive construction. The examples in (1) illustrate once more that
this morphosyntactic construction encodes several different types of
semantic relation that are grouped around the prototype of possession
(Taylor 1989).
(1) John’s book
John’s office
John’s train
the country’s president
yesterday’s sad events
inflation’s consequences
The S-Genitive construction can be used to convey that someone owns
a certain object, but the examples reveal a network of extended meanings
beyond that central sense. Parallel observations were made concerning
meaning variation in the Ditransitive construction (Goldberg 1995)
and in Modal Auxiliary constructions (Sweetser 1990). Different senses
of these constructions are connected via metaphorical and metonymic
links (see Section 3.2.2), just as in the example of the different senses
of secretary. Lexical and grammatical constructions thus behave very
similarly with regard to variation at their meaning poles. But what about
formal variation in grammatical constructions? It appears that the forms
of grammatical constructions can vary in different ways from the forms
of lexical constructions. To begin with, complex constructions like the
S-Genitive construction occur with a wide range of lexical words, and
therefore their actual pronunciations exhibit massive variation. The
only commonality at the phonological pole of the examples in (1) is
that all of them contain an alveolar fricative in the role of the genitive s.
Beyond the lexical variation, it could be argued that there is actually not
much variation going on in the S-Genitive construction: the genitive s
simply connects two nominals, which, we might admit, can be realised
in different ways, perhaps being preceded by a determiner (the country’s
president) or an adjective (yesterday’s sad events). It is, however, interesting
to consider the limits of that variation. For instance, formations such
as *John’s it, with a pronominal second nominal, are ungrammatical, as
is *that’s window (in the sense of ‘the window of that one’), in which the
first nominal is a demonstrative. So, even in the S-Genitive, not just
any nominal will do; some nominals are used while others are not. This
variation reflects knowledge of language that speakers have and that

Construction Grammarians should try to work out. In order to illustrate
formal variation in abstract syntactic constructions in some more detail,
the following section discusses the example of relative clauses.
8.2.2 Variation in syntactic constructions: the example of relative

clauses
The Relative Clause construction has already been introduced briefly
in Chapters 3 and 6. Relative clauses instantiate the Noun Phrase con-
struction, and they belong to the family of Filler-Gap constructions
(Sag 2010). As the examples in (2) show, relative clauses come in a wide
range of structural variants.
(2) That’s the cat that ran away.
That’s the cat that I saw yesterday.
That’s the cat that I told you about.
That’s the cat I saw yesterday.
That’s the solution suggested by our team of experts.
That’s the proper thing to do.
All of the above examples are what are called presentational relative
clauses that occur within a Predicate Nominal construction of the
form That’s NP. The construction types that will be compared in the
following represent the NP of that Predicate Nominal construction.
The above examples can be contrasted in terms of several variables,
that is, features that can be realised in two or more different ways. The
following paragraphs discuss three of those variables.
A particularly important variable with regard to relative clauses con-
cerns the grammatical role of the nominal constituent that is relativised
and hence appears as a ‘gap’ in the relative clause (see the discussion
of fillers and gaps in Chapter 3). Consider the first three examples:
the cat that ran away, the cat that I saw yesterday, and the cat that I told you
about. Note that the grammatical role of the relativised nominal the cat
is different across the three relative clauses. In the first example, the cat
is understood as the subject of the verb phrase ran away; in the second
example, the cat is understood as the object of the verb saw. This moti-
vates a terminological distinction of Subject Relative Clauses and
Object Relative Clauses (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 1044). In the
third example, the cat is neither the subject nor the object of the relative
clause. Rather, as the topic about which something has been said, it
functions as an oblique, defined here as an object that is marked by a
preposition. Examples with this kind of relativised nominal are called
Oblique Relative Clauses. Besides Subject, Object, and Oblique

Relative Clauses there are further types of grammatical roles that can
appear as gaps, but the distinction between those three already serves to
illustrate the variability of the grammatical role.
A second variable is the presence or absence of a relativiser, that
is, an element that introduces a relative clause and explicitly marks it
as such. A comparison between the first three examples and the fourth
example shows that some relative clauses are introduced by a relativ-
iser, here the relative pronoun that, whereas some other relative clauses
are uttered without a relativiser. Notably, Object Relative Clauses
display variation in this regard: the cat that I saw and the cat I saw are
both well-formed relative clauses. By contrast, the Subject Relative
Clause *That’s the cat ran away is not an acceptable sentence in standard
British or American English. That said, Subject Relative Clauses
without relativisers are fully acceptable in certain varieties of English
such as Hong Kong English and Newfoundland English (Kortmann
and Lunkenheimer 2013). Differences between varieties of English will
be discussed in more depth in Section 8.3. For now, the focus lies on
variability that pertains to the linguistic knowledge of a single speaker,
called intra-speaker variability. A speaker of standard American English
may form Object Relative Clauses with or without a relativiser, and
in the former case, there is furthermore a choice between the generic
relativisers that and which, and the relative pronouns who, whom, and
whose, which go along with specific types of relativised constituents.
A third variable becomes apparent when the first four examples are
compared with the fifth and sixth examples. Whereas the earlier exam-
ples showed relative clauses with finite, fully inflected verb forms (e.g.
the cat that ran away), the last two examples contain verbs that are non-
finite, that is, a participle in the fifth example (the solution suggested by our
team) and an infinitive in the sixth one (the thing to do). Note that the vari-
able of finiteness covaries with the presence or absence of a relativiser:
non-finite relative clauses disallow the use of a relativiser (*the solution
which suggested by our team, *the thing that to do). Speakers intuitively know
how to form relative clauses with these different verb forms, and so
the variable of finite and non-finite relative clauses must be part of the
formal pole of the Relative Clause construction.
The three variables described in the above paragraphs by no means
exhaust the entire variability that is found in English relative clauses
(see Wiechmann 2015 for a comprehensive overview), but they should
suffice to illustrate the complexity of linguistic generalisations at the
level of syntactic constructions. To posit that there is a Relative
Clause construction in English is to commit to the claim that speakers
generalise across the entire space of variability, viewing all different

examples of relative clauses as instances of the same, highly abstract
grammatical category. Whether speakers actually arrive at such high-
level generalisations or whether they use more local generalisations
at a lower level of abstraction is being investigated in current work
(Perek 2012). Looking at the variability that is inherent in the syntactic
constructions that make up the grammar of English thus teaches us
an important lesson: constructions, that is, linguistic generalisations,
are not fixed schematic templates, like assembly instructions that allow
only a single correct way of constructing a complex whole. By way of
an analogy, it might not be too far-fetched to compare constructions to
the theme of a jazz standard like Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. When musicians
play the song, the melody is reproduced in recognisable ways, but there
is room for modification and improvisation. And like musicians who
have a ‘feel’ for the modifications that do and do not work, speakers
intuitively know when it ‘sounds right’ to leave out the relativiser of a
relative clause or to choose a non-finite verb rather than a fully inflected
one. Variation in the usage of constructions is thus an important topic
for Construction Grammar, but taking variation seriously also means
that the job of describing linguistic knowledge gets a lot harder. Recall
that the traditional goal of grammatical description is to distinguish
grammatical utterances from ungrammatical utterances. Doing this is
already quite a difficult task. Now, with variation entering the picture,
we do not merely want to distinguish between black and white, that is,
ungrammatical and grammatical, but rather, we acknowledge that there
is a continuum with shades of grey between the end points of black and
white, and we want to explain why there is this continuum. Why does a
certain form ‘sound better’ than another form in one context but not in
another? What are the variables that are at play? How do those variables
relate to one another? It may seem to you at this point that asking these
questions is more likely to result in utter confusion than in an improved
understanding of speakers’ linguistic knowledge. The following para-
graphs will try to clear matters up a little bit by discussing how corpus
data can be used to investigate constructional variation.
8.2.3 Analysing variation between constructions

The analysis of linguistic variation has only recently been put on the
research agenda of Construction Grammarians, who are thus relative
late-comers to a phenomenon that has already been studied intensively
for several decades within the tradition of quantitative sociolinguis-
tics (Tagliamonte 2006; Trousdale 2010). Sociolinguists following the
approach developed by William Labov (1994, 2001) have known for a

long time that speakers realise constructions in different ways, and that
these different realisations are not random, but highly predictable on the
basis of social factors such as age or ethnicity, or linguistic factors such
as the morpho-phonological context of a given utterance. To illustrate,
more than forty years ago Labov (1969) had already shown that variable
usage of the copula be in African American Vernacular English (AAVE),
more specifically Philadelphia AAVE, followed a system of rules that
could be described in terms of both linguistic and social factors. In
the parlance of sociolinguistics, these are known as language-internal
factors and language-external factors respectively. The variation that
Labov analysed concerned the presence or absence of the copula in
examples such as the following.
(3) She [’s/ø] the first one.
We [’re/ø] on tape.
He [’s/ø] gon’ try to get up.
His wife [is/ø] suppos’ a be getting money.
Non-use of the copula was shown to be more likely in sentences with
pronominal subjects, as opposed to subjects expressed by full lexical
forms. The zero variant was also more likely if the following syntactic
constituent was a form of gonna rather than a predicate nominal or a
predicative adjective. A social factor that Labov took into account was
the speech situation: when interviewed in a group, the participants used
the zero variant more often than when they were interviewed individu-
ally. There were furthermore differences between different groups of
AAVE speakers, so the language-external variable of the peer network
had an effect.
Labov proposed that cases of variability should be thought of as gram-
matical rules that are contingent on a number of factors, with each of
those factors influencing the likelihood of the rule being either applied
or not applied. The technical term that is associated with this proposal
is the variable rule. So a rule such as ‘the copula be is expressed as zero
in AAVE’ is inherently variable: speakers apply it on some occasions but
not on others. This means that the application of the rule is probabil-
istic, and the presence or absence of certain contextual features makes
it more or less likely that the rule will in fact apply. As was explained,
the rule is especially likely to apply if the subject of the utterance is
pronominal, if the utterance contains gonna, and if the utterance is made
in a group interview. But even when all of these factors come together,
there remains a small chance that the rule does not apply, so that the
speaker ends up pronouncing a form of the copula.
Studies of variable rules have mostly been carried out with the aim of
showing how variation in language use correlates with non-linguistic,
social distinctions. Their main purpose is thus not to provide a model of
what speakers know when they know a language, which you recognise as
the fundamental goal of Construction Grammar. Nonetheless, the tools
of quantitative sociolinguistics have proven to be immensely useful,
and indeed indispensable, for constructional research. In particular, the
concept of a variable rule has informed research on related argument
structure constructions (see Chapter 2) such as the member construc-
tions of the Dative Alternation or the Locative Alternation.
Consider, once again, two examples of the Ditransitive construction
and the Prepositional Dative construction.
(4) John gave his favourite aunt Mary Ditransitive
the book.
John gave the book to his favourite Prepositional Dative
aunt Mary.
How does the idea of a variable rule carry over to the use of these
constructions? Like the contrast between /sε.kr.tə.r/ and/sε.kr.tr/
or the contrast between a copula form and a zero variant, the Dative
Alternation represents a possibility for speakers to say something
in two different ways. Both member constructions of the Dative
Alternation can be used to express the idea of a transfer. This does
not mean that the two constructions are seen as semantically equiva-
lent. There is merely an area of semantic overlap, that is, a certain
range of ideas that can be expressed through both the Ditransitive
construction and the Prepositional Dative construction. Given that
alternative ways of saying things are usually not random but governed
by linguistic and social determinants, it makes sense to investigate
the conditions under which speakers choose either one or the other
of the two constructions. The literature that addresses this question is
so large that any attempt to review it in this book is bound to be less
than satisfying. The Dative Alternation has been such a popular
topic that one could actually compare that linguistic body of research
to the biological study of the fruit fly, which has been analysed as a
model organism in genetics, physiology, and pathogenesis, amongst
other fields. So, at the obvious risk of giving short shrift to a lot of
important findings, what have linguists learned about the Dative
Alternation? Bresnan et al. (2007) offer a summary of linguistic
factors that govern speakers’ choices between the two constructions.
As the following paragraphs will outline, these factors concern dis-
tinctions that pertain to practically all levels of linguistic structure:
morpho-phonology, syntax, semantics, and information packaging

(see Chapter 5).
While information packaging was named last in that list, the dis-
tinction between given and new information is actually one of the
most fundamental determinants of speakers’ choices in the Dative
Alternation. The distinction between given and new matters chiefly
for two of the three arguments of the respective constructions: the
theme, that is, the element that is transferred, and the recipient, that is,
the participant that represents the end point of the transfer (see Chapter
2 for a discussion of these thematic roles). Let us focus on the role of
the theme first. Consider the following constructed dialogue that is
concluded by two possible utterances by speaker B.
(5) A: Do we have any more wine?
B: No, I’m afraid there’s nothing left.
A: But we had that last bottle of Merlot!
B: Yes, but . . .
. . . I gave John that last one. Ditransitive
. . . I gave that last one to John. Prepositional Dative
Being forced to choose between those two conclusions of the dialogue,
which one would you prefer? In experimental studies that use stimuli of
this kind (Bresnan 2007), speakers of American English show a strong
preference for the Prepositional Dative, and you probably do, too. In
the example, the theme, that is, that last bottle of Merlot, represents shared
knowledge of the two speakers. With themes that are given, speakers
prefer to use the Prepositional Dative because that allows them to
reserve the utterance-final position for the actual focus of the utterance
(see Chapter 5). In the example above, the element in focus is John,
whose role as the recipient of the last bottle of Merlot represents new
information. With the role of the recipient, speakers’ respective prefer-
ences are precisely reversed. Consider the following, modified version
of the dialogue you just read.
(6) A: Do we have any more wine?
B: No, I’m afraid there’s nothing left.
A: But it’s John’s birthday and I need to bring something!
B: Yes, well . . .
. . . you could give John some
chocolates. Ditransitive
. . . you could give some
chocolates to John. Prepositional Dative
In this context, many speakers find that the Ditransitive sounds con-
siderably better. Corpus data show that this is not only an intuition that
speakers have when they judge experimental stimuli, but that this dis-
tribution of given and new information also characterises the naturally
occurring usage of the two constructions (Bresnan et al. 2007). Hence,
when speakers verbalise the idea of a transfer, they choose a construc-
tion with information packaging properties that match the current set of
ideas that are shared between the speaker and the hearer.
The variable of givenness is closely correlated with three syntactic
variables. First, there is the distinction of whether theme and recipient
are expressed by pronouns or full lexical noun phrases. The former
strongly tend to represent given information, which is not necessar-
ily so with the latter. The Ditransitive construction is thus used
disproportionally often with pronominal recipients (You could give him
some chocolates) whereas it actually disallows pronominal themes (*You
could give John it). The second syntactic variable that ties in with the
issue of givenness is the status of theme and recipient as either definite
noun phrases or indefinite noun phrases. Given information tends to be
expressed with definite noun phrases, whereas a primary function of
indefinite articles is the introduction of new referents into the conversa-
tion. Third, themes and recipients can be expressed through syntactic
units that differ in length. Naturally, pronouns are shorter than full
lexical phrases, and new pieces of information tend to require relatively
lengthier descriptions, so this variable also aligns with the remaining
ones. In accordance with the principle of end weight (see Chapter 5), long
themes nudge speakers towards using the Ditransitive construction
whereas long recipients are used more often with the Prepositional
Dative construction.
A semantic variable concerns the distinction of different kinds of
transfer that can be expressed through the constructions of the Dative
Alternation. Concrete transfers (give John some chocolates) contrast with
intended transfers (promise John some chocolates), metaphorical transfers
(give the idea some thought), and transfers of information (tell John a story).
These different types of transfer do not lend themselves equally well
to the use with both constructions. For instance, certain metaphorical
transfers are not felicitously expressed with the Prepositional Dative
construction.
(7) This light gives me a headache.
?This light gives a headache to me.
With regard to semantic properties of theme and recipient also, it is
possible to identify variables that affect speakers’ choices. The contrast
between animate and inanimate recipients is responsible for the differ-
ent acceptability judgements in the following examples.
(8) John threw his keys to the floor.

*John threw the floor his keys.
Another important variable that pertains not just to the utterance itself
but to the prior speech situation is the question whether or not a member
construction of the Dative Alternation has been uttered in the pre-
ceding context. Corpus studies show that speakers are more likely to
use a given syntactic construction if they have recently either heard
that construction or even produced it themselves (Szmrecsanyi 2006).
This phenomenon, which is called structural priming or morpho-
syntactic persistence, not only accounts for variation in the Dative
Alternation but has been shown to be at work in a wide range of other
morphosyntactic alternations.
Among the variables that only have a minor impact on the alter-
nation, one might name the variable of whether the theme is either
concrete (give John some chocolates) or abstract (give John a hint) and the
variable of whether the theme is in the singular (a box of chocolates)
or in the plural (some chocolates). Abstract themes induce a slight bias
towards the Ditransitive, while plural themes pull speakers towards
the Prepositional Dative.
All of the variables that have been discussed up to now, with the
exception of the length of theme and recipient, reflect distinctions
between two or at most a handful of possible values. Givenness was
discussed as a binary variable that takes either given or new as its value;
the variable of transfer sense distinguished between a small number of
different types of transfer. It was mentioned earlier in this chapter that
one source of variability in syntactic constructions is their ability to
co-occur with many different lexical elements. As a case in point, both
the Ditransitive construction and the Prepositional Dative con-
struction occur with a large set of ditransitive verbs, notably give, send,
offer, sell, and so on. The variable of the verb that occurs in a member
construction of the Dative Alternation is one that has hundreds of
different levels. Depending on how large a corpus one has at hand, the
number of different verbs that appear may get fairly large. Nonetheless,
it is useful to consider this variable, because as was pointed out in
Chapter 1, speakers’ knowledge of collocational relations between verbs
and constructions forms an integral part of the linguistic knowledge that
Construction Grammarians aim to model. Native speakers know intui-
tively that *John explained me the problem is not an acceptable sentence
of English, but second language learners of English have to learn the
idiosyncrasy of explain as an exception. Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004a)
compare the observed and expected frequencies of verbs in the Dative
Alternation, which allows them to identify verbs that are particularly

typical of either the Ditransitive construction or the Prepositional
Dative construction. As it turns out, verbs such as give, tell, and show are
strongly associated with the former, while speakers prefer to use verbs
such as bring, play, and take with the latter. These preferences can partly
be explained as reflexes of semantic variables such as a dispreference for
inanimate recipients in the Ditransitive: you can bring your dog to the
office, but you cannot *bring the office your dog.
Given all of this information on variation between the Ditransitive
construction and the Prepositional Dative construction, you can
imagine that a variable rule governing the use of the two constructions
will be highly complex. What a rule of this kind would state is that
the idea of a transfer is likely to be expressed as a Ditransitive if the
recipient is given, pronominal, and animate, the theme is new and a
long lexical phrase, the kind of transfer is a transfer of information,
and the verb that is used is give, as in an example such as John gave me
the idea of painting the house purple (compare John gave the idea of painting
the house purple to me). Quantitative techniques that work on the basis
of corpus data (see Baayen 2008 and Gries 2013 for overviews) allow
rather precise assessments of the relative impacts of each variable, and
experimental studies show that the behaviour of speakers in forced
choice tasks and grammaticality judgement tasks is highly compatible
with those corpus-based results (Bresnan 2007; Bresnan and Hay 2008;
Bresnan and Ford 2010). This means that the close analysis of variation
between constructions allows us to build detailed and realistic models
of selected parts of the construct-i-con. It goes without saying that the
Dative Alternation is merely a very small part of the construct-
i-con, but as the example of the fruit fly in biology shows, it is some-
times very useful to have precise knowledge of a small slither of reality
because that knowledge may in the end generalise to other phenomena.
More specifically, we know that all kinds of constructions exhibit vari-
ation, and we further know that some variables – among them syntactic
length, animacy, and givenness – matter across a wide range of different
constructions (Szmrecsanyi 2006). If the goal of Construction Grammar
is to create a realistic image of what it is that speakers know, working
out how speakers choose between alternative constructions is an impor-
tant part of the enterprise.
8.3 Constructional variation across groups of speakers

When we are talking about the grammar of English and mean speakers’
linguistic knowledge by that, we are obviously making an abstraction:
different speakers of English have very different ways of talking, which

reflect individual differences in linguistic knowledge. ‘The grammar
of English’ would thus be something of a compromise between these
bodies of knowledge, perhaps some general traits that all speakers more
or less agree on. Yet it is questionable whether such a compromise would
be an appropriate object of scientific inquiry because inter-speaker vari-
ation is found even in what we think of as very general constructions.
Consider the following examples, none of which are compatible with
the linguistic knowledge of a speaker of standard American English,
but all of which form part of speakers’ knowledge in at least one of the
world’s varieties of English.
(9) Example Description
There’s no one does that any more. subject relative without
relativiser
This our problem is very serious. determiner doubling
I eaten my lunch. perfect without auxiliary
have
This is better as the other one. comparative as
The boys was there, Mary weren’t. was/weren’t polarity split
They ride bikes is what they do. full clauses as cleft focus
phrase
As I said it before, this is a problem. resumptive it
These examples, which are based on data from the electronic World
Atlas of Varieties of English (eWAVE) database (Kortmann and
Lunkenheimer 2013), show that variability between different groups
of speakers runs much deeper than, say, the British–American contrast
between /təmɒ:təυ/ and /təmetəυ/. Relative clauses, noun phrases,
the perfect, comparison, negation, clefting, and pronoun usage are fun-
damental and basic domains of grammar, and in all of these there is
variation. What this means is that the quest for a compromise between
all varieties of English is likely to be a problematic enterprise. Rather,
the goal of constructional research should be to account for speakers’
knowledge in a certain variety of English. This goal of course includes
the objective of accounting for differences in the use of a construction
across two or more varieties, or the question of how a construction is
used by different social groups within a single variety. Let us consider
two studies that pursue questions of this kind.
Bresnan and Hay (2008) compare the member constructions of the
Dative Alternation across American English and New Zealand
English. As was discussed in the previous section, the Ditransitive
construction and the Prepositional Dative construction are both used
for the verbalisation of transfers, and speakers probabilistically choose

between the two constructions on the basis of several factors, including
the givenness of theme and recipient and the type of transfer that is at
issue. These factors impact speakers’ choices with different strengths
(Bresnan et al. 2007). A reasonable question to ask is whether the rela-
tive force of these factors is the same across different varieties of English.
Bresnan and Hay (2008) gathered examples of the Ditransitive con-
struction and the Prepositional Dative construction with the verb
give from corpora of American English and New Zealand English to
compare the effects of givenness, animacy, length, and so on across the
two varieties. A first result of Bresnan and Hay’s analysis is that these
factors do have effects in the same direction across both varieties. A
theme that represents given information thus biases both American and
New Zealand speakers towards the Prepositional Dative construc-
tion. A second result is that the effect strengths of givenness, length, and
transfer type are statistically indistinguishable across the two varieties.
As far as these factors are concerned, speakers’ knowledge of the two
constructions is thus remarkably similar. A third result, however, is that
American and New Zealand speakers differ with regard to the factor of
animate and inanimate recipients. Speakers of New Zealand English
make greater use of the Ditransitive construction with inanimate
recipients in examples such as give the door a push or give the economy a
boost. Despite this difference, the overall picture that emerges is that
even complex variable rules can exist in very similar forms across dif-
ferent varieties of English.
By the same token, there are also cases of constructions differing
across two varieties where such differences would not necessarily be
expected. One such example is the Into-Causative construction,
which is illustrated below.
(10) He tricked me into believing the story.
They forced him into signing his resignation.
The Into-Causative construction has been studied by Gries and
Stefanowitsch (2004b), who observe that the construction varies at
its meaning pole between a sense that involves causation by trickery
and another one that encodes causation by force. The above examples
respectively instantiate these meanings. Wulff et al. (2007) compare
the construction across corpora of British and American English, find-
ing that there are differences with regard to the lexical verbs that are
typically used. With regard to the finite main verb of the construction,
an asymmetry between British and American usage concerns verbs of
physical violence (bounce, push, throw, force, etc.) and verbs of persuasion
(talk, coax, entice, threaten, etc.). The former class of verbs is dispropor-
tionally often found in the British data, while the latter is characteristic
of American examples, allowing Wulff et al. to summarise their findings
in the title ‘Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans’. To be sure, both
classes of verbs are routinely used by both American and British speak-
ers, and given a single example, one would be hard pressed to match
the utterance with one of the varieties. Nonetheless, what these results
show is that speakers’ knowledge of the construction is subtly different
across the two varieties. While the syntactic form of the construction
is identical across both varieties, the variation at the semantic pole
of the construction, its ‘meaning potential’ (Wulff et al. 2007: 278), is
not.
To sum up this section, the study of constructional variation across
different groups of speakers represents one of the current frontiers of
Construction Grammar; there simply is not a lot of research. One reason
for this is that variation has traditionally not been a central concern
for constructional research, and another is that differences of the kind
discussed in this section are not easily revealed through native-speaker
intuitions, which have remained the evidence of choice for Construction
Grammarians for a very long time (see the discussion in Chapter 1).
However, as experimental and corpus-based methods are increasingly
becoming the norm in constructional research, it is now fully feasible
to analyse phenomena of inter-speaker variation, and research of this
kind is likely to play a significant role in the further refinement of
Construction Grammar as a theory of linguistic knowledge.
8.4 Constructional change: variation across time

The introduction to this chapter discussed several language myths –
deep-seated, flawed beliefs about language. One myth that was not men-
tioned is the belief that there is a single correct way to use a linguistic
form that needs to be preserved. For instance, best-selling style guides
will tell you that the adverb hopefully should not be used in a sentence
such as Hopefully I’ll be leaving tomorrow, that is, unless you are actually
planning to leave in a hopeful frame of mind. The word hopefully is to
be used only as a manner adverb, as derived from the adjective hopeful.
The underlying logic of this proposal is that there is a ‘right’ way to use
a word, and by that logic, any process of change that leads speakers to
use a linguistic form in a way that deviates from earlier usage is to be
condemned. What is slightly self-defeating about that argument is that
these days, very few speakers actually use hopefully in the sense of ‘full
of hope’. Or when was the last time you hopefully checked your inbox?
Change is the natural state of a living language, and this is the case
because variation characterises language at all levels of its organisation.
Speakers use linguistic forms in different ways, and over time, vari-
ants that appeal to other speakers tend to proliferate. The appeal of a
variant may be due to intrinsic qualities, such as its usefulness or ease of
production or processing, or it may be due to extrinsic reasons, such as
the social prestige of the speakers that started using it, or the nature of
the idea it describes. For instance, there is a reason that the euphemistic
labels for disadvantaged minorities, public toilets, and bodily disabili-
ties are regularly updated: as speakers strive to express themselves in
socially acceptable ways, they prefer to use variants that are just a bit
more indirect than what is commonly used, and as a consequence, older
euphemisms end up being perceived as too direct (see Keller 1994).
Coming back to constructions, how does the enterprise of
Construction Grammar relate to language change? The discussion
earlier in this chapter developed the idea that speakers’ knowledge of
constructions represents many-to-many mappings that involve a set
of related forms and a set of related meanings. Speakers know that a
construction can be realised formally in a number of different ways, and
they know that the construction has the potential to convey a range of
different meanings. Knowledge structures of this kind are susceptible
to change. The case of hopefully illustrates this. A speaker of American
English who grew up after the 1950s will recognise the sense ‘full of
hope’ as a possible meaning of the word, but at the same time that speaker
will know that hopefully is first and foremost used as a pre-posed sentence
adverb in the sense of ‘I hope’. By the same token, you will probably share
the intuition that the man whom I thanked sounds somewhat old-fashioned
when compared with the man that I thanked. In that sense, your cognitive
representation of the Relative Clause construction differs from the
representation that earlier generations of speakers would have had.
Differences between different historical stages of a single variety of
English can be analysed with the same tools that are applied for the
comparison of contemporary varieties of English. Typically, research of
this kind resorts to corpora, since the historical varieties of English are
fairly well documented. To give an example, Wolk et al. (2013) carry out
a study that follows the model of Bresnan and Hay’s (2008) investigation
of the Dative Alternation, but instead of contrasting American and
New Zealand English, Wolk et al. compare the use of the Ditransitive
and the Prepositional Dative construction across different periods of
Late Modern English. Speakers during those periods had slightly dif-
ferent ways of using those constructions, for instance with regard to the
factor of animate and inanimate recipients. These corpus-based results
allow researchers to make very precise ‘educated guesses’ as to the

constructional knowledge that speakers used to have. Regrettably, of
course, it is impossible to test those claims experimentally: there simply
are no speakers of Late Modern English left who could be asked into the
laboratory. Yet it is possible to study more recent processes of change
with currently living speakers of different ages, say, around 20, 45, and
70 years of age. If it emerges that old speakers use a constructional
variant that is used less by middle-aged speakers and even more rarely
by young speakers, it can be concluded that this is a variant on its way
out of the language system. Studies taking this analytical approach are
called apparent-time studies (Bailey 2008), as opposed to real-time
studies that compare data from different historical periods.
To sum up the preceding paragraphs, the diachronic approach to
Construction Grammar studies variation in language use over time. Via
studying historical variation in language use, it aims to work out differ-
ences between the linguistic knowledge of speakers at different points
in time. The historical record of language use shows that constructions
change. What makes the study of historical change so challenging is that
constructions can in fact change with regard to several different aspects,
including not only their form and meaning, but also their frequency of
use and their association with social traits of the speakers who are using
them. To capture all of these aspects, Hilpert (2013: 16) proposes the
following definition of constructional change.
(11) Constructional change selectively seizes a conventionalized
form–meaning pair of a language, altering it in terms of its form,
its function, any aspect of its frequency, its distribution in the
linguistic community, or any combination of these.
This definition starts with the idea of a construction as a convention-
alised pair of form and meaning (see the definition of constructions in
Chapter 1). The most basic changes that can happen to a construction
concern meaning and form. Over time, speakers may use a construction
with a new meaning that is extended from an older one, as in the case
of sentence-adverbial hopefully. They may also use the construction in
a new form that is an altered variant of an older form. A typical pro-
cess in this regard is the phonological reduction of frequent construc-
tions, as for instance gonna from be going to. Another common process
of formal change in constructions is known as host-class expansion
(Himmelmann 2004), which captures the idea that a slot in a construc-
tion may over time come to accommodate different types of struc-
tural units. Patten (2010) reports on the historical development of the
It-Cleft construction (see Chapter 5). It-Clefts show a diachronic
development towards a diversified repertoire of syntactic phrase types

that can appear in the focus phrase of the construction. Consider the
following examples.
(12) It was the butler that killed her.
It is in December that she’s coming.
It is here that we met.
It is vacuuming the floor that I hate most.
In the first example, the focus phrase contains a nominal, while the
second example has a prepositional phrase, and the third one an adver-
bial. The fourth example has a gerund -ing clause as the focus phrase.
Patten (2010: 229) shows that the noun phrase pattern is the earliest
one that is attested, the remaining ones successively coming in at later
stages. What this means is that the class of syntactic units that can be
used as focus phrases increasingly expands; hence the term host-class
expansion.
The above definition of constructional change further states that a
construction can change with regard to any aspect of its frequency.
This statement first and foremost covers the event of a construction
becoming used more or less often over time. Relative clauses with the
relativiser whom are a good example of a construction gradually fading
out of usage. As was discussed in Chapter 6, speakers keep track of the
frequencies with which they hear a construction used, so they know
whether a construction is common or rather uncommon in day-to-day
language use. Yet there is much more to the statement that construc-
tions change with regard to frequency. The most important aspect of
this statement concerns the fact that constructions have variants, and
that these variants may change in terms of their relative frequencies. At
the risk of boring you, let us return to the Ditransitive construction
just one more time. As a speaker of English, whether native or second
language learner, you have knowledge of that construction, and your
knowledge includes the fact that there is a variant of the construction
in which the recipient is not a single animate human being, as in the
following examples.
(13) Let’s give the potatoes five more minutes.
John gave the swing a push.
Mary earned her country a gold medal in the Winter Olympic
Games.
Not only do you know that such examples are possible, your mental
representation of the Ditransitive construction also includes a record
of how often you can expect to hear such examples, as opposed to
Ditransitive clauses with animate recipients. In the many-to-many

mapping of forms and meanings that make up your knowledge of
the Ditransitive construction, some variants are represented more
strongly than others, so that they are activated more easily, processed
faster, and produced more often. Over time, the relative frequencies of
constructional variants may change, and the cognitive representation of
those variants will change accordingly.
Constructional change also has a social dimension, such that a con-
struction may change from being used by a specific subgroup of the
speech community to being used by a larger part of the community.
Your knowledge of a construction includes knowledge of the social
contexts in which it is appropriate to use that construction. In some
constructions, these contexts may be quite restrictive. Take for instance
the word dude, which is a lexical noun that has acquired grammatical
function as a term of address in American English (Kiesling 2004). The
following examples offer two tokens of usage.
(14) It was great, dude. I really liked it.
Dude, you need to borrow that DVD. It’s freakin’ rad.
Clearly, dude indexes an informal, conversational register, and it tends to
be used by younger speakers, but there is more to it than that. Kiesling
(2004: 285) analyses authentic uses of the term and finds that dude is
unevenly distributed across female and male speakers: mostly, dude is
used by males to address other males. Female speakers use dude to a
much lesser extent, and if they do, they prefer to use it in same-sex
conversations. What speakers do when they use dude is thus to signal
male-stereotyped camaraderie. This only works between certain speak-
ers. Imagine your linguistics professor handing you back a term paper
and saying Dude, that’s a straight A! The chances are that despite the good
news, a few seconds of awkward silence would follow. Now, whether
or not dude will spread out to other demographics, including linguistics
professors, is a matter of speculation. However, there are documented
cases of constructions that speakers perceived as restricted at first and
which subsequently spread to ever larger groups of language users
and to a greater range of registers, spoken as well as written ones. Mair
and Leech (2006) note that phenomena such as negative contraction
(don’t, isn’t), the Get-Passive (something gets eaten), and singular they (If
anyone still needs a handout they should see me after class) are increasingly
establishing themselves in written genres, and these authors propose the
term colloquialisation for this. What this boils down to is that knowl-
edge of constructions includes knowledge of who is likely to say what
in what kinds of situation, and over time that knowledge may change.
8.5 Three open questions in Diachronic Construction Grammar

The diachronic branch of Construction Grammar that was described
in the last section has recently grown into a fully-fledged research pro-
gramme (Noël 2007; Bergs and Diewald 2008; De Smet 2013; Hilpert
2013; Traugott and Trousdale 2013; Petré 2014; Barðdal et al. 2015;
Heine et al. 2016; amongst others). This section will present some of this
research and take up three questions that are currently under debate in
Diachronic Construction Grammar.
8.5.1 What is investigated in Diachronic Construction Grammar?

The first open question is whether or not Diachronic Construction
Grammar has the aim of developing a psychologically realistic cogni-
tive model of language change. Throughout this book, Construction
Grammar has been presented as a theory that aims to provide a model
for speakers’ knowledge of language. The central notion of that model is
that of constructions, which are understood as mental representations of
linguistic form–meaning pairs. In order to postulate such mental repre-
sentations, analysts rely either on data from psycholinguistic experiments
(see Chapter 6) or on corpus-linguistic data that provides evidence for
constructional generalisations. If Diachronic Construction Grammar
were simply regular Construction Grammar with the additional factor
of historical time, then its main goal should be to investigate how speak-
ers’ knowledge of language changes diachronically. Yet, this is not actu-
ally the case in many studies that address the history of constructions.
It could even be argued that it is inherently problematic to make claims
about the linguistic knowledge of earlier generations of speakers, given
that diachronic corpora only capture very selective aspects of historical
language use. In practice, Diachronic Construction Grammar is often
chosen as a descriptive framework that allows researchers to adopt a
perspective on changes in individual form–meaning pairs. Whether or
not these form–meaning pairs are psychologically real is treated as a
secondary issue in those studies. At the same time, there are analyses
that try to tackle cognitive issues and that offer promising results. The
previous section has already pointed to Wolk et al.’s (2013) historical
analysis of the Dative Alternation. Another example is a study by
Sommerer (2015) that addresses Noun Phrase constructions in Old
English. Drawing on data from the Peterborough Chronicle and the Parker
Chronicle, Sommerer (2015) argues that an abstract Noun Phrase con-
struction with an obligatory slot for a determiner became increasingly
entrenched in speakers’ minds. Hilpert (2013) describes a development
in recent American English. He provides distributional evidence to sug-

gest that parenthetical concessive clauses (as in This is an interesting, if
problematic, suggestion) are not mentally represented as a single, general
construction, but rather as a family of constructions at lower levels
of abstraction. In another study, Petré and Van de Velde (2018) track
the grammaticalisation of the Be going to construction during Early
Modern English at the level of individual writers and the community as
a whole. Their analysis identifies leaders, early adopters, and laggards
with regard to Be going to, and thereby provides a perspective on the
dynamics between the changing linguistic knowledge of the individual
and changes in aggregate corpus data. Studies such as these show that
Diachronic Construction Grammar with a cognitive outlook is possible,
even though there are of course many restrictions.
What is clear is that any claim about cognition incurs the cost of
having to make that claim plausible. Evidence from historical corpora
thus needs to be supported with converging sources of data. One such
source would be experiments that involve present-day speakers and
that demonstrate how processes that are assumed to drive historical
change are also at work in current language use. Another source is
computational simulations, which can take into account frequency of
use, connections between speakers, and other factors in order to test
whether proposed explanations for historical change actually hold up
in situations where all contextual factors are fully controlled. There are
thus a number of avenues that researchers in Diachronic Construction
Grammar can follow in the pursuit of making their analyses psychologi-
cally plausible.
8.5.2 When is a new construction a new construction?1

Chapter 3 described how knowledge of language is organised in the
construct-i-con through instance links, polysemy links, metaphorical
links, and subpart links. Research in Diachronic Construction Grammar
subscribes to the general idea that knowledge of language is organised
in a network-like fashion, and a substantial body of work has been
targeting the question of how the constructional network can change
over time. A process that has received particular attention in this regard
is the emergence of new constructions in the network. Traugott and
Trousdale call this process constructionalisation and define it as follows
(2013: 22):
1
The discussion in this section is based on Hilpert (2018).
Constructionalization is the creation of formnew-meaningnew (combi-

nations of) signs. It forms new type nodes, which have new syntax or
morphology and new coded meaning, in the linguistic network of a popu-
lation of speakers. It is accompanied by changes in degree of schematicity,
productivity, and compositionality. The constructionalization of schemas
always results from a succession of micro-steps and is therefore gradual.
New micro-constructions may likewise be created gradually, but they
may also be instantaneous. Gradually created micro-constructions tend
to be procedural, and instantaneously created micro-constructions tend
to be contentful.
The terms procedural and contentful capture a distinction between

constructions that could be called grammatical and lexical, respectively.
Traugott and Trousdale thus distinguish between two different types of
constructionalisation, namely grammatical constructionalisation and
lexical constructionalisation. The former is largely synonymous with
the term grammaticalisation, as used by Hopper and Traugott (2003).
Grammatical constructionalisation is a gradual process that goes along
with increases in the schematicity and productivity of a construction and
with a decrease in its compositionality. Lexical constructionalisation
can be instantaneous and does not bring about increases in schematicity
and productivity. Traugott and Trousdale (2013: 22) emphasise that
constructionalisation has to involve both formal and functional change.
In their words, ‘[f]ormal changes alone, and meaning changes alone
cannot constitute constructionalization’. Changes that involve only
form or only meaning are viewed as instances of constructional change.
While the concept of constructionalisation, understood as the emer-
gence of new nodes in the construct-i-con, is intuitively clear, it is not
always easy to apply the concept in analyses of actual historical data
(Börjars et al. 2015). In some cases, the application is straightforward.
When new lexical items such as Brexit emerge, it is evident that a new
form–meaning pair has been created. In other cases, it is a matter of
definition whether an observed development should be viewed as con-
structionalisation or constructional change. What exactly is viewed as
a new form–meaning pair depends on the source construction that is
chosen as the basis for constructionalisation. The schema in (15) illus-
trates this with a hypothetical example. In the schema, ‘>cc>’ stands
for constructional change, and ‘>czn>’ stands for constructionalisation.
The development that is diagrammed shows how an existing form–
meaning pair undergoes two changes. The first change yields a new
form that is paired with the old meaning. This could happen for instance
in a development of phonological reduction. The second change brings
about a new meaning that is paired with the new form. The phonologi-
cally reduced form might acquire a new meaning that is specific to the
reduced form.
(15) FORM1 >cc> FORM2 – >czn> FORM2
MEANING1 MEANING2 MEANING2
Following Traugott and Trousdale, it is only when we get to FORM2

– MEANING2 that a completely new form–meaning pair arises and
the definition of constructionalisation is met. Börjars et al. (2015) point
out that this result depends on the starting point that is chosen for the
development. If an earlier starting point is introduced with a pairing
of FORM1 and MEANING0, a completely new form–meaning pair is
attested already with the emergence of FORM2 – MEANING1, as is
shown in (16).
(16) FORM1 >cc> FORM1 >czn> FORM2 – >czn> FORM2 –
– MEANING0 MEANING1 MEANING1 MEANING2
What this means is that constructionalisation is a relative term. Any

attempt to answer the question of when a new construction is a new
construction is dependent on the subjective choice of a starting point
that marks the beginning of the constructionalisation process. This
conclusion, while not taking anything away from the usefulness of
constructionalisation as a concept, considerably blurs the line between
constructionalisation and constructional change.
8.5.3 Are there nodes in the constructional network?

Throughout this book, the idea that constructions are nodes in a highly
interconnected network has been presented as one of the cornerstones
of Construction Grammar. Yet, the question in the heading of this sec-
tion suggests that this idea is somehow problematic, or not universally
accepted. In a trivial sense of the question, there is no controversy. The
construct-i-con is generally viewed as a network of nodes and con-
nections. What is more contentious, however, is how the nodes in the
construct-i-con should be thought of. Here, there are different opinions.
The discussion in this book has taken the position that constructions
are to be seen as nodes in the network that contain information about the
constructions they represent. For example, the English Way construc-
tion was presented as a node that contains both syntactic and semantic
information (see Section 2.3.3). Through inheritance links and subpart
links, the construction is connected with other parts of the network.
What this means is that in the construct-i-con, most of the information
that makes up speakers’ knowledge of language is stored in the nodes,

and relatively little information is stored in the connections. Hudson
(2015: 692) points out that this way of thinking about networks contrasts
with many other approaches in the natural and social sciences, which
tend to restrict the internal complexity of nodes to a bare minimum. For
example, in models of neural networks, the internal structure of nodes is
limited to a mechanism that allows them to receive and send activation.
Hudson calls for a network model of language that follows this logic
and in which most of the knowledge is stored directly in the connec-
tions. In this kind of model, what a network can do is determined by
the configuration of connections between the nodes, rather than by the
information that is contained within the nodes. Instead of Goldberg’s
(2006: 18) view, in which knowledge of language is ‘constructions all the
way down’, Hudson proposes that a more realistic model of linguistic
knowledge should be ‘networks all the way down’. The same view is
endorsed by Schmid (2017: 25), who envisions a Construction Grammar
in which associative connections are actually the only mental represen-
tations of linguistic knowledge.
Viewing constructions and constructional changes in terms of chang-
ing associative connections is possible in a number of ways. To take a
concrete example, Colleman (2015) presents an analysis of semantic
and collocational change in the Dutch Passive construction with the
verb krijgen. Colleman observes that over the twentieth century, the
construction is used with an increasingly wide range of lexical verbs
in its participle slot. This development can be described both in terms
of changing nodes and in terms of changing connections. If the node
view is given priority, the development of the construction could be
described as an extension of its meaning pole, or as a deterioration of
its semantic constraints. Alternatively, the same phenomenon can be
viewed as the formation of new links. The form of the krijgen-Passive
becomes associated with new meanings and with new participle types.
In another study that focuses on the diachrony of connections in the
construct-i-con, Torrent (2015) analyses changing infinitive construc-
tions in Brazilian Portuguese and proposes two hypotheses about how
constructional networks may change. The first of these is labelled the
Constructional Convergence Hypothesis. According to the hypoth-
esis, new links can emerge between constructions that are historically
unrelated, but that share aspects of form and that serve similar func-
tions. Torrent thus spells out the conditions under which new subpart
links can be formed. The second hypothesis that Torrent advances is
called the Construction Network Reconfiguration Hypothesis,
which is concerned with the changes in connectivity that result from
c onstructionalisation. As new constructions arise, the network readjusts

itself and new inheritance links are created.
As these examples show, the study of connectivity changes in
Diachronic Construction Grammar has already gained some momen-
tum. The coming years will show whether it will be possible to develop
a model of the construct-i-con that, in line with Hudson’s and Schmid’s
ideas, is indeed ‘networks all the way down’.
8.6 Summing up
This chapter began by pointing out that variation and change, contrary
to what many laypeople believe, are fundamental and natural character-
istics of language. Variation in language means that speakers have a cer-
tain amount of freedom to say the same thing in different ways. Change
in language is a direct outcome of variation: given a construction that
has multiple variants, speakers may reduce their usage of some of those
variants while creating other variants that are then used to an increas-
ingly greater extent. It was argued that variation and change naturally fit
into the constructional view of linguistic knowledge. Constructions, as
symbolic units, have a formal pole and a functional pole. The main point
of this chapter was to illustrate that at both of these poles, there is varia-
tion, so that knowledge of a construction is in fact knowledge of a many-
to-many mapping of several related forms to several related meanings.
Variation at the meaning pole of a construction includes patterns of
polysemy in lexical words such as strong (strong fighter, strong coffee, strong
feelings) and in constructions such as the S-Genitive construction (John’s
book, yesterday’s events) or the Ditransitive construction (John gave Mary
the book, I gave the idea some thought). Variation at the formal pole includes
different pronunciations of the same word, but also different syntac-
tic realisations of the same complex construction. Recall the example
of the It-Cleft construction, which accommodates different types of
structure in its focus phrase (It was the butler that killed her, It was here
that we met, etc.). Another example of formal variation that was offered
discussed different realisations of the Relative Clause construction.
The discussion introduced the concept of a variable as a constructional
feature that speakers can realise in two or more ways. With regard to
relative clauses, important variables include the grammatical role of the
relativised constituent, the presence or absence of a relativiser, and the
verb form of the relative clause, which may be finite or non-finite. It
was argued that constructional variation is an integral part of speakers’
knowledge of language: speakers know how a construction can vary, that
is, what variants are possible and what variants are not.
The chapter further pointed out that the study of variation in

constructions and between constructions has its roots in the research
tradition of quantitative sociolinguistics. The discussion introduced
the concept of a variable rule, that is, a rule that is applied proba-
bilistically: several language-internal and language-external factors
influence the likelihood of such a rule being applied. Most studies that
operate with this concept cast variable rules as binary choices, so that
speakers may choose to use one construction from an alternating pair
of constructions. An example that was presented in some detail was
the Dative Alternation, in which speakers’ choices between the
Ditransitive construction and the Prepositional Dative construc-
tion hinge on variables such as the givenness of theme and recipient,
the length of theme and recipient, the animacy status of the recipi-
ent, and several others. Current research combines both experimental
and corpus-based methods to investigate constructional variation,
and approaches of this kind can identify with great precision the
relative impacts that different variables have on speakers’ linguistic
behaviour.
This chapter was also concerned with constructional variation across
different varieties of English, including not only varieties that are
spoken in different areas of the world, but also varieties that were spoken
during different historical periods. It was argued that Construction
Grammar should not strive to model a compromise between the differ-
ent bodies of knowledge that different speakers of English have. Rather,
the goal should be to account for the knowledge that reasonably well-
defined groups of speakers have. Individual differences of course also
remain when such an approach is taken. The example of the Dative
Alternation was used to illustrate how constructional knowledge
may differ rather subtly from one variety of English to another one.
The example of the Into-Causative construction illustrated cross-
varietal differences in the collocational preferences of a construction.
The methodologies that are applied in studies of constructions across
different Englishes are put to use in similar ways in diachronic research
on constructional change. The discussion offered a definition of con-
structional change and illustrated the ways in which constructions can
change with several examples. Importantly, constructions may change
not only with regard to form and meaning, but crucially also with regard
to aspects of their frequency and their distribution in the community of
speakers.
The final section of this chapter turned to three questions that
are currently under debate in Diachronic Construction Grammar.
The first of these questions addressed the status of constructions as
mental r epresentations of language and discussed whether Diachronic

Construction Grammar should aim to uncover cognitive aspects of
historical language use. The second question concerned the emergence
of new constructions and the difficulty of determining whether a new
form–meaning pair has emerged. The third question related to the way
in which nodes and connections are viewed as parts of the constructional
network and how diachronic developments in language are profitably
viewed as changes in connectivity between constructions.
Study questions
1. Give an example of linguistic variation from your own language
use. What are the factors that make you say the same thing differ-
ently in different situations?
2. Why do language variation and change have such a bad reputation
among non-linguists?
3. Look up the web page of the eWAVE (www.ewave-atlas.org)
and find out in what varieties, besides Hong Kong English and
Newfoundland English, subject relative clauses without relativisers
are acceptable.
4. What is a variable rule? Give an example.
5. What does it mean to say that a language-external factor has a
probabilistic effect on a variable rule? Give an example.
6. Do some bibliographical research and find another morphosyn-
tactic alternation that has been studied with the approach used by
Bresnan et al. (2007).
7. What is morphosyntactic persistence?
8. What is the difference between apparent-time studies and real-
time studies?
9. The term of address dude is restricted with respect to the speakers
that use it. Can you come up with other examples of constructions
that are used only by specific groups in the speech community?
10. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) is a great
resource in which to learn about constructions that have changed in
frequency over the past two hundred years. Look up the web page
(http://corpus.byu.edu/coha) and search for the words whom, chap,
and dude. Feel free to continue searching!
Further reading
Traugott and Trousdale (2013) is a cornerstone reference for work on
Diachronic Construction Grammar. The studies in Barðdal et al. (2015)
offer practical applications of the theoretical framework. Hoffmann and

Trousdale (2011) have edited a special issue of the journal Cognitive
Linguistics on the topic of ‘Variation, change and constructions in
English’. Their introduction to the special issue, as well as the contribu-
tions themselves, illuminate the topic from different angles. Hoffmann
and Trousdale’s (2013) Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar contains
several chapters on variation and change; in particular, the contribu-
tions by Östman and Trousdale, Fried, and Hollmann continue lines of
thought that were developed in this chapter. A resource that is extremely
useful for the exploration of constructional variability between differ-
ent varieties of English is The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English
(Kortmann and Lunkenheimer 2013), especially since it is accompa-
nied by a web-based database that is free to use (www.ewave-atlas.org).
Finally, Hilpert (2013) presents several case studies of constructional
change that illustrate how variation in constructional usage develops
over time.
9 Constructions in spoken
language
Up to this point, the discussion of linguistic data in this book has

adopted a perspective that mainly focused on words, syntactic phrases,
and sentence-level constructions. There is nothing inherently wrong
with that, but there is nonetheless a problem. Adopting this perspec-
tive uncritically will prevent us from seeing and studying phenomena
that do not easily fit into the view of constructions as structural units
with formal and functional characteristics. In other words, our view on
language is biased towards certain phenomena, and we run the risk of
overlooking others that are perhaps equally important. Construction
Grammar shares with many linguistic frameworks what Linell (1982)
has termed the written language bias. The concepts that linguists use
to analyse language are primarily designed to account for phenom-
ena in writing. The opening lines from Chomsky’s (1957: 13) Syntactic
Structures offer an illustration:
From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite)
of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of
elements. [. . .] The fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis of a lan-
guage L is to separate the grammatical sequences which are the sentences
of L from the ungrammatical sequences which are not sentences of L and
to study the structure of the grammatical sequences.
The notion of a sentence, which figures prominently in the quota-
tion, is a concept that differs in many ways from that of an utterance.
Sentences are static, complete units that can be assessed with regard to
their constituent structure and their grammatical acceptability. Their
natural habitat is the printed page. Utterances are produced in real
time by actual speakers, and the structure of an utterance need not cor-
respond to that of a sentence. Many utterances would not pass the kind
of acceptability judgement test that is commonly applied to sentence-
level constructions. The quotation further evokes a finite set of ele-
ments that can be used to construct sentences. This reflects the idea of
208
constructions in spoken l anguage 209
words as building blocks, which need to be assembled in a certain way

to yield sentences. The general view of language that lies behind the
quotation, and in fact behind most modern linguistic work, including
work in Construction Grammar, is that language consists of object-like
structures that have stable characteristics and that can be manipulated.
Understanding language in terms of static objects is a significant part of
the written language bias. Rather than studying language as a dynamic
process, that is, as something that speakers do, the temporal dimension
is excluded from view, and language is viewed as a set of objects that can
be studied independently of time, speakers, or context, just like written
words and sentences on a page. Linell (1982: 3) points out that this view
is informed by a conceptual metaphor that Lakoff and Johnson (1980:
206) describe as follows:
Meanings are objects.
Linguistic expressions are objects.
Linguistic expressions have meanings (in them).
In communication, a speaker sends a fixed meaning to a hearer via the
linguistic expression associated with that meaning.
Conceptual metaphors are as powerful as they are because they allow
us to understand abstract and complex phenomena in terms of familiar
concepts, such as physical objects, containers, or the transfer of an object
between two human beings. In other words, they provide highly intui-
tive models of complex phenomena. The inherent danger of conceptual
metaphors is that they only allow us to understand those parts of the
abstract phenomenon that are actually represented in the metaphorical
model. In the case of viewing language as a set of stable objects, several
aspects of language are simply not present. In order to overcome the
written language bias, we need to bring those aspects back into focus.
9.1 Overcoming the written language bias

Auer (2009) identifies three characteristics of spoken language that
directly relate to its temporality. The first of these is its ephemeral
nature, that is, the fact that spoken language is an extremely short-lived
phenomenon. Auer calls this the transitoriness of language. Once an
utterance has been made, its sound does not linger in the way that
written words stay on the page. This is not without consequences.
There are limitations on what hearers and speakers can remember,
and that affects language processing as well as production. Quite often,
this point is acknowledged and deliberately excluded from further
consideration, based on the argument that processing difficulty and
grammatical acceptability are notions that should be kept apart. A

given structure may be hard to process, but that does not mean that
it is ungrammatical, it rather just means that complex structures will
be avoided in speech. Auer (2009: 2) points out that this is not a com-
pletely accurate description of what speakers do. The transitoriness
of language biases speakers against certain types of complexity, but
not against others. Example (1) shows a centre-embedded sentence
(Bakery 2006), which tends to be strongly avoided in speech. By con-
trast, example (2) from the Santa Barbara Corpus (Du Bois et al. 2000)
shows a structure with multiple instances of right-branching, which is
rather common in spoken data.1
(1) An apparently new speech disorder a linguistics department our
correspondent visited was affected by has appeared.
(= An apparently new speech disorder has appeared. It has affected
a linguistics department that our correspondent has visited.)
(2) LYNNE: I mean you get so tired
. . . n- you just,
. . . it takes . . .
well,
it takes me longer than most people,
cause you know,
I’m not as strong and,
and I’m not as good,
as like somebody that would do it . . . all the time.
Despite being relatively short, example (1) is completely incompre-
hensible at first. Disentangling the interwoven relative clauses takes an
enormous processing effort. Example (2) is a lot longer than example
(1), but much easier to process. The utterance starts with a main clause
(I mean you get so tired), which is then coordinated with a false start of
another main clause (n- you just), which is repaired (it takes me longer
than most people) and ultimately elaborated with a subordinate adverbial
clause (cause you know) which at the end contains a noun phrase with a
relative clause (somebody that would do it . . . all the time). The kind of com-
plexity that is on display here lends itself to the use in spoken language
because new constituents are introduced through right-branching: they
connect to constituents that immediately came before and are therefore
1
Unless indicated otherwise, all spoken examples in this chapter are from the Santa
Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. In some cases, parts of the annotation
have been removed for expository purposes.
fresh in the hearer’s memory. What can be concluded from this example
is that the transitoriness of language favours certain kinds of complexity
over others, thereby constraining the types of structure that usually
show up in speech.
A second characteristic of spoken language is what Auer (2009) calls
its irreversibility. Whatever is said is said. By contrast, writing can
be edited. Most of the sentences in this book underwent a number of
changes between their respective first drafts and the final versions that
you are reading. Whereas editing in writing happens in private, with
only the author being aware of the changes, the words of a speaker
are immediately accessible to the hearer. Because of its irreversibility,
spoken language has a number of characteristics that make it unique.
This is especially apparent in situations in which the first version of
an utterance is at odds with what the speaker wants to accomplish.
Example (2) above features a false start (n- you just), that is, a first part
of a sentence-level construction that is subsequently abandoned and
replaced by another (. . . it takes . . . well, it takes me longer than most people).
This kind of editing phenomenon is called a self-repair. The speaker
backtracks to the part of the current utterance at which the so-called
trouble source is located and starts over at that point. Entire classes of
elements in spoken language owe their existence to its irreversibility.
Hesitation markers such as uh and um (Clark and Fox Tree 2002) and
discourse markers such as oh (Heritage 2002) serve as examples. Because
the editing of spoken language happens overtly in real time, speakers
use elements that signal to the hearer what kind of editing is currently
in progress.
A third aspect of spoken language that highlights its temporality
is the synchronisation of actions carried out by the speaker and the
hearer. Language production and language comprehension are tightly
coordinated in spontaneous conversation, such that very often hearers
are able to anticipate the speaker’s upcoming words with great precision.
Amongst other things, this leads to the phenomenon of co-construction,
in which utterances are collaboratively produced. Examples (3) and (4)
illustrate this.
(3) HAROLD: It turns out as a spouse,

I get in free.
PETE: Oh really.
HAROLD: So,
PETE: That’s not [bad].
JAMIE: [to] group classes, yeah.
PETE: Hm.
(4) CAROLYN: And we all heard it,

and we all . . .
KATHY: . . . Went home and told your [parents]?
CAROLYN: [freaked out].
In example (3), Harold’s utterance I get in free is elaborated on by Jamie,
who adds to group classes, yeah. Despite occurring only after three inter-
vening utterances by Pete and Harold, it is clear that Jamie’s words link
up syntactically with Harold’s earlier statement, restricting it semanti-
cally. Jamie’s action thus yields a collaborative utterance to which two
speakers contribute syntactic material. Example (4) starts with Carolyn,
whose hesitation prompts Kathy to propose a continuation of her utter-
ance. An interesting feature of Kathy’s contribution is that it is syntacti-
cally integrated into Carolyn’s utterance, while it conveys the pragmatic
function of a question, which is reflected in its prosodic characteristics.
Ultimately, Carolyn completes her utterance herself, which amounts to
a negative answer to Kathy’s question. More examples of this particular
kind will be discussed in Section 9.4.4 below.
The synchronisation of spoken language is not only visible in co-
constructed utterances, but more generally in the fine-tuned tem-
poral organisation of conversation. As a vast literature of research in
Conversation Analysis has established, spontaneous linguistic behav-
iour is highly systematic, with speakers taking turns at talking. Hearers
carefully monitor the speech of their interlocutor, identify points in the
conversation where it would be appropriate to take over as the speaker,
and seize their opportunity within a precisely chosen time window.
Sacks et al. (1974) have called these points transition relevance places.
As Fischer (2015: 565) points out, transition relevance places have
up to now not been given any theoretical status within Construction
Grammar.
Overcoming the written language bias means that language has to be
recognised as an inherently dynamic phenomenon, which is transitory,
irreversible, and synchronised. The proclaimed aim of Construction
Grammar to account for language in its entirety (Kay and Fillmore
1999: 1) means that it is actually a matter of intellectual honesty to
acknowledge the existence of these characteristics and to integrate them
into the theoretical apparatus of Construction Grammar. The next sec-
tion outlines a number of conceptual tools for this purpose that have
been proposed by Auer (2009).
9.2 On-line syntax

Auer’s (2009) view of an inherently temporal syntax, aptly called on-line
syntax, comprises three central notions, namely projection, expansion,
and retraction. Each of these will be introduced and exemplified below.
Projection (Auer 2005, 2009) relates to the fact that hearers continually
and incrementally monitor what the speaker is saying in order to antici-
pate upcoming elements. Speakers can actively use projection in order
to create expectations within the hearer. Projecting elements differ in
the scope of the expectations that they create. The definite determiner
the projects a nominal element in the immediately following context;
a complement-taking verb such as believe creates the expectation of
a that-clause within the same utterance; and a discourse marker such
as actually foreshadows that the speaker will make a point that is to
some extent in conflict with an earlier contribution to the conversation.
Effective use of projection can be seen as audience design, that is,
hearer-friendly language use. If an utterance begins with an element
that is strongly predictive of further elements, that minimises the strain
on working memory: the hearer does not have to deal with uncertainty
and the cognitive stress of having to anticipate a wide range of possible
continuations. At the same time, projection has cognitive benefits for the
speaker. If an utterance begins with elements that determine its overall
syntactic shape, then all the speaker has left to do is to fill the syntactic
frame with appropriate lexical elements. Projection can also be used
by the speaker to keep the floor for a longer stretch of time. Starting
an utterance with a projecting element has the effect that hearers will
hold off on intervening until they actually hear the elements that were
projected. Example (5) features such a use of projection.
(5) MONTOYA: . . . If I make the statement which I did,
. . . that there’s no fear factor,
when it comes to . . . the Chicano Latino
community,
and there is much more of a fear factor,
. . . in dealing with the African American
community,
. . . am I not dealing with a racial factor of power?
The example starts with the initial part of a conditional clause (If I
make the statement which I did), the so-called protasis, which projects a
matching second part, the apodosis, which in this case has the syntactic
shape of a question (am I not dealing with a racial factor of power?). In
between protasis and apodosis, the speaker weaves into the utterance a
complex structure that syntactically functions as a complement clause.

That complement clause is dependent on the noun phrase the statement
which I made, as shown in (6).
(6) the statement which I made
that there is no fear factor
when it comes to the Chicano Latino community
and there is much more of a fear factor
in dealing with the African American community
For the entire duration of these structures being uttered, the hearer has
to keep waiting for the apodosis that was projected earlier. The speaker
uses projection in this example in order to deliver a nuanced argument
and to maintain the hearer’s attention for the time that it takes to make
that argument.
Auer (2005: 13) points out that different linguistic elements vary in
terms of their projective strength. Whereas the protasis of a conditional
clause with if is a rather strong predictor of a following apodosis further
down the line, other elements only allow relatively weak projections.
In example (7) below, a projecting element is the line and they’re just . . .
a little bit, which creates the expectation of a following predicate, either
in the form of an adjective or a prepositional phrase. This expectation
remains unfulfilled for a while, until Lynne repeats the projecting ele-
ment they’re just and adds the adjective sore.
(7) LYNNE: Well you can trim em too short.
. . . And make em,
you know,
and they’re just . . . a little bit,
for f-
the first couple of days,
you know,
I mean they’re just . . . sore.
The probabilistic nature of projection is further illustrated by examples
like (8), which is discussed by Hopper (2011: 31). Hopper argues that
some projecting elements are only retroactively identified as such by the
speaker. In other words, speakers do not necessarily plan the entirety of
their utterance in advance, but rather they proceed by increments and
may reinterpret the functions of uttered elements as they go along. This
can be observed in example (8) with the word such.
(8) DORIS: . . . Sam has been,
. . . has taken such an interest in this retirement bit.
. . . (H) . . . That it –
. . . it really surprises me.
If example (8) were analysed as a piece of writing, it would be uncon-
troversial to say that such is an element that projects a following comple-
ment clause with that. Hopper calls into question whether this is actually
an appropriate analysis for example (8) as it was produced in speech.
While the element such can project a that-clause, it can also be used with
just a noun phrase, as in We had such a nice day. Several pieces of evidence
suggest that Doris was using such in this way. Prosodically and syntacti-
cally, the utterance is complete after the second line, at the full stop.
A following pause and in-breath point to the same conclusion, which
motivates Hopper’s argument that Doris did not actually plan for her
utterance to go on beyond that point. However, since her interlocutor
does not take the floor, Doris eventually adds an increment to her utter-
ance. The added that-clause connects to such and thereby retroactively
draws on its projecting function. This amounts to a reinterpretation of
what such does syntactically in this context. Similar cases of syntactic
reinterpretations will be discussed later in this chapter under the head-
ing of apo-koinou constructions (Section 9.4.2).
Not all parts of an utterance can be classified as either a projecting
element or a projection-fulfilling element. Among the elements that
belong into neither of the two categories, Auer (2009) identifies a class
of elements that he calls expansions. Expansions are attached to exist-
ing parts of an utterance without being projected by them, and without
necessarily creating projections of their own. As their name suggests,
expansions serve to make existing structures bigger, providing informa-
tion that the speaker wants to add. Example (9) contains no fewer than
three such expansions, which will be discussed below.
(9) LYNNE: So,
. . . w- you know,
. . . like,
a lot of people,
. . . that have a lot of horses and stuff,
. . . and that they’re riding a lot,
they’ll just,
. . . let the college kids do em.
. . . For em you know.
Lynne’s utterance begins with several projecting elements. Everything
between the initial So up to a lot of people creates the expectation of an
upcoming sentence-level construction. The relative clause that have a
lot of horses and stuff expands the noun phrase a lot of people. Similarly, the
relative clause and that they’re riding a lot expands the noun phrase a lot
of horses and stuff. Neither of these expansions is syntactically necessary,
but they provide additional information about the referents of their
respective noun phrases. What is projected by the subject noun phrase a
lot of people is the predicate let the college kids do em. At that point, the initial
projection has been fulfilled, but Lynne adds another expansion, namely
For em you know, which expands the predicate. In Auer’s terminology, the
first two expansions would be called internal expansions, since they
expand elements that are internal to a syntactic construction. While the
speaker utters the expansion, the hearer is in the process of anticipating
a projection-fulfilling element. This is not the case for the last expan-
sion. The expansion For em you know goes beyond the point at which a
projection is already fulfilled, so that it would be called an external
expansion.
Aside from projecting elements, projection-fulfilling elements, and
expansions, there is a final class of elements that needs to be discussed.
These elements are called retractions. As the name suggests, retrac-
tions allow the speaker to take a step back in an utterance and to change
an element that was used earlier. Of course, since speech is temporal,
something that has been said cannot be literally taken back, but new
material can be added with the intention of replacing or reactivating
earlier material. This makes retractions particularly important in the
context of self-repair, which has already been mentioned above as a
phenomenon. An instance of self-repair has been observed in example
(2), which is repeated here for convenience.
. . . n- you just,
. . . it takes . . .
well,
cause you know,
There are two retractions in this example, both of which go back to the
beginning of a sentence-level construction. In the second line of the
example, Lynne produces a potential start for a construction (n- you
just) that projects a predicate, which is however not realised. Instead,
what follows is the retraction it takes, which is syntactically equivalent
to the preceding line, in that it starts a sentence-level construction and
projects further material. Ultimately, Lynne retracts a second time to

the beginning of that construction when she utters it takes me longer than
most people.
Not all retractions serve the purpose of self-repair. Example (10)
shows how syntactic retractions are used as semantic elaborations of a
point that is being presented. The main speaker in the example is Roy,
who is talking to his interlocutor Pete about the topic of environmental-
ism, specifically about the endangerment of whales.
(10) ROY: But –
but,
. . . implicit is,
that at any point in time,
. . . anytime in the future,
. . . that man the collective,
. . . you know,
. . . group,
PETE: Mhm.
ROY: or even,
. . . individual special interests decide,
<Q yeah,
fuck the whales Q>.
A first retraction occurs when Roy says anytime in the future, which
retracts to the previous line and elaborates the semantically very similar
phrase at any point in time. In the line that follows, that man the collective
features the complementiser that and thus retracts to the beginning of
the complement clause that at any point in time. These retractions do not
exemplify self-repair. Their purpose is not to replace or correct some-
thing that has been said earlier, but rather to round out and elaborate
earlier parts of the utterance.
The notions of projection, expansion, and retraction allow us to ana-
lyse systematic characteristics of spoken language. Within a view of
language that prioritises the sentence as the main level of analysis and
that takes written language as its implicit benchmark, these characteris-
tics would run the risk of being seen as mere deficiencies, or as noise that
needs to be filtered out before an analysis can take place. Cleaning up
the data in this way would, however, amount to a significant alteration
of our object of study that is in direct conflict with the declared aims of
Construction Grammar.
9.3 Emergent constructions

How can we integrate the concepts of on-line syntax that were dis-
cussed above into the theoretical context of Construction Grammar?
In order to answer that question, we need to introduce the concept of
emergent phenomena. An example of an emergent phenomenon is the
fact that in any supermarket you may visit, the lines at the check-out
counters are of approximately equal length. This is not because there
is a rule instructing shoppers to queue in a certain way. The equal
length of the check-out lines emerges because each shopper is trying
to find the line that is currently the shortest one. Another illustration of
emergence is the shape of a flock of birds. There is no overarching plan.
The movement of the flock emerges because each individual bird tries
to stay close to its neighbours while also aiming to avoid collision. The
emergent nature of linguistic phenomena has been famously pointed
out by Paul Hopper. In a paper that offers a radical critique of the main-
stream linguistics of its time, Hopper (1987: 142) outlines a theoretical
framework that he calls emergent grammar:
The notion of Emergent Grammar is meant to suggest that structure, or
regularity, comes out of discourse and is shaped by discourse as much as
it shapes discourse in an on-going process. Grammar is hence not to be
understood as a pre-requisite for discourse, a prior possession attributable
in identical form to both speaker and hearer. Its forms are not fixed tem-
plates but are negotiable in face-to-face interaction in ways that reflect
the individual speakers’ past experience of these forms, and their assess-
ment of the present context, including especially their interlocutors,
whose experiences and assessments may be quite different. Moreover,
the term Emergent Grammar points to a grammar which is not abstractly
formulated and abstractly represented, but always anchored in the spe-
cific concrete form of an utterance.
Let us go through the ideas in this quotation one by one. First, Hopper
points out that grammatical constructions are ‘shaped by discourse’,
which means that the temporality of linguistic interaction has a direct
effect on the structures that appear in speech. An example of this that
was discussed above is the preference for right-branching structures
that speakers of English have. This idea is very much in line with the
basic assumptions of usage-based construction grammar (Bybee 2010).
The use of language in real time affects how grammatical constructions
are shaped and how they are mentally represented by speakers.
Hopper’s second point is not quite as compatible with standard
ideas in Construction Grammar. He argues against the assumption that
grammar is a ‘pre-requisite for discourse’, that is, a set of schemas that

speakers have memorised and that they can draw on when they form
utterances. At first, this argument may seem rather frivolous. Does it
mean that no prior knowledge is required to speak a language? Can you
go on a vacation in Japan and Japanese will emerge when you interact
with other speakers? This is obviously not what Hopper means. The
important point is the following. When we observe recurrent structures
in discourse, it is tempting to think of these as constructions that speak-
ers have mentally represented. However, what if these structures come
about not because speakers reproduce them from memory, but rather
because they are emergent phenomena? Consider example (2) one more
time.
. . . n- you just,
. . . it takes . . .
well,
cause you know,
How do right-branching constructions like the ones in example (2)
come about? Let us focus on the main clause it takes me longer than most
people and its continuation cause you know. Would we want to argue
that the speaker reproduces a schema that links a main clause and an
adverbial clause, or could we not simply argue that this structure falls
out of the temporality of discourse? Once the speaker has produced the
main clause, several continuations are possible. One possible choice is
an adverbial clause. The written language bias invites us to think that
this structure was planned all along, but can we be sure of that? Hopper
cautions us against making this assumption blindly. When a structure
can be explained as an emergent phenomenon, then there is no need to
invoke a mental representation.
Hopper goes on to state that grammatical forms are not fixed tem-
plates, and that speakers’ experience of language may differ to a large
extent. This point is again highly compatible with the current consen-
sus in Construction Grammar. Chapter 8 has reviewed constructional
research on linguistic variation that highlights the point that construc-
tions are not fixed, but variable. The chapter further discussed the
considerable differences that are found across different varieties of the
same language.
Finally, Hopper (1987: 142) calls for a grammar that is ‘not abstractly
formulated and abstractly represented’. This point resonates with ideas
that have been presented in Chapter 3 of this book. Hopper’s point can
be compared to Croft’s (2001: 55) statement that ‘no schematic syntactic
category is ever an independent unit of grammatical representation’.
Abstract categories such as parts of speech are not basic, but derived,
and their psychological reality is by no means self-evident. The position
that Hopper takes can also be linked to Langacker’s (1999: 119) point
that speakers will always prefer to process language in terms of concrete,
low-level schemas rather than in terms of abstract representations. The
difference between Hopper’s point of view and the current consensus
in usage-based Construction Grammar may be one of degree. Whereas
Hopper is very reluctant to posit any kind of abstraction, both Croft
and Langacker explicitly allow for abstract constructions that come into
being through repeated usage and the process of schematisation.
Summing up the discussion of how Hopper’s emergent grammar
relates to Construction Grammar, it is apparent that the two approaches
are compatible to a very large extent. At the same time, there is one
important corrective that emergent grammar has to offer to a construc-
tional view of language. Whereas researchers in Construction Grammar
will be likely to interpret patterns in discourse as reflections of construc-
tions that pre-exist the interaction and that are deployed by speakers,
the view from emergent grammar would be the opposite. Patterns in
discourse are primary, and they give shape to linguistic structures that
speakers may eventually come to recognise, and even memorise, as
constructions. Importantly, this view does not take anything away from
the constructionist tenet that knowledge of language is captured in its
totality by a network of constructions (Goldberg 2003: 2019). It does,
however, imply that using language cannot be reduced to the process
of taking a construction and producing an utterance on the basis of that
construction. Linguistic interaction in real time gives rise to a wide
range of emergent phenomena that come about through the use of con-
structions, but that cannot be explained solely in terms of constructions.
That said, there is of course a link between emergent phenomena
in speech and mental representations of language. Phenomena that
occur time and time again in language use will become entrenched
(Bybee 2010), speakers will form generalisations over these entrenched
speech events, and they will mentally represent those generalisations
as constructions. This process is often called sedimentation (Linell
2005: 209). Recurrent linguistic routines become sedimented as gram-
matical constructions. Distinguishing between emergent structures and
sedimented constructions is not a trivial task, since there is no clear
dividing line between the two. The discussion in the following section
will return to this issue at different points.
9.4 Using constructions in spoken language

In order to show how the ideas and concepts that were discussed up to
now can be put to use in actual analyses of grammatical constructions,
it is useful to consider a number of actual examples where this has been
done. This section outlines a number of phenomena that are frequently
observed in spoken language and that show how constructions are used
by speakers in everyday conversations.
9.4.1 Projector constructions

Projector constructions are constructions that speakers use to build up
expectations within the hearer. In the words of Günthner (2011: 163),
a projector construction ‘opens a syntactic gestalt’. An example of a
common projector construction in English is the Wh-Cleft construc-
tion, which was described in Chapter 5 with a view to information
packaging. Examples that informed the discussion included sentences
such as What I want is a gin and tonic. The construction consists of an
initial relative clause that expresses a pragmatic presupposition, which
is followed by copula and a predicative argument that expresses the
focus of the construction. An important aspect that was not explored in
any detail in Chapter 5 is how Wh-Clefts function in spoken conversa-
tion, and what projection has to do with that. Consider example (11), in
which Roy and Marilyn talk about cooking a fish.
(11) ROY: What you oughta do though Mar,
MARILYN: [Hm].
ROY: [cook] all the fish.
. . . Cause –
. . . well,
we won’t use it,
. . . if you don’t cook it.
. . . [Now].
MARILYN: [Well I was gonna] make ceviche with the left
overs.
In the example, Roy begins his utterance with What you oughta do though
Mar. He directly addresses his interlocutor Marilyn, and he draws her
attention to the part of his utterance that is still to come. In other words,
the initial relative clause of a Wh-Cleft construction functions as a
projecting element. Marilyn’s back-channelling signal Hm shows that

she is acknowledging Roy’s role as the current speaker and that she
expects his utterance to continue. The part of Roy’s utterance that
follows and that would traditionally be analysed as the focus phrase
of a Wh-Cleft construction is cook all the fish. Roy’s realisation of
the Wh-Cleft construction differs from what has been described in
Chapter 5 in that there is no copula (cf. a written Wh-Cleft such as
What you ought to do is cook all the fish). In an analysis influenced by the
written language bias, this might be viewed as a performance error.
From the perspective of emergent grammar, it is questionable to make
the assumption that the speaker accessed a mental representation that
contained a copula, but then somehow failed to verbalise that copula.
Positing a copula that should be there is simply not necessary, especially
since corpus data demonstrate the pervasiveness of Wh-Clefts that are
only loosely syntactically integrated (Guz 2015). The initial relative
clause functions as a projecting element, and Roy’s continuation cook
all the fish fulfils that projection. In the terms of Hopper (1987: 142), a
Wh-Cleft construction is not a fixed template, and its realisations are
always negotiable. What is more, it is clear that Roy’s utterance is not
finished at the focus phrase of the Wh-Cleft. The utterance continues
with several expansions that explain why, in Roy’s opinion, Marilyn
should cook the whole fish right away.
Another example of a spoken Wh-Cleft construction illustrates that
these characteristics are by no means isolated incidents. In example (12),
Lenore asks a question that Lynne answers by producing a Wh-Cleft
that begins with the projecting relative clause What we do, and which
then continues with a longer narrative.
(12) LENORE: So every – every uh=,

horseshoe is made –
custom-made for the horse then?
LYNNE: (H) No no.
. . . (H) No.
What –
What we do,
then that’s . . . that’s where the farrier comes in.
. . . (H) Every shoe,
is like,
. . . you get- order,
you know,
I would like a b- case of double-aught shoes=.
You’d get- –
. . . (H) The farrier gets em.

. . . You know,
that’s the way it goes,
(H) . . . And then=,
. . . (TSK) our job,
is to shape the shoe,
. . . to the horse’s foot.
As in the previous example, the initial relative clause is not simply fol-
lowed by a copula and a focus phrase. After the relative clause, Lynne
continues with then that’s . . . that’s where the farrier comes in. A farrier, in
case you did not know, is a professional who specialises in caring for
horses’ hooves. Coming back to Lynne’s utterance, her continuation
does not look like a focus phrase, and it would indeed be questionable
to analyse it as such. The string What we do, then that’s . . . that’s where the
farrier comes in is not a Wh-Cleft construction. Rather, the projection
that is set up by What we do sustains the entire narrative that explains
how horseshoes are ordered, produced, and finally brought into shape
for the horse that will receive them. The example illustrates that projec-
tion goes well beyond the confines of a single sentence.
Wh-Clefts represent only one type of projector constructions that
speakers of English routinely use. Paradigm examples of projector con-
structions include discourse markers (Fischer and Alm 2013) such as
English well or actually, amongst many others.
9.4.2 Apo-koinou constructions

Chapter 3 introduced the term ‘syntactic amalgams’, which describes
the blending of constructions that are brought together via the process
of multiple inheritance. The example John invited you will never guess how
many people to his party was used to illustrate the concept. This section
discusses apo-koinou constructions, which are sometimes also called
pivot constructions (not to be confused with pivot schemas, which
were mentioned in Chapter 7). Apo-koinou constructions represent a
special case of syntactic amalgams. Their specific characteristic is that
they have one part, the so-called pivot, which belongs to both of the
blended constructions, but which serves a different syntactic function in
either of the two. The pivot is thus reinterpreted during the production
of the utterance. Example (13) offers an illustration.
(13) DAN: . . . if the entire community as a whole,
. . . was brought into this process,
. . . and,
. . . this is what I’m bringing up is,

the idea of participation.
. . . True community-based citizen participation.
The crucial part of the example is the line this is what I’m bringing up is.
The pivot, that is, the linguistic element that is functionally reinter-
preted, is the complement clause what I’m bringing up, which functions
both as the object by the preceding verb form is and as the subject clause
of the following verb form is. This double function is represented below.
(14) This is what I’m bringing up.
What I’m bringing up is the idea of participation.
If the first part of the apo-koinou construction is combined with the
pivot, the resulting structure, that is, This is what I’m bringing up, is
actually a syntactically complete sentence. Similarly, the pivot and the
second part of the apo-koinou construction also yield a complete sen-
tence, namely What I’m bringing up is the idea of participation.
Linell (2005: 75) makes the point that some apo-koinou constructions
have been produced in similar form often enough to become conven-
tionalised to some extent. The following example is an illustration of
that.
(15) MILES: No=.
Uh=,
the guy [ looked like that ].
PETE: [Or there’s a guy looked] like that.
In the example, Pete utters the relative clause construction there’s a
guy looked like that. The noun phrase a guy can be analysed as the pivot,
with there’s a guy and a guy looked like that forming complete independent
sentences. At the same time, it is not self-evident that the example
came about through the on-line process of syntactic amalgamation.
Constructions that combine there’s with an indefinite noun phrase and
a following verb are sufficiently common to be remembered as such.
Highly entrenched examples such as There’s a man wants to talk to you can
serve as exemplars, so that new examples can be formed on their basis.
Apo-koinou constructions serve to make an important theoretical
point. From the perspective of an approach that considers language
as a set of grammatical sentences (Chomsky 1957), any element in a
sentence can be assigned an unambiguous syntactic function. Examples
such as (12) show that this is not always possible in speech. It is possible,
and indeed very plausible, to argue that what I’m bringing up is an object
complement clause, but only for some time. As soon as the speaker
continues the utterance, what I’m bringing up suddenly becomes a subject

complement clause. It is clearly unsatisfactory to dismiss this kind of
phenomenon as a speech error. The examples of apo-koinou construc-
tions in authentic data are too numerous for that, and speakers do not
treat these constructions as mistakes. There is, for example, no evidence
that speakers try to repair apo-koinou constructions, or that hearers
prompt such repairs. Rather, we have to reckon with the notion that the
syntactic status of a linguistic element can be temporary. This is actu-
ally not very surprising, given that language is produced and processed
incrementally, in time. It is, however, a fact that is hard to reconcile with
a view that prioritises written language.
9.4.3 The Double-Is construction

A spoken construction that has been studied in some detail is the
Double-Is construction, which is also known under a variety of other
labels, such as the Two-Be construction (Tuggy 1996), the The Thing
Is construction (Massam 1999), the IsIs construction (Brenier and
Michaelis 2005), or the X is (is) construction (Keizer 2013). Brenier and
Michaelis (2005: 48) offer the following examples from the Switchboard
corpus (Godfrey and Holliman 1993) to illustrate the construction.
(16) B: So, you got to make – uh so how do you keep track of where
you are in in your monthly spending
A: Well, the thing is is that um I basically – I basically know how
much I have, right?
(17) A: Now does the old Star Trek guys meet the new guys?
B: No, huh uh.
A: No. It’s just the old guys still.
B: Yeah, it was just a rumor that that would happen this time.
However the rumor is is that it will happen next – happen
next time so –
(18) Okay, Nineteen Eighty Four there are like three big continents
and uh there’s just this area like around Egypt and stuff that eve-
rybody’s fighting over. Now the problem is is that nobody’s going
to invade anybody else’s boundaries.
The Double-Is construction can be analysed into two major parts. It
begins with a definite singular noun and a form of the copula. This
first part, which Massam (1999) calls the set-up, is followed by another
form of the copula and a that-clause, which is called the focused clause.
The Double-Is construction shows a marked preference for a small
group of nouns in the set-up, including thing, problem, question, and point
(Brenier and Michaelis 2005: 48). As its name indicates, the construction
features two forms of the copula. The two copulas differ prosodically,
with the first one being much more prominent than the second one.
Between the two, there is a major intonational break.
The non-canonical form of the construction has prompted several
hypotheses with regard to its origins. Massam (1999) proposes that the
Double-Is construction is actually a variant of the Wh-Cleft construc-
tion in which the initial what is silent, as shown below. Example (18a)
shows a canonical Wh-Cleft. In example (18b), the mere omission of
the initial what yields the Double-Is construction.
(19) a. What the problem is is that nobody’s going to invade anybody
else’s boundaries.
b. What The problem is is that nobody’s going to invade anybody
else’s boundaries.
Massam’s proposal has been criticised by Brenier and Michaelis (2005:
53), who point out that not all examples of the Double-Is construc-
tion can be augmented into Wh-Clefts. Conversely, the Double-Is
construction has a number of constraints that it does not share with
Wh-Clefts. The initial noun in the Double-Is construction needs to
be singular and definite and the verb forms in the Double-Is construc-
tion are highly restricted to the present tense (Keizer 2013: 231). These
observations motivate the view that speakers of English represent the
two patterns as distinct constructions.
Brenier and Michaelis (2005) raise the question why speakers some-
times choose the Double-Is construction instead of a competitor that
is more frequent, more canonical, and less complex, namely a predica-
tive construction with a that-clause such as The problem is that nobody’s
going to invade anybody else’s boundaries. They suggest that the Double-Is
construction is a strategy of last resort. In situations in which the context
makes a simple predicative construction undesirable, speakers choose
the non-canonical and more complex syntax of the Double-Is construc-
tion as the lesser of two evils. Specifically, Brenier and Michaelis (2005)
argue that in simple predicative constructions, syntax and prosody are
inherently misaligned. Consider example (19).
(20) The problem is there’s nothing else to buy.
Under natural circumstances, a speaker would produce this example
with an intonational break after The problem is. Unfortunately, this into-
national break does not align with the major syntactic constituents of
the construction. The subject noun phrase of the sentence is The problem.
The following verb phrase is the string is there’s nothing else to buy. This
means that the prosodic break cuts across syntactic constituency. A
second prosodic disadvantage of the simple predicative construction
is that the verb form is will be produced with stress intonation (i.e. The
problem IS). By default, complement-taking verbs tend to be unstressed
because they project new information that will follow them (e.g. I think
a BEER would be nice). Brenier and Michaelis (2005: 49) suggest that these
prosodic defects are repaired by the Double-Is construction, which
allows speakers to produce intonational contours that map onto syn-
tactic constituents, and which allows them to stick to the convention of
producing an unstressed complement-taking verb.
The analysis that Brenier and Michaelis (2005) propose is highly
compatible with the view of the Double-Is construction as an emergent
construction that draws on existing patterns in grammar. The set-up of
the construction clearly meets the definitional criteria of a projecting
element. An utterance beginning with The problem is raises the expecta-
tion of a following stretch of discourse that elaborates on a problem.
The focused clause is a continuation that fulfils that projection in the
form of a conventional syntactic unit of English. The sequence of set-up
and focused clause has been used repeatedly enough for it to become
sedimented, so that speakers have formed a schema that conventionally
associates the two parts.
9.4.4 Collaborative insubordination

In the first section of this chapter, the phenomenon of co-construction
was discussed as one illustration of the fact that spoken language is tightly
synchronised between different interlocutors. This section will focus on
examples of co-construction in which there is a divergence between the
syntactic dependence of the two parts that make up a co-constructed
utterance and their pragmatic independence. Hilpert (2015) introduces
the term collaborative insubordination for cases such as the one shown
in (21). The example features two speakers, Pamela and Darryl. The
topic of their conversation is the mortality of human beings.
(21) PAMELA: (H) I’m thinking one thing my mother

always used to say=,
when I wouldn’t go bicycling with my
[father],
DARRYL: [<@ ~Pamela], you are [2@@@,
PAMELA: [2she would say2],
DARRYL: you are @@@ @>2]
PAMELA: she would say,

(H)<Q you’ll be s=orry when we’re dead Q>.
DARRYL: @Because you would[n’t bicycling]?
PAMELA: [@@ <@Mm@>].
Because I wouldn’t go bicycling with my
father.
DARRYL: Oh.
What can be observed in this example is that Darryl utters an adver-
bial clause with because (@Because you would[n’t bicycling]?) that has the
syntactic characteristics of a subordinate clause, but which pragmati-
cally functions as an independent interrogative speech act. The term
insubordination has been established for the use of formally subordi-
nate clauses as independent utterances (Evans 2007). Hilpert (2015: 26)
defines collaborative insubordination as follows.
(22) Collaborative insubordination is the collaborative production of
a hierarchical syntactic structure, in which a speaker produces
an ‘anchor’, which is elaborated by another speaker through a
formally subordinate but functionally independent continuation.
The notion of an anchor merits a brief explanation. Any linguistic ele-
ment that allows a syntactic elaboration of some sort has the potential to
be selected as an anchor. For example, a main clause allows a continua-
tion with an adverbial clause. A preposition allows a continuation in the
form of a noun phrase. In any example of collaborative insubordination,
the anchor can only be identified retroactively, after it has been used as
such by a second speaker. Both anchors and their continuations show a
large range of formal variants. On the basis of different spoken corpora
of English, Hilpert (2015) explores the formal and functional features of
collaborative insubordination.
Functionally, instances of collaborative insubordination can be used
for the purpose of mutual alignment between speaker and hearer. In
example (21) above, Darryl’s incredulous question spells out a part of
Pamela’s story that she subsequently reaffirms. Example (23) below,
which functions similarly, shows an instance in which collaborative
insubordination is used by Miles to elicit a missing piece of information.
(23) MILES: Well I finally found some people there I can dance with.
So that helps.
JAMIE: Do you need a partner?
MILES: To go there?
JAMIE: Yeah.
MILES: No.
Collaborative insubordination is also frequently used to provide

requested information. In example (24) from the MICASE corpus
(Simpson et al. 2002), speaker A asks a question to which speaker B
gives a response that has the form of a subordinate adverbial clause that
uses the actual question as its syntactic anchor.
(24) A: The only time that it appears that you have to use quantized
fields is when?
B: When the number of photons is very small.
Example (25) illustrates yet another function of collaborative insubor-
dination, namely offering additional information. In the example, the
anchor is B’s utterance It can bring things along, which is expanded by A
with the relative clause which is not a normal part of chromosomes.
(25) A: It gets . . . it makes a target site and it goes there.
B: It goes there. Yeah. It can bring things along.
A: Which is not a normal part of chromosomes.
In some cases, collaborative insubordination is used for the coordina-
tion of joint action. In example (26), the child’s request is the syntactic
anchor. The adult connects an adverbial clause with when to that anchor,
expressing a condition for performing an action.
(26) ADULT: Bring a blanket for Mommy.
CHILD: Give me Raggedy-Ann.
ADULT: When you bring the blanket, okay?
Formally, collaborative subordination makes use of a wide range of
subordinate clause types, including relative clauses (example 25),
complement clauses (example 23), and adverbial clauses (example 26).
Given that the range of formal variants is very wide, it is important to
address the question of whether speakers treat all instances of collabora-
tive insubordination as cases of the same construction. Have speakers
formed a generalisation that subsumes all formal variants of collabora-
tive subordination? Are there at least some patterns of collaborative
insubordination that have become sedimented constructions? Or is it
the case that collaborative insubordination can only be explained as
an emergent phenomenon? Hilpert (2015) offers two observations that
are suggestive of at least some degree of sedimentation. First, there are
constraints on how speakers can use collaborative insubordination. The
constructed dialogue in (27) shows an example that should work, but
that does not sound right to many native speakers of English.
(27) A: Do you know if this is the way to the main station?
B: Which is down the road on the left.
If speakers have intuitions of this kind, that means that they have formed
a generalisation that serves as a benchmark. The second argument that
points towards sedimentation is the high co-occurrence frequency of
certain anchors and their continuations. For example, sequences of an
anchor with the verb need and a continuation with a to-infinitive can
be observed regularly in spontaneous discourse. At the same time, the
existence of sedimented low-level schemata does not prove that speak-
ers have formed a more abstract generalisation, and the sheer breadth of
formal variants makes it very unlikely that such an overarching gener-
alisation exists. Hilpert (2015) therefore views collaborative subordina-
tion as an emergent phenomenon. Hearers use projection to anticipate
how speakers will continue their utterances, and they draw on their
knowledge of complex syntactic constructions in order to create con-
tinuations of their own.
9.5 Summing up
This chapter started with the observation that research in Construction
Grammar is not immune to a distorted view of language that has been
called the written language bias. The written language bias gives prefer-
ence to views and concepts that cast language as a-temporal and decon-
textualised, like sentences on a page. It was argued that in order to
arrive at a more realistic assessment of its object of study, Construction
Grammar would need to overcome the written language bias and
engage with the temporality of language. Aspect such as the transitori-
ness, irreversibility, and synchronisation of language are crucial in this
regard. Notions that facilitate analyses of linguistic data along these lines
include Auer’s (2009) concepts of projection, expansion, and retraction.
Projecting elements raise expectations, expansions provide elaborations,
and retractions allow speakers to edit earlier parts of an utterance.
The chapter further made the point that constructionist analyses
should take care not to posit mental representations for linguistic
structures that can be analysed as emergent phenomena. The discus-
sion reviewed the main ideas of Hopper’s (1987) emergent grammar,
namely that regularities are shaped through discourse, that structure
can be emergent, that constructions are not fixed, but negotiable, and
that most of linguistic knowledge is concrete, rather than abstract. It was
argued that these points largely converge with the current consensus
in Construction Grammar, but that emergence should be taken more
seriously than is commonly done.
The discussion then covered several phenomena that are frequently
observed in spoken language, namely projector constructions, apo-
koinou constructions, the Double-Is construction, and collaborative

insubordination. Apart from exemplifying different aspects of the tem-
porality of language, these phenomena also illustrate the continuum
between emergent structures, which come about spontaneously through
language use, and sedimented constructions, which have been used fre-
quently enough to become mentally represented.
Study questions
1. In your own words, define the concepts of projection, expansion, and
retraction.
2. What is the difference between internal expansions and external
expansions? Using a resource such as the Santa Barbara Corpus,
find authentic examples and explain how they illustrate the
difference.
3. In the example below, Jennifer is explaining the rule of a game
to Dan. Identify projecting elements, projection-fulfilling elements,
expansions, and retractions.
JENNIFER: (H) Now listen,
(H) . . . Okay now,
b- two different people took . . . hearts.
Now,
if you t- have all –
if you take all the points,
. . . if you take all the points.
All thirteen hearts,
and the [queen of diamonds,
DAN: [So that’s twenty-six points].
JENNIFER: (H) it’s called,
right.
It’s called shooting the moon,
and you get –
. . . you give everyone else . . . twenty-six points,
. . . or else you’re minus twenty-six points.
. . . And that’s good.
. . . Shooting the moon is really hard to do.
4. The chapter mentioned several non-linguistic examples of emergent
phenomena. Can you come up with other examples?
5. Compare apo-koinou constructions and the Double-Is construction.
Use the concepts that were introduced in this chapter to explain how
the two are similar and different.
6. If you could ask Paul Hopper one question about emergent gram-
mar, what would it be? Take a look at Hopper (1987) and identify
passages that relate to your question.
Further reading
A foundational reference for the ideas in this chapter is Hopper (1987).
The notion of emergent grammar, which is developed in that paper,
questions the idea of grammar as a set of rules that pre-exists oral
discourse. Hopper’s radical claim is that grammar is an epiphenomenon
of discourse, not its basis. Linell (2005) has coined the term ‘the written
language bias’; his book offers a very accessible discussion of the dangers
that are inherent in this idea. The concepts of projection, expansion,
and retraction have been developed by Auer (2009). Imo (2015) dis-
cusses how Construction Grammar and Interactional Linguistics can be
brought closer together. Papers that inform the discussion in the later
sections of this chapter are Günthner (2011), Guz (2015), Tuggy (1996),
Brenier and Michaelis (2005), Evans (2007), and Hilpert (2015).
10 Constructions across
grammars
The overarching question that the previous chapters of this book have
tried to address is what speakers know when they know a language. In
order to do that, tools and concepts of Construction Grammar were
discussed on the basis of examples from a single language, namely
English. An important issue that was left out of the discussion is that
many speakers of English have knowledge of further languages, either
because they acquired several languages from childhood onward, or
because they learned a foreign language later in their lives. In other
words, their knowledge of language actually comprises more than a
network of interrelated English constructions. This of course raises a
number of questions. Should we assume that bilingual speakers have
two networks of constructions that are distinct from each other and
mutually independent? Alternatively, is it possible that constructions
from different languages are connected through links in a bilingual or
even multilingual construct-i-con? If so, what is the exact nature of
these links? Do constructions from different languages affect each other,
and if so, how? What processes are at work when constructions from
different languages are combined in a single conversation, or even a
single utterance?
These and other questions have been addressed in two very active
research domains in Construction Grammar. First, there is a grow-
ing body of work that investigates bilingualism and language contact
from a constructional perspective (e.g. Höder 2012; Hilpert and Östman
2016; Boas and Höder 2018). Second, constructional research in second
language acquisition (e.g. Gries and Wulff 2005, 2009; Ellis 2013;
Baicchi 2015; De Knop and Gilquin 2016) has explored how L2 learners
acquire, represent, and use knowledge of constructions. This chapter
will survey these lines of research and it will explore how research on
constructions across grammars informs our current understanding of
the multilingual construct-i-con.
233
10.1 Diasystematic Construction Grammar

Languages that are genetically closely related, such as English and
German, show similarities on several structural levels. Their vocabular-
ies contain many so-called cognates, that is, word pairs such as shoe and
Schuh, cat and Katze, or book and Buch. They further have a large number of
homologous structural features. These include morphological markers
such as tense inflections (he wait-ed, er warte-te), syntactic patterns such as
prepositional phrases (on the sofa, auf dem Sofa), and matching paradigms
that express grammatical distinctions, for example definiteness and
indefiniteness (the cat / a cat, die Katze / eine Katze). An English-speaking
L2 learner of German will acquire not only a knowledge of German
itself, but importantly also a type of knowledge that is meta-linguistic
in nature. Our learner will come to understand in what respects German
is similar to English and in which ones it is different. The above exam-
ples illustrate similarities. An example for a difference would be that
English has a single pronoun for the second person singular, namely you,
while German has the familiar pronoun Du and the formal pronoun Sie.
The insight that English is ‘missing’ a formal second person pronoun is
a piece of meta-linguistic knowledge. A significant part of L2 learners’
newly acquired knowledge will be in the form of mappings between
elements from English and their corresponding elements in German.
The process of creating such mappings, which is called interlingual
identification, has been defined as ‘the judgment that something in
the native language and something in the target language are similar’
(Odlin 2003: 454). To some extent, of course, similarity lies in the eye
of the beholder. Interlingual identification is not fully predictable, and
speakers will differ in their individual ability to draw parallels across
their repertoire of languages. An important consequence of interlingual
identification is that the linguistic knowledge of a multilingual speaker
is more than the sum of what the speaker knows about each individual
language. There is a surplus of metalinguistic knowledge. It is uncon-
troversial that knowledge of cross-linguistic correspondences is knowl-
edge of language and that Construction Grammar, as a comprehensive
model of linguistic knowledge, should account for it in some way. But
how exactly is this to be achieved?
A concrete proposal has been put forward by Höder (2012, 2014a,
2014b, 2018), who labels his approach Diasystematic Construction
Grammar. Höder borrows the term diasystem from Weinreich
(1954), who defines it as an arrangement of two systems with partial
similarities and correspondences between them. Weinreich used this
concept to account for phonological correspondences across differ-
constructions across gr ammars 235
ent dialects of Yiddish. Höder extends the notion of a diasystem to

include also morphological and syntactic correspondences, as well as
semantic and pragmatic relations. On the basis of viewing multilingual
knowledge as a diasystem, Höder introduces two theoretical innova-
tions to Construction Grammar. The first of these is the concept of
a diasystematic link. When the process of interlingual identification
leads to the association of two constructions from different languages,
that association can become conventionalised and represented in the
multilingual construct-i-con as a diasystematic link. For example, the
English word book would be linked to the German word Buch through a
diasystematic link. Any two words that are translational equivalents, or
even just rough synonyms, would be linked in this way. In the domain
of syntactic constructions, the English Prepositional Phrase con-
struction would map onto its German equivalent, since the two have
parallel structures. Höder does not view diasystematic links as being
restricted to relations between constructions, so that even correspond-
ences between phonemes of different languages can be captured with
them. For example, the German words Pfeffer ‘pepper’, Pfennig ‘penny’,
Pflaume ‘plum’, Pfanne ‘pan’, and Pfund ‘pound’ begin with a bilabial stop
and a labiodental fricative. In their English counterparts, the stop is
there, but the fricative is missing. Bilingual speakers may thus gener-
alise that word-initial German /pf/ corresponds to English /p/. That
correspondence would be represented as a diasystematic link between
phonemic elements.
Höder’s second proposal is that diasystematic links can give rise to
a new type of node in the construct-i-con. The term diaconstruction
describes nodes that represent abstractions over two language-specific
constructions. The idea as such is very similar to the concept of second-
order schemas that represent generalisations across morphosyntactic
alternations within a single language, such as the Ditransitive con-
struction and the Prepositional Dative construction (Perek 2012,
2015). A second-order schema is an abstraction that is based on the
similarities between the two constructions and that allows speakers
to view them as instantiations of the same category. Diaconstructions
serve the same purpose, except that they subsume constructions from
different languages. An example of a diaconstruction would be the cor-
respondence between the English Noun Phrase construction and its
German equivalent. Consider the examples in (1).
(1) a. the cat / die Katze

b. a new idea / eine neue Idee
c. Belgian chocolate / belgische Schokolade
d. freshly ground black pepper / frisch gemahlener schwarzer

Pfeffer
e. dogs that bark / Hunde die bellen
f. our man in Havana / unser Mann in Havanna
g. the jobless / die Arbeitslosen
h. theirs / ihres
In English and German, noun phrases can take a variety of different
shapes. The structural variation is considerable. Noun phrases occur
with definite and indefinite determiners. There are also possessive
determiners and possessive pronouns. Mass nouns can form noun
phrases without a determiner. Noun phrases allow premodification
of the noun through adjectives and participles, and postmodification
through prepositional phrases and relative clauses. Adjectives can be
coerced into nouns. Importantly, all of these structural variants are
found across English and German. For an L2 learner who has experi-
enced some of the structural parallelism between English and German
noun phrases, the assumption that whatever works in one language also
works in the other is both very economical and relatively failsafe. There
are of course limits to the structural parallelism, but these only affect
a small subset of noun phrases. For example, English that-less relative
clauses have no German counterparts, and German allows premodifica-
tion through participial clauses, which is not possible in English.
(2) a. the example he gave / *das Beispiel er gab
b. die von Obama enttäuschten Wähler / *the by Obama disap-
pointed voters
What this boils down to is that English–German bilinguals have the
opportunity to make a generalisation that captures the pervasive simi-
larities across English and German noun phrases. This kind of generali-
sation is what Höder calls a diaconstruction.
Höder (2018) argues that diaconstructions emerge in a process that
involves three steps. The first step is interlingual identification, which
is driven by perceived similarities in form or function of two construc-
tions, and which results in the formation of diasystematic links. To stay
with the example of noun phrases across English and German, interlin-
gual identification would first result in a bundle of diasystematic links
that capture correspondences across English and German determiners,
adjectives, participles, nouns, pronouns, and relative clauses.
As speakers realise that entire configurations of such elements map
onto each other, the second step of the process takes place. This step
leads to the establishment of a generalisation across two construc-
tions. This generalisation is a pair of form and meaning, but crucially,

it remains unspecified for language-specific categories. Höder (2018)
uses the term idioconstruction to refer to language-specific construc-
tions, which thus contrast with language-unspecific diaconstructions.
The establishment of a diaconstruction allows speakers to use this
cross-linguistic generalisation in a productive fashion. Inevitably, this
sometimes leads to the kind of overgeneralisation error that researchers
in second language acquisition call negative transfer (Ortega 2009: 31).
L2 learners often form diaconstructions that are overly permissive or
overly restrictive. For example, a German L2 learner of English may
form a diaconstruction for noun phrases that actually allows premodify-
ing participial clauses in English (see example 2b). French L2 learners
of English frequently overuse the definite article in noun phrases with
generic meaning, as in I like to listen to the classical music. Diaconstructions
that are too permissive or too restrictive result not only in ungram-
matical utterances, but perhaps even more significantly in the avoid-
ance of structures that would be perfectly grammatical (Ortega 2009:
39). Learners tend to avoid patterns for which they do not perceive
clear correspondences between L1 and L2. German learners may thus
underuse English that-less relative clauses, which are specific to the L2.
The third step that Höder describes is the reorganisation of speakers’
constructional knowledge. Once a diaconstruction has been established,
some of the information in the corresponding idioconstructions becomes
redundant. Chapter 3 discussed redundant representations, that is, the
phenomenon that speakers store the same information multiple times
at different levels of abstraction. In opposition to this, Höder (2018)
suggests that diaconstructions can fully replace the language-specific
constructions that have given rise to them. Why should this be the
case? Höder (2012: 248) argues that as a matter of economy, bilingual
speakers naturally gravitate towards a state that maximises similari-
ties between their two languages. A high proportion of diaconstruc-
tions means that there are many situations in which a speaker can kill
two birds with one stone. Bilingual speakers thus have an incentive to
look out for cross-linguistic generalisations, and even to change their
languages in ways that make them more similar to each other. The
term pro-diasystematic change (Höder 2012: 248) describes this phe-
nomenon. One manifestation of pro-diasystematic change is the loss of
language-specific restrictions that were present in an idioconstruction,
but that are no longer represented once a diaconstruction has been
established. Let us consider a concrete example. German has a reflex-
ive verb sich wundern ‘marvel’, which is at least partially synonymous
with the English verb to wonder. The two verbs do, however, differ in
their respective syntactic behaviours. English wonder can function as a

complement-taking verb that projects an if-clause, as in (3a). The cor-
responding German example (3b) with sich wundern is contested among
native speakers.1
(3) a. I am wondering if they have arrived yet.
b. Ich wundere mich, ob sie schon angekommen sind.
Unsurprisingly, the use of sich wundern as a complement-taking verb is
attested in the speech of English L2 learners of German (Barron 2003:
177), and English–German bilinguals will usually find these examples
fully acceptable. This can be explained in terms of a diaconstruction
that generalises over to wonder and sich wundern, and that lacks language-
specific restrictions on possible complementation patterns. What can
be concluded from this is that the formation of diaconstructions does
not just create additional knowledge. Rather, the establishment of a
diaconstruction may go along with the loss of some language-specific
information.
Another way in which pro-diasystematic change can take shape
is through a process that Heine and Kuteva (2005: 92) call replica
grammaticalisation. As has been discussed in Chapter 8, the processes
of grammaticalisation (Hopper and Traugott 2003) and grammatical
constructionalisation (Traugott and Trousdale 2013) introduce new
form–meaning pairs with procedural meaning to the construct-i-con.
Replica grammaticalisation is a specific subtype of grammatical construc-
tionalisation that is triggered by language contact. For an illustration,
consider example (4) from Pennsylvania German (Burridge 1995: 61).
(4) Ich hab geglaubt es geht ihm happene
1SG have believed it goes him happen
‘I thought it’s going to happen to him.’
The example features a construction that looks suspiciously similar
to the English Be Going To construction and that does not exist in
Standard German. Pennsylvania German is of course in very close con-
tact with English. This motivates the view that speakers of Pennsylvania
German have created a new grammatical construction that functions
like English Be Going To but that is composed of the German verb
gehen ‘go’ and a lexical verb in the infinitive. Heine and Kuteva (2005:
1
The following link leads to an online discussion in which two participants state
that sentences such as (3b) are not idiomatic German: <https://dict.leo.org/forum/
viewGeneraldiscussion.php?idforum=4&idThread=954727&lp=ende> (last accessed
23 January 2019).
92) analyse the process of replica grammaticalisation into the four steps
that are described in (5a) to (5d).
(5) Replica grammaticalisation
a. Speakers notice that in language M there is a grammatical
category Mx.
b. They create an equivalent category Rx in language R, using
material available in R.
c. To this end, they replicate a grammaticalisation process
they assume to have taken place in language M, using an
analogical formula of the kind [My > Mx] : [Ry > Rx].
d. They grammaticalise Ry to Rx.
The first step can be seen as an attempt at interlingual identification that
does not lead to success. Sometimes, there are grammatical construc-
tions in a contact language that do not correspond to anything that is
part of the speaker’s native language. For English-speaking learners
of German, the formal pronoun Sie is one such example. For speakers
of Pennsylvania German, the English Be Going To construction was
a salient part of English grammar that did not have a corresponding
construction in their variety of German. The second step rectifies this
asymmetry. In line with Höder’s idea of pro-diasystematic change,
the speakers of Pennsylvania German created a construction that cor-
responds to English Be Going To, using words and structures from
Pennsylvania German. This makes replica grammaticalisation different
from borrowing, in which materials from the so-called donor lan-
guage are integrated into the recipient language. Consider the word
Schadenfreude, for which German is the donor language, and which has
been integrated as a lexical element into the recipient language English.
In replica grammaticalisation, only native materials are used. The
influence of the contact language is thus not visible in the substance
of the newly created construction, but only in the way in which the
native materials have been selected. This selection mirrors the gram-
maticalisation process that has taken place in the contact language. In
English, the lexical verb go in the context of a following purpose clause
has given rise to the grammatical Be Going To construction (Hopper
and Traugott 2003: 69). In creating a corresponding construction for
English Be Going To, speakers of Pennsylvania German used the verb
gehen, which was the best interlingual match for the lexical source of the
English construction. As Heine and Kuteva (2005: 92) point out, this step
in the process is driven by analogy. The verb go relates to Be Going To
in the same way in which gehen relates to the construction in example
(4). The fourth and final step is that the newly created construction
undergoes some of the processes that are typical for grammaticalisation.

For example, the verb gehen, in the context of the new construction,
broadens in meaning and sheds some of the constraints that are specific
to its lexical variant. Another process that may take place is that the new
construction is phonologically reduced and used across a successively
larger set of morphosyntactic contexts. The end result of this particular
case of replica grammaticalisation is that the diasystem of English and
Pennsylvania German has been rendered more symmetrical, and thus
more speaker-friendly.
To summarise this section, Diasystematic Construction Grammar is
an approach that aims to account for phenomena that commonly arise
in scenarios of language contact, adopting a constructional perspective.
Its main theoretical innovations, diaconstructions and diasystematic
links, draw on an assumption that is generally accepted in Construction
Grammar, namely that knowledge of language can be understood in
terms of form–meaning pairs and links that connect those form–meaning
pairs. While Diasystematic Construction Grammar is thus highly com-
patible with usage-based constructional theory, there are of course open
questions that remain. Höder (2018) addresses two criticisms that could
be levelled against Diasystematic Construction Grammar. The first criti-
cism is that diaconstructions are highly abstract, which might cast doubt
on their psychological reality. Langacker (1999: 119) has emphasised
that concrete, low-level schemas have an inherent processing advantage
over abstract representations, since they will always be more similar to
the actual tokens of language use that speakers can observe. Patterns
such as the English Noun Phrase construction are very abstract and
cover a wide range of different forms. If English–German bilinguals
generalise over Noun Phrase constructions in both of their languages,
the resulting diaconstruction would be still more abstract. Höder
acknowledges this, but points out that such diaconstructions are hardly
more abstract than grammatical categories such as Subject or Object,
which are posited as a matter of course in Construction Grammar. A
second challenge for Diasystematic Construction Grammar is the ques-
tion of whether diaconstructions are also formed across language pairs
without a close genetic relationship. As was discussed at the beginning
of this section, the grammars of English and German contain a multi-
tude of structurally similar constructions. What about bilinguals whose
languages are typologically very different? Here, Höder concedes that
interlingual identification is generally easier between languages that
are closely related. However, interlingual identification is not limited
to these language pairs. As will be discussed in more detail in the next
section, second language learners routinely form correspondences
between their native language and their L2, no matter how different
these are typologically. The difference between those language pairs
that are genetically close and those that are genetically distant may thus
be that interlingual identification does not happen to the same extent
and with the same degree of ease. That said, the general principle of
pro-diasystematic change still holds. Bilinguals will look for parallels,
and to the extent that it is possible, they will create constructions that
maximise parallelism between their languages.
10.2 Do foreign language learners also have constructions?

The previous section made the argument that that second language
learners acquire knowledge of the L2 in the form of constructions. This
implies that the linguistic knowledge of L2 learners and native speakers
has the same representational format. Not everyone might agree with
that idea. It has to be conceded that the acquisition of a first language
differs in many ways from learning a second one. A lot of L2 acquisi-
tion takes place in classroom settings, often with explicit, rule-based
instructions. Also the outcome of second language acquisition differs
in many ways from that of first language acquisition. For example, L2
learners typically retain an identifiable non-native accent, and even
highly gifted L2 learners will show fossilisation (Ortega 2009: 133), that
is, the persistence of errors that will not go away in spite of continued
L2 input. It is therefore necessary to address this issue more closely. Is it
really the case that foreign language learners also have constructions? Is
there empirical evidence to back up this claim?
Gries and Wulff (2005) provide several pieces of evidence in favour
of this idea. First, they show experimentally that L2 learners are sensi-
tive to constructional priming, just like native speakers are. In order to
show this, they replicate a sentence completion experiment (Pickering
and Branigan 1998) that had demonstrated priming effects in native
speakers of English. In each trial of the experiment, the participants had
to complete two sentence fragments. An example trial is shown in (6).
(6) Fragment 1: The racing driver gave the helpful mechanic . . .
Fragment 2: The patient showed . . .
How would you have continued these sentence fragments? With regard
to the first one, a very likely continuation would be a noun phrase such
as a thumbs-up, so that the overall sentence would instantiate the English
Ditransitive construction (The racing driver gave the helpful mechanic a
thumbs-up). The second fragment allows continuations in terms of both
the Ditransitive construction (The patient showed the nurse his right arm)
or the Prepositional Dative construction (The patient showed his right

arm to the nurse). Pickering and Branigan (1998) hypothesised that the
completion of the first fragment would have a priming effect on the
completion of the second one. If participants produce a Ditransitive
construction in fragment 1, they should have an increased likelihood of
producing another one in fragment 2. In order to test this hypothesis,
they compared trials such as the one in (6) with others that showed
fragments such as those in (7) below.
(7) Fragment 1: The racing driver gave the torn overall . . .
Fragment 2: The patient showed . . .
Here, fragment 1 is much more likely to yield a continuation in terms
of the Prepositional Dative construction (The racing driver gave
the torn overall to his assistant), and hence also fragment 2 should have
increased odds in favour of the Prepositional Dative construction.
The experimental results confirm that this is indeed the case (Pickering
and Branigan 1998: 639). The construction that is used in the continu-
ation of fragment 1 exerts a priming effect on the continuation of frag-
ment 2. Using the same stimuli, Gries and Wulff (2005: 186) replicate
this result with German L2 learners of English. This is a first piece of
evidence suggesting that L2 learners draw on the same type of linguistic
knowledge that native speakers have.
Gries and Wulff (2005: 189) further show that the observed priming
effect varies in strength depending on the mutual association between
verbs and constructions, as determined by a collostructional analysis
(Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004a). The effect is especially strong when
the verb in fragment 2 exhibits an attraction towards the priming con-
struction in fragment 1. For example, the verb show is highly attracted to
the Ditransitive construction. In trials in which fragment 1 features the
Ditransitive construction, the association of show with the construction
gives an additional boost to the priming effect. Conversely, verbs such as
sell or post are highly attracted to the Prepositional Dative construction.
This means that they resist to some extent the priming effect of a preced-
ing Ditransitive construction. This finding suggests that L2 learners do
not just resemble native speakers in representing constructions as syntac-
tic patterns, but also in storing mutual associations between constructions
and verbs that typically appear within them. Importantly, the associations
between the Ditransitive construction, the Prepositional Dative
construction, and their respective verbal collocates are not the same in
English and in their German counterparts. The German L2 learners of
English that participated in the study did not simply draw on associations
that exist in German (Gries and Wulff 2005: 190).
Chapter 6 presented an experimental study by Bencini and Goldberg

(2000) that used a sorting task to show that constructional meanings
are routinely accessed in sentence comprehension. Participants were
asked to sort sixteen sentences into different categories. The sentences
were designed in such a way that four different verbs (throw, get, slice,
take) were crossed with four different constructions (the Transitive
construction, the Ditransitive construction, the Caused Motion con-
struction, and the Resultative construction). The participants’ sortings
revealed an effect of constructional meaning (Bencini and Goldberg
2000: 644). Gries and Wulff (2005: 192) replicated this study and found
that German L2 learners of English exhibit a strong tendency to sort
after construction. Whereas one could have expected that learners take
advantage of the verbs as strong perceptual cues, constructions appear
to have a stronger effect on the sorting process.
In a follow-up study, Gries and Wulff (2009) focused on the alter-
nation of -ing forms and to-infinitives in English complement clause
constructions such as I started working and I started to work. Verbs such
as start, stop, try, or continue are used with both complementation pat-
terns but differ in their respective preferences. Whereas start and stop
are attracted to -ing forms, try and continue show a preference for to-
infinitives. Gries and Wulff asked a group of German L2 learners of
English to rate sentences in which alternating verbs occurred either
with their preferred complementation pattern or with the respective
other complementation pattern. Sentences were given higher ratings
when their structure matched the collocational preference of the verb
(Gries and Wulff 2009: 180). Taken together, the results obtained by
Gries and Wulff (2005, 2009) indicate that L2 learners access knowl-
edge of constructions both in language production and in language
comprehension. Successful replications of these findings with L2 learn-
ers of English that are native speakers of Italian (Baicchi 2015: 115) and
Spanish (Valenzuela Manzanares and Rojo López 2008: 206) provide
further support for this conclusion.
10.3 Typological differences and their effects on L2 learners

It was suggested at the end of Section 10.1 that interlingual identifica-
tion and transfer are influenced by typological differences between L1
and L2. The process of acquiring the constructions of an L2 will be
biased by the specific characteristics of the learner’s native language,
which will function like a lens through which the L2 is viewed. The
native language shapes what the learner expects and pays attention to,
so that certain aspects of the L2 are learned more easily than others.
One grammatical domain in which typological differences between

L1 and L2 affect second language acquisition is the domain of argument
structure, which has been discussed in Chapter 2. The term ‘argument
structure’ describes, amongst other things, how verbs in a given language
combine with other elements. An example would be the English verb
give, which combines with a THEME argument and a RECIPIENT
argument in the Ditransitive construction. Typological differences in
the combinatorics of verbs and their arguments have been thoroughly
studied in constructions that express motion events. An important
distinction has been proposed by Talmy (1991, 2000), who contrasts
verb-framed languages and satellite-framed languages. Compare the
following pair of examples from English and Spanish (Talmy 1991: 489).
(8)
a. I rolled the keg out of the storeroom.
b. Saqué el barril de la bodega rodándolo.
moved-out the keg from the storeroom rolling
‘I moved the keg out of the storeroom by rolling it.’
Both examples express the same motion event. An AGENT (the speaker)
moves a THEME (the keg) along a PATH (out of the storeroom) in a
certain (rolling) MANNER. The crucial difference between English
and Spanish is how the verbalisations of these meanings are distributed
across the respective parts of the two sentences, and especially which
meanings are encoded in the verb. Here, English and Spanish show a
characteristic difference. The English verb roll conflates two meanings,
namely movement and the manner of movement. The Spanish verb
sacar ‘move out, take out’ conflates the meanings of a movement and a
path. This difference is not an isolated feature of these two specific verbs,
but it reflects a broader tendency in the verbal inventories of English
and Spanish. English has a multitude of manner-incorporating motion
verbs such as slide, stumble, plod, or scurry. Spanish has path-incorporating
motion verbs such as entrar ‘enter’, salir ‘exit’, subir ‘go up’, poner ‘put on’,
and others. Talmy’s terms ‘verb-framed’ and ‘satellite-framed’ relate to
the verbalisation of the path in expressions of motion events. Spanish
belongs to Talmy’s class of verb-framed languages, since it tends to
incorporate the meaning of the path within verbs. English, on the other
hand, is a satellite-framed language. In example (8a), information about
the path is expressed in an argument that is external to the verb (out of
the storeroom), and for which Talmy proposes the term satellite. There
is empirical evidence that speakers of verb-framed languages not only
differ from speakers of satellite-framed languages in how they verbalise
motion events, but crucially also in how they conceptualise motion
events. For example, speakers of satellite-framed languages are likely
to conflate motion and manner in co-speech gestures (McNeill and

Duncan 2000; Parrill 2011), which is something that speakers of verb-
framed languages typically avoid.
Coming back to the issue of second language acquisition, what hap-
pens when a speaker of a verb-framed language learns how motion is
expressed in a satellite-framed language? In order to investigate this
question, Römer et al. (2014) conducted a study of English argument
structure constructions that contrasted the L2 language use of German,
Czech, and Spanish learners of English. The three groups did not differ
in terms of their English proficiency, but only in terms of the typological
characteristics of the L1. Whereas German and Czech belong to the
group of satellite-framed languages, Spanish, as pointed out above, is
a verb-framed language. Römer et al. (2014: 957) devised a sentence
completion task with phrases such as the ones shown in (9).
(9) a. she ____ towards the . . .
b. it ____ between the . . .
c. he ____ through the . . .
Each phrase consists of a pronoun, an open slot, a spatial preposition,
and a definite article. The open slot prompts the insertion of a lexical
verb. Participants were instructed to write down the first word that
came to their minds as a possible filler for the open slot. The responses
of each learner group were pooled and compared with English data
from the British National Corpus. Römer et al. (2014: 958) present cor-
relation statistics that show how well the learners’ responses align with
the natural language production of native speakers of English. They
find that the English data correlate more strongly with the responses of
the German and Czech learners than with the responses of the Spanish
learners. The results further reveal patterns of overuse and underuse for
each of the three groups. The Spanish learners overuse verbs such as go,
pass, come, and move (Römer et al. 2014: 961), which are verbs that express
motion, but not manner of motion. Conversely, verbs such as jump, climb,
and hop, which do express manner of motion, are underused by Spanish
learners (Römer et al. 2014: 965). These results indicate that speakers
of a verb-framed language acquire a satellite-framed L2 in a way that
reflects the typological characteristics of their L1.
In another study that examines the effects of typological char-
acteristics on L2 learners’ use of constructions, Perek and Hilpert
(2014) start with the observation that new and unusual combinations
of verbs and constructions can be formed relatively freely in English.
The term constructional tolerance is used to describe this phenom-
enon. It is illustrated in the examples below, which feature verbs in
syntactic frames that differ from their respective canonical argument

structures.
(10) Example sentence Construction
a. John sneezed the napkin off the table. Caused Motion
b. Mary poured John another whisky. Ditransitive
c. Emeril sliced and diced his way to Way Construction
TV stardom.
d. The truck rumbled down the street. Intransitive
Motion
e. Pat kissed Bill unconscious. Resultative
f. Kate hit at the wasp. Conative
An idea suggested by Rostila (2014: 148) is that languages can be char-
acterised as giving their lexical items greater or lesser freedom to occur
with different constructions. What if the kind of constructional tolerance
that can be observed in English is typologically unusual? What would
be the consequences for L2 learners whose native languages differ from
English in this regard? Aiming to address these questions, Perek and
Hilpert (2014) contrasted the behaviour of English-speaking L2 learn-
ers of German with that of French-speaking learners of German. In con-
trast to English, French is much more restrictive with regard to verbs
and their syntactic contexts. Perek and Hilpert (2014) therefore hypoth-
esised that English-speaking L2 learners of German would differ from
French-speaking L2 learners of German in their acceptance towards
creative combinations of German verbs with unusual constructional
contexts. Perek and Hilpert (2014) devised a grammaticality judgement
task on the basis of four German constructions. For each construction,
they created stimuli that varied with respect to their conventionality.
The examples below, which illustrate this for the German Reflexive
Motion construction, include a fully idiomatic use (11a), a more crea-
tive one (11b), and a clearly deviant example (11c).
(11) a. Die Helfer wühlen sich durch den Schutt.
the helpers dig themselves through the rubble
‘The helpers are digging their way through the rubble’
b. ? Die Ratte nagt sich in die Speisekammer.
the rat gnaws itself in the pantry
‘The rat gnaws its way into the pantry’
c. ?? Der Dieb raubt sich ins Gefängnis.
the thief robs himself into-the prison
‘The thief robs his way into prison.’
Perek and Hilpert (2014: 280) find that both learner groups rate creative
examples more severely than a control group of native speakers of
German. The results further indicate that the learners’ acceptance of
unconventional examples varies by construction across the two groups.
The English-speaking learners are relatively more open towards exam-
ples of the Reflexive Motion construction that is shown in (11), while
the French-speaking learners showed greater leniency with examples
of the Ditransitive construction (Perek and Hilpert 2014: 283). These
results can be explained in terms of Höder’s diasystematic approach
to constructional knowledge. Sentences such as He drank himself under
the table are licensed by the English Resultative construction and
thus allow for the formation of diasystematic links with the German
Reflexive Motion construction. Since the English Resultative con-
struction is highly productive, the English-speaking learners do not
project any constraints on the corresponding construction in German.
This is different with the Ditransitive construction. The German
Ditransitive construction is considerably broader in its semantic scope
than its English counterpart. Benefactive and malefactive uses of the
construction, which are common in German, simply do not have con-
ventionalised counterparts in English. The English-speaking learners,
who link the German construction to a more restrictive English con-
struction, are therefore reluctant to accept creative German examples.
Perek and Hilpert (2014: 295) conclude that constructional tolerance,
that is, the general openness that English exhibits with regard to verbs
and their constructions, needs to be taken seriously as a typological
characteristic that affects L2 learning, but that knowledge of specific
constructions will modulate its influence. This conclusion is in line with
the findings of Römer et al. (2014) that were discussed earlier in this
section. The availability (or unavailability) of constructions in the L1
that permit learners to create diasystematic links and diaconstructions is
a central factor that shapes the outcome of second language acquisition.
10.4 Implications for the L2 classroom

Research into second language acquisition aims to deepen our under-
standing of how new languages are learned, and the preceding sections
of this chapter have illustrated the role that constructions play in that
process. An important question is how these insights can be put to use in
the L2 classroom. Can Construction Grammar be used to improve the
outcomes of language teaching? Herbst (2016) argues that this is possi-
ble and that concepts from Construction Grammar can usefully replace
traditional theoretical terms that often render the learner’s task more
complicated than it has to be. Herbst (2016: 26) offers the example of
a language textbook that introduces the distinction between tense and
modality and illustrates both concepts with the English auxiliary will.
The book uses sentences such as I’ll drop by some time and We will stay here
to illustrate its respective temporal and modal uses. Understandably,
learners will struggle to figure out how exactly these two meanings can
be differentiated. The discussion in the book suggests that there is a
clear distinction, which in practice is very hard to make. The notions
of polysemy, prototypes, or of course constructions as multifunctional
form–meaning pairs would help the learner to make sense of the English
data, but since traditional grammatical terminology is given priority,
these are not made available. The example makes clear that there is
room for improvement, but how exactly is this to be achieved? Herbst
(2016: 41–4) proposes seven principles for the use of Construction
Grammar in language teaching that are summarised below.
(12) Principle 1: Teach constructions.
Since language learning boils down to learning constructions, lan-
guage teaching should consist of teaching constructions. Instead of
introducing grammatical categories such as tense and modality in
the abstract, the presentation of concrete units such as the English
Will construction should have priority.
Principle 2: Present constructions as form–meaning pairings.
Language teaching should honour the principle of ‘What you see
is what you get’. To illustrate, expressions such as the rich (as in The
rich should pay more taxes) should be presented as a construction that
combines the form of an adjective (rich) with a specific meaning
(‘rich people’). Presentations in terms of equivalents, shortenings
or derivations of other existing constructions should be avoided.
Principle 3: Introduce one sense at a time.
Many constructions, including a large number of highly frequent
lexical items, are polysemous. For example, prepositions such as
in convey a range of different meanings (in a box, in ten minutes,
in French, etc.). Introducing all of these senses at the same time is
likely to do more harm than good.
Principle 4: Give examples of important collocations.
When lexical items and constructions are introduced, they should
be accompanied by concrete examples of highly frequent colloca-
tions (e.g. draw a conclusion) and common phrases that show non-
compositional meanings (e.g. under the weather ‘unwell’).
Principle 5: Show valency constructions.

The presentation of verbs should include their most common syn-
tactic frames. To give an example, crucial information about the
verb avoid would be that it can occur both with noun phrases (avoid
the rush hour) and with complement clauses that are headed by an
-ing form (avoid eating junk food).
Principle 6: Restrict grammatical terminology to a useful
minimum.
The use of technical terms should not be an end in itself, but
it should contribute to positive learning outcomes. Some widely
used terms are based on grammatical distinctions that exist in
classical languages such as Latin. If these terms do not accurately
reflect the grammatical structures of the L2 that is being taught,
they should not be used. For example, the distinction of dative
and accusative can be projected onto English, but the use of these
labels is more likely to confuse learners than to help them.
Principle 7: Use authentic language.
For languages such as English, large corpora are widely and freely
available. The use of authentic data allows learners to discover
what is frequent and what is typical.
Herbst (2016: 45) acknowledges that these principles have been implic-
itly recognised in many branches of language teaching. Viewing them
in terms of Construction Grammar may, however, serve to ground
these principles in a common framework that provides both theoretical
motivation and empirical support for them. By applying the principles
to classroom studies that measure how they affect learning outcomes,
their usefulness can be assessed and they can be developed further. The
remainder of this section offers three illustrations of this process.
In a study that tests the applicability of Herbst’s principle 2 (Present
constructions as form–meaning pairings), Sung and Yang (2016) con-
trast two strategies of teaching the English Resultative construction
to Korean L2 learners. They distinguish between two variants of the
construction, namely its use with semantically light verbs such as make
and its use with more contentful verbs such as hammer.
(13) a. She made me happy.
b. John hammered the metal flat.
The verb make in example (13a) expresses an instance of bringing
about a result, whereas the verb hammer in (13b) verbalises the means
of bringing about a result (cf. the discussion of the Way construction
in Chapter 2). Sung and Yang (2016) exposed two groups of Korean
L2 learners to different instruction units. One group received training
that presented the Resultative construction in terms of the main verb
and the syntactic form of its arguments; the training of the other group
focused on the construction as a holistic unit of form and meaning.
Two lessons of 25 minutes each were administered, with a first lesson
being dedicated to light verb uses and a second one discussing uses
with contentful verbs. Pre- and post-tests measured the performance
of the participants in translation tasks from Korean to English and vice
versa. Sung and Yang (2016: 103) find that the learners’ command of the
Resultative construction improves in both conditions, but that con-
structional training was significantly more beneficial, regardless of the
direction of translation. They further report that constructional training
led to a relatively greater improvement in the translation of examples
with contentful verbs (2016: 104). These results are encouraging insofar
as they suggest that the use of concepts from Construction Grammar in
the L2 classroom can have tangible benefits.
Gilquin (2016) engages with Herbst’s principle 7 (Use authentic
language) and tests whether exposure to naturally occurring examples
of English causative constructions leads to more native-like language
use. The study contrasts students of EFL (English as a foreign lan-
guage) with students of ESL (English as a second language). While
EFL and ESL can be seen as forming a continuum, their prototypical
realisations exhibit clear differences. In comparison with ESL, EFL
shows a relatively greater dependence on the norms of a target variety
and a more limited exposure to authentic language use. Gilquin (2016:
119) thus hypothesises that ESL learners will outperform EFL learners
in a comparison that measures proficiency in a case study of causative
constructions. The data representing EFL learners are drawn from the
ICLE corpus (Granger et al. 2009), which contains essays written by
learners with sixteen different native languages, including Bulgarian,
Chinese, and Turkish. Texts written by ESL learners are available
in the ICE corpora that represent learner varieties, such as Hong
Kong English, Nigerian English, or Tanzanian English. The British
National Corpus is used as a benchmark of native language use.
Gilquin (2016: 124) retrieved a set of causative constructions with
cause, get, have, and make from the corpora and annotated them for
several features, including the syntactic context and the lemma of the
non-finite verb. The results reveal differences between EFL, ESL, and
native British English with regard to frequency, syntactic behaviour,
and collocational preferences. As for frequency, the corpora show that
both learner groups significantly overuse causative constructions. The
EFL students exhibit a relatively greater extent of overuse; ESL stu-

dents are situated half-way between the EFL students and the native
writers. This finding suggests that learners prefer periphrastic causa-
tive constructions, which are analytic and semantically transparent,
over lexical causative verbs, which package causative meaning more
densely. The syntactic analysis of the corpus examples reveals that
the learners produce a wide range of uses that deviate from Standard
English. Expressions such as to make feel regretful or makes people trying
to find one (Gilquin 2016: 130) are not found in the writing of native
speakers. The range of ungrammatical patterns is wider in the EFL
data than in the ESL data, which corroborates the idea of a cline from
the native data to ESL and finally EFL data. In her analysis of the
collocational preferences of causative constructions in learner data,
Gilquin (2016) uses collostructional analysis to find out how closely
the learners manage to emulate the language use of native writers.
Distinctive collexeme analyses (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004a) that
contrast native usage with EFL and with ESL respectively show
that greater differences can be observed between the native colloca-
tional preferences and the data produced by EFL students (Gilquin
2016: 139). Both learner groups overuse highly frequent and general
collexemes, including be and have. The ESL learners, however, show a
greater mastery of using causative constructions with collexemes that
are typical of native language use. This result empirically vindicates
Herbst’s principle 7. Authentic input leads to a more native-like com-
mand of causative constructions.
Herbst’s principle 1 (Teach constructions) has an implication that
relates to Höder’s (2018) concept of diaconstructions and the notion
of transfer. As was discussed in Section 10.1, L2 learners will try to
establish diasystematic links and diaconstructions. Since these may
be overly restrictive or permissive, an important task of the foreign
language teacher is to help students avoid negative transfer. In a study
of Spanish L2 learners of Italian, Della Putta (2016) focuses on two
Spanish constructions that invite negative transfer. Both are exempli-
fied below. The first, in example (14), is comparable to the English Be
Going To construction in that it features a verb with the meaning ‘go’
that can either express movement or future time. The second construc-
tion, shown in example (15), involves a verb meaning ‘return’ that in this
context expresses either movement or iterative aspect.
(14) Paco va a escribir un libro sobre su teoría

Paco go.3SG to write.INF a book about his theory
‘Paco goes to / is going to write a book about his theory.’
(15) Volvió a duchar-se

returned.3SG to shower.INF-REFL.3SG
‘He returned to take a shower.’ / ‘He took a shower again.’
Italian has cognate lexical items and corresponding syntactic structures

that make it easy for Spanish L2 learners to transfer their existing
knowledge. However, what makes these constructions challenging is
that only their respective lexical meanings are conventional in Italian.
The grammaticalised meanings of future time and iterative aspect are
specific to Spanish. Della Putta thus puts forward the hypothesis that
transfer between constructions has to be unlearned (2016: 243). Testing
this hypothesis, Della Putta (2016) compared two groups of L2 learners
with different histories of prior exposure to authentic Italian usage.
The participants of the first group were Spanish L2 learners of Italian
that had been living in Italy for several years but that had not received
extensive L2 instruction in a classroom setting. The members of the
second group had been living in Italy for less than a year, but they
had received formal L2 instruction. Eight Italian monolingual speakers
served as a control group. Both learner groups were asked to complete
a picture description task that involved scenes of planned future events
and iterative actions, which were designed to elicit usage of the two
target constructions. Both learner groups used the target constructions
in ways that the control group did not. The extent of negative transfer
was not significantly different across the two groups, which indicates
that overly permissive diaconstructions can persist even after prolonged
exposure to authentic L2 usage, or after months of formal L2 instruc-
tion. This motivates the need for teaching strategies that engage with
the idea of diaconstructions and how they can be constrained. Della
Putta (2016: 258) proposes pedagogical interventions that give learners
positive evidence of idiomatic L2 usage.
10.5 Summing up
The study of constructions across grammars, which touches on phe-
nomena such as language contact, bilingualism, and second language
acquisition, is one of the current frontiers of Construction Grammar.
This chapter has surveyed some of the central lines of research that
have emerged in these areas over the last few years. Throughout the
chapter, Höder’s (2012, 2018) concepts of diasystematic links and diaco-
nstructions were shown to be relevant to phenomena in which speakers’
knowledge of language comprises more than a monolingual network of
constructions. A central insight is that speakers look for parallels across
their constructional repertoires, and that languages in contact undergo

pro-diasystematic change over time.
By now, a substantial body of empirical research confirms that the
linguistic knowledge of L2 learners is usefully seen as knowledge of
constructions. Several of the psycholinguistic experiments that were dis-
cussed in Chapter 6 have been successfully replicated with populations
whose native language is not English. Beyond that, we have evidence
that typological differences between languages affects how L2 construc-
tions are learned and used. Several of the studies that were discussed in
this chapter further point to the importance of constructions in the L1
that may serve as starting points for the formation of diasystematic links.
The productivity and semantic breadth of L1 constructions can help
explain how learners will use corresponding constructions in the L2.
As the studies that were discussed in this chapter have shown, theo-
retical work in Construction Grammar has practical implications for
second language acquisition that Herbst (2016) has spelled out in seven
principles that should inform language teaching. Refining our current
understanding of how Construction Grammar should be put to use
in the L2 classroom is an important project for future constructional
research.
Study questions
1. In your own words, define what a diasystematic link is and what a
diaconstruction is.
2. If you speak a second language, try to reflect on your L2 use and
identify an example of negative transfer. If your only language is
English, have you observed instances of negative transfer in bilingual
speakers?
3. Pretend that Gries and Wulff hired you as a research assistant for
their study of complement clauses (Gries and Wulff 2009). Your
task is to construct a set of stimuli that contains complement clause
constructions with -ing forms and to-infinitives, such as I started going
to the gym or He managed to arrive on time. The verbs start, stop, avoid,
enjoy, consider, and finish are preferentially used with -ing forms. The
verbs try, manage, attempt, fail, like, and continue exhibit a bias towards
to-infinitives. Write ten complement clauses with -ing forms and ten
with to-infinitives. Combining them with the verbs gives you twenty
sentences. Print them out, randomise their order, and create a book-
let. Have a friend rate how good your examples are on a scale from
1 (completely unacceptable) to 7 (perfect). Do the ratings reflect the
preferences of the verbs?
4. What is constructional tolerance and in what ways could it be opera-

tionalised and measured?
5. Imagine that you are a teacher of English in a foreign language
programme. Can you devise an activity that lets L2 students discover
the constraints of the English Ditransitive construction?
Further reading
The basic notions of Diasystematic Construction Grammar are
explained in Höder (2018). Issues relating to bilingualism and language
contact are discussed by the contributions in Hilpert and Östman (2016)
and Boas and Höder (2018). Ellis (2013) provides an overview of con-
structional research on second language acquisition. The contributions
in Collins and Ellis (2009) and Ellis and Cadierno (2009) explore the
roles of input, form, function, and frequency in the acquisition of L2
constructions. Baicchi (2015) presents a series of psycholinguistic stud-
ies that investigate how L2 learners use constructions. De Knop and De
Rycker (2008) and De Knop and Gilquin (2016) bring together stud-
ies that explore applications of Construction Grammar and Cognitive
Linguistics in the second language classroom.
11 Concluding remarks
The introduction of this book asked the question of what speakers know
when they know a language. The very short answer to that question was
given right then and there: speakers know constructions. The simplicity
of that answer is deceptive, of course. The subsequent chapters of this
book have tried to articulate the many different ideas that this simple
sentence entails: constructions comprise everything from monomor-
phemic words to complex syntactic constructions; they connect a formal
pole with a meaning pole, each of which is characterised by variation;
they are hierarchically organised and interconnected through links
such as instantiation links or subpart links; they are learned through
exposure to language use; they serve to evoke parts of semantic frames
and to present those ideas in ways that facilitate successful communica-
tion. They are automatically accessed by hearers when they process
language; they change over time; they exhibit subtle or not so subtle
differences from one variety of English to another. The list could go on,
but you get the general idea: behind the simple statement that speakers
know constructions lies a view of linguistic knowledge that comprises a
network of ideas – a linguistic theory – and the purpose of this book was
to introduce you to that theory.
Now that you have a rough idea of Construction Grammar as a
linguistic theory, there are two next logical steps. A first step would
be to increase your expertise and explore the Construction Grammar
literature, following your own interests. It was mentioned in the preface
to this book that what is presented here is just one particular flavour of
Construction Grammar; you are now sufficiently versed in the basics
to learn about and appreciate the differences between approaches such
as Cognitive Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006), Cognitive
Grammar (Langacker 1987), Radical Construction Grammar (Croft
2001), and Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Boas and Sag 2012).
In order to get a first overview, start with the respective articles in
Hoffmann and Trousdale’s Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar
255
(2013). In deepening your knowledge of Construction Grammar, you

might also proceed by following up on a specific area of Construction
Grammar that particularly suits your interest. For instance, if first lan-
guage acquisition is what you are interested in, there is a world of
constructional research for you to explore. Tomasello (2003) continues
to be a great reference to start with, even though a lot of fascinating new
results have emerged since it was published. If you would like to find
out more about the psycholinguistic side of constructional research,
start with Goldberg (2006) and Bencini (2013). It is always a good idea
to look up people’s professional web pages to find out about their most
recent work. Many researchers keep copies of their articles online, so
that looking up someone’s web page might even save you a trip to the
library.
A second important step would be to engage with Construction
Grammar in your own work. Throughout this book, it was emphasised
that Construction Grammar is a theory that makes testable predictions
and that these predictions need to be evaluated on the basis of empirical
data. If you are a student planning to write a first long essay, the idea
of having to deal with data might make you a little uneasy. However,
engaging with empirical linguistic data, be they collected from a corpus,
during an experiment, or from the responses of a questionnaire, is not
witchcraft, and dealing with such data will tell you more about language
than any amount of reading that you could do in the same time. Be sure
to ask for help; discuss your plans with your lecturers and your fellow
students. When you are starting out, it is not a bad strategy to model
your own work on a study that someone else has already done. You can
use other sources of data or tweak the research question a little bit. In
such cases, do not be afraid to send the original author an email, asking
for advice. Yes, researchers are usually busy, but getting an email from
someone who is reading and appreciating their work will generally
make them happy.
Now, what could be a manageable research project for a long essay on
Construction Grammar? One type of study could be called the ‘oddball
construction’ essay. Several classic studies in Construction Grammar
deal with patterns such as What’s that scratch doing on my desk? or I wouldn’t
read, let alone review, a book by that guy. An essay of this kind identifies
an idiosyncratic construction and offers an analytical sketch, typically
describing the constraints and unexpected properties of that construc-
tion. Showing that a construction deviates from more canonical patterns
of English adds to the body of evidence that speakers must have a
tremendous amount of construction-specific knowledge. In Chapter 1,
this was metaphorically described as the ‘growth of the appendix’.
concluding remarks 257
A second type of essay that merits discussion involves the repli-

cation of a published experimental study. Experimental research in
Construction Grammar is still in its infancy, but there are quite a few
studies out there that do not require the use of specialised software or
expensive machinery. Studies such as Bencini and Goldberg (2000),
Gurevich et al. (2010), or Da˛browska (2010) can be replicated, that is,
repeated with similar or identical stimuli but with different participants,
using your own computers and props that you can make from office
materials. Do not worry that simply repeating an existing study might
not yield anything of worth: the replication of studies is a very impor-
tant part of science, and besides that, retracing the steps of experienced
researchers makes you learn a lot.
A third type of essay uses corpus data to study variation in the use of
a construction. Studies of this kind take a construction and explore how
it varies with regard to structure and to meaning, across varieties, and
perhaps across different groups of speakers, or across different periods
of time. Doing this does not necessarily require that you are already
familiar with corpus-linguistic methods, but it certainly requires you
to take the plunge and get the skills that enable you to answer your
research question. For starters, you might use online resources such as
Mark Davies’s suite of corpora (http://corpus.byu.edu), which allow
you to collect data via a web page, without any need for specialised
software. Wiechmann and Fuhs (2006) point towards useful pieces of
software for the analysis of conventional corpora. If you decide that you
want to pursue corpus linguistics in more depth, Gries (2009) is a highly
recommended resource. As it is needless to say, these suggestions do not
begin to cover the spectrum of studies that could be done. Follow your
interests, ask for advice, and be ready to learn.
To conclude, this book hopefully leaves you wanting to find out
more about Construction Grammar. As was pointed out earlier, the
theory is under development, which means that many issues still need
to be worked out. Also, connections between Construction Grammar
and related fields of inquiry are currently being developed. It therefore
remains to be seen what the future holds for Construction Grammar. At
the same time, if you would like to play a part in shaping that future,
there is ample opportunity.
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Stéphanie Pourcel (eds), New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics, Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, pp. 185–200.
Index
Sorted word by word: ‘s-genitive’ before ‘scene encoding hypothesis’.
a-adjectives, 139–42, 152 borrowing, 239

acceptability judgments, 137–8, 189 Boyd, J., 19, 138–41, 152
activation, 108, 115–18, 127, 145–7 Bresnan, J., 187–95, 206
affix ordering, 89 Bybee, J., 66–8, 94, 149, 154, 218, 220
agent, 18, 26, 27, 30, 32, 35, 42, 51, 62,
84, 135, 244 caused motion construction, 31, 35–7,
allomorphy, 76, 85, 99, 155 45–8, 61, 65, 73, 134–7, 170–1, 243,
Ambridge, B., 119, 124–8, 178 246
analogy, 51, 71, 239 Chafe, W., 109, 129
apodosis, 213 coercion, 17–18, 24, 39, 55, 65, 73, 77,
apo-koinou, 215, 223–5 130–2
apparent time, 196 Cognitive Construction Grammar, 255
argument structure, 25–49, 60, 65, 71, Cognitive Grammar, 255
135–6, 153, 159, 164–5, 169–70, 173, collocational preferences, 20–3, 41–3,
177, 187, 244 56, 205, 250
as-predicative construction, 149–50, colloquialisation, 198
153 collostructional analysis, 22, 242, 251
attributive adjective construction, 5, 52, comparative correlative construction,
63, 69, 71, 96, 139–41 7–9, 50, 53–4, 57, 148
attributive compounds, 95, 98–100 complement clause, 63, 125, 145, 148,
audience design, 213 153, 172–3, 177, 214, 224, 229, 243,
Auer, P., 120, 148, 209–16, 230, 232 253
auxiliary plus infinitive construction, complete inheritance, 67
21 complexity based ordering hypothesis,
91
BCI hypothesis, 126 compounding, 80, 86–8, 94–100, 134
Bencini, G., 135–7, 152–4, 243, 256 comprehension, 70, 132–7, 142–4,
beneficiary, 27 152–4, 174
big mess construction, 5–6, 151 construct, 12, 71, 81, 90, 134, 141, 163
bilingualism, 233, 252 construct-i-con, 2, 6–8, 13–14, 19–23,
blending, 78, 100, 223 29, 41, 50–75, 80–4, 92–9, 126, 130–1,
BNC (British National Corpus), 3–5, 151, 157, 161, 165, 180, 191, 200–4,
65, 82, 88, 149 233, 235, 238
Boas, H., 49, 71, 233, 254, 255 construction (definition), 10, 13
Booij, G., 75, 81, 84, 94, 97, 100 constructional change, 194–207
275
constructional contamination, 65 filler-gap constructions, 53–4, 73, 173,

constructional tolerance, 245 183
constructionalisation, 200–4, 238 Fillmore, C. J., 7–8, 11, 15, 24–5, 51–6,
conversion, 132 67, 73
corpus data, 3, 20–2, 32–4, 65, 82, 91, focus, 110
100, 107, 120, 138, 146–9, 153, 167, for-benefactive construction, 46–7
172, 178, 185, 188–91, 194–5, 200–4, frequency, 13, 22, 43, 66, 82, 93, 99, 139,
210, 222, 225, 229, 231, 245, 250, 256, 144, 149–50, 166, 171, 174–8, 196–7,
257 200–1, 205, 230, 250
Croft, W., 24, 70, 74, 220, 255 Fried, M., 24, 207
cue validity, 148
cyclic rule application, 87 Gahl, S., 144–5, 148, 153–4
gapping, 54–7, 73
Dąbrowska, E., 66, 129, 137, 161, 168–9, Garnsey, S., 144–5, 148, 153–4
178, 257 Gilquin, G., 233, 250–4
Davies, M., 20, 257 Glenberg, A., 133–4, 152
definite noun phrase construction, 12, goal, 27
18 Goldberg, A. E., 2, 9–25, 28–38, 46–55,
degree marker construction, 19 58–62, 71–3, 84, 102, 119, 124–9,
De Knop, S., 233, 254 133–41, 149, 152–4, 159, 170–2, 182,
de-noun-ate construction, 88 203–4, 220, 243, 255
de-noun-ise construction, 88 grammaticalisation, 200, 238–40,
derivational constructions, 76, 85, 89, 252
98 Gries, S. T., 21–2, 43, 74, 101, 146–50,
Diasystematic Construction Grammar, 153–4, 190–3, 233, 241, 251
234–41 grinding constructions, 15, 77
dictionary and grammar model, 3–8, Gurevich, O., 68, 142–3, 152
14, 18, 23–5, 28, 45–7, 52, 70–2, 76,
85, 100, 144, 156–9, 165, 169 hapax legomenon, 83, 99
Diessel, H., 161, 172–8 have long V-ed construction, 19–20, 77
ditransitive construction, 5, 19, 31–5, Herbst, T., 49, 247–53
45–51, 60–2, 75, 84, 102, 130, 133–6, Hilpert, M., 21, 196, 227, 245
139, 146–8, 153, 161, 170, 182, Höder, S., 233–40, 247, 251–4
187–93, 197–200, 235, 241, 254 Hoffmann, T., 24, 74, 207, 255
Hopper, P., 51, 201, 214–22, 230, 238
ecological validity, 174 host class expansion, 196
Ellis, N. C., 233, 254 Huddleston, R., 40–3, 124, 183
emergent grammar, 218, 230
end weight principle, 115, 118, 129, idiomatic expressions, 1–9, 22, 25, 41,
174 50, 55, 71, 86, 130, 246, 252
endocentric compounds, 94, 98 imperative, 8, 39, 42–5
English as a second language, 250 individuation construction, 17
enough to-infinitive construction, 63, 64 information packaging, 23, 102–29, 141,
entrenchment, 40, 85, 94, 170, 199, 220, 166, 188, 221
224, information structure (definition), 105
event structure, 26–30, 35–40, 44, 47–9 informative presupposition clefts, 117
exclamative constructions, 51–4, 59, inheritance, 57–66, 73, 80, 94, 126
64, 122 instance links, 60, 63–5, 73, 200
expansion, 213, 215–22, 230 instrument, 27
experiencer, 27, 47 interlingual identification, 234
inde x 277
into-causative, 193, 205 negative transfer, 237

island constraints, 119, 123, 128–9 noun of one’s own construction, 6
Israel, M., 19 nominal extraposition construction, 59,
it-cleft construction, 114–18, 126–8, 64, 121, 128
196, 204 non-compositional meaning, 10–11,
item-based learning, 156–7, 163, 177 16–23, 42, 48–50, 86, 99, 130
not much of a noun construction, 16
joint attention, 159–63, 177–8 noun past participle compound
construction, 86
Kaschak, M., 133–4, 152 noun present participle compound
Kay, P., 24, 212 construction, 87
Kortmann, B., 184, 192, 207 null instantiation, 39, 44–5, 49
labelese construction, 44–5, 48 object relative clause, 173–5, 183–4

Labov, W., 186 oblique relative clause, 184
Lakoff, G., 56, 61–3, 209 Östman, J., 24, 207, 233, 254
Lambrecht, K., 59, 64, 105–29 overgeneralisation, 86, 156, 178, 237
Langacker, R., 16, 220, 240, 255 Oxford English Dictionary, 4, 21
language contact, 233, 238, 252
language myths, 179, 180, 194 paradigm, 84, 97, 234
left dislocation construction, 111, participial ing-clause construction, 12,
118–20, 128 41
let alone construction, 8, 25, 256 passive construction, 8, 26, 39–48, 65,
level ordering hypothesis, 90 133, 146, 150, 161, 165–6, 169, 198,
lexical boost, 147 203
Lieven, E., 161, 164, 167–9, 178 past tense construction, 14, 76, 83–6,
location, 27 98, 102, 156
patient, 27
Mair, C., 107, 198 pattern recognition, 162, 177
make–causative construction, 139 Perek, F., 185, 235, 245, 247
many a noun construction, 12 Petré, P., 199
many-to-many mappings, 63, 181, 195, phrasal compound construction, 80,
198 94, 98
measurement as modifier construction, pivot schemas, 164–5, 168–72, 177–8
15 Plag, I., 76–7, 85, 90–3, 99–100
metaphorical links, 61–3, 73, 200 plural construction, 14, 76, 82, 98,
metonymic noun phrase construction, 102
59–60, 64 PN construction, 58–9
Michaelis, L., 17, 39, 44–5, 59, 64, polysemy links, 60–1, 73, 200
119–23, 129 poverty of the stimulus, 158
modifier–head construction, 52, 56,
73 pragmatic accommodation, 117
morphological comparative pragmatic assertion, 106
construction, 14, 76 pragmatic presupposition, 106
morphological productivity, 81–4, 92, pragmatics, 103, 123
98, 201, 253 predicative construction, 15, 18, 44,
morphological superlative, 76 113, 121, 126, 149, 226
morphosyntactic persistence, 146, 190 prepositional dative construction, 28,
multiple inheritance, 63–5, 73, 80, 126, 45–7, 115, 135, 138–9, 146–8, 153,
223 187–95, 205, 235, 242
prepositional phrase construction, source, 27

57–9, 80 statistical preemption, 138, 154
priming, 145–8, 153, 190, 241 Stefanowitsch, A., 20–2, 43, 55–6, 149,
Prince, E., 102, 117, 129 154, 190, 193, 242, 251
progressive construction, 76, 133 stem allomorphy, 85
projection, 120, 148, 213–17, 221 stimulus, 27
protasis, 213 stripping, 54–7, 73
psycholinguistics, 14, 23, 67, 72, 91, subject–auxiliary inversion, 51–5, 73,
100, 131–2, 135, 153–4, 173–4, 199, 158, 161
253, 256 subject–predicate construction, 12, 52,
Pullum, G., 40–3, 124, 183 56–8, 67, 68–71
subject relative clause, 173–5, 183–4,
quantitative sociolinguistics, 185 192
subpart links, 62–5, 72, 83–4, 96–9, 102,
Radical Construction Grammar, 255 125, 202
real time studies, 196 surface generalisation hypothesis, 46
reciprocal predicative construction, 15 Sweetser, E., 62, 182
reduction, 144–5, 196, 201, syntactic alternation, 26, 45–8, 187–92,
redundant representations, 67, 74, 195, 199, 205, 235, 243
237
reflexive construction, 39 Takahashi, H., 43
resultative construction, 18, 26, 29–31, Taylor, J. R., 3, 13, 16, 22, 55, 61, 182
48–51, 61, 69, 71–4, 102, 136, 156, the Xer the Yer construction, 7–9, 50,
243–50 53–4, 57, 148
retraction, 213, 216, 230 thematic roles, 27, 47, 188
right dislocation construction, 118–22, theme, 27
128 theory of mind, 160
right node raising, 54 Thompson, S., 51
role reversal, 162 Tomasello, M., 157–61, 164–6, 169,
Ross, J. R., 124 172–5, 178, 256
Ruppenhofer, J., 45 topic, 110
tough-raising, 16, 107, 139, 158
s-genitive construction, 5, 55, 61, 73, 76, transition relevance place, 212
98, 102, 115, 182, 204 transitive construction, 12–13, 17, 51,
Sag, I., 24, 53–4, 119, 183 60–5, 70, 84, 103, 111, 133–9, 145,
satellite-framed languages, 244 170, 177
scene encoding hypothesis, 31, 48, 102, transitoriness, 209–11, 230
133, 159 type frequency, 82, 99, 166
schematisation, 161, 220 typological differences, 240, 243
second language acquisition, 3, 16, 190,
233, 241–52 un-adjective construction, 86
second-order schemas, 235
sedimentation, 220 valency, 26, 30–5, 38–42, 47–9, 249
semantic coherence principle, 30, 48 valency-decreasing constructions,
shared completion construction, 54–7, 39–42, 48
72 valency-increasing constructions, 31,
Sign-based Construction Grammar, 39, 48
255 Van de Velde, F., 65, 200
simultaneous affixation, 87 variable rule, 186
skewed frequency hypothesis, 171 verb-framed languages, 244
inde x 279
verb island hypothesis, 164 Wiechmann, D., 184, 257

verbatim memory, 68, 142–4, 152 will-future construction, 21
with-applicative construction, 45
Wasow, T., 129 word formation processes, 76–87,
way-construction, 19, 31, 36–9, 48, 57, 98
202, 246 World Atlas of Varieties of English
wh-cleft construction, 103–8, 114–18, (eWAVE), 192
128, 134, 221–6 written language bias, 208, 209, 219,
wh-question construction, 53–4, 124–8, 230
168–9 Wulff, S., 22, 193–4, 233, 241, 253

Construction Grammar and Its Application To English

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Construction Grammar and its Application to

Titles in the series include:

Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English, 2nd edition

© Martin Hilpert, 2019

First edition published by Edinburgh University Press in 2014

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

ISBN 978 1 4744 3360 0 (hardback)

List of tables and figures x

1 Introducing Construction Grammar 1

2 Argument structure constructions 25

3 Inside the construct-i-con 50

4.3 Constructional solutions to morphological puzzles 89

5 Information packaging constructions 102

6 Constructions and language processing 130

7 Constructions and language acquisition 155

8 Language variation and change 179

9 Constructions in spoken language 208

9.4.3 The Double-Is construction 225

10 Constructions across grammars 233

11 Concluding remarks 255

Table 2.1 Thematic roles 27

Figure 3.1 face the music and the constructions it instantiates 58

So, you have found this book, an introduction to a linguistic theory

I would like to write a few words of thanks to my colleagues, friends,

1.1 What do you know when you know a language?

(2) What speakers have to know, according to Construction

of the dictionary-and-grammar model (Taylor 2012: 8), which is

1.1.1 Idiomatic expressions permeate ordinary language

your linguistic knowledge, and a second language learner of English

1.1.2 Idiomatic expressions are more than fixed strings

1.1.3 Idiomatic expressions are productive

1.1.4 The growth of the appendix

suffers from a painful growth of the appendix, requiring an emergency

1.2 What is a construction?

1.2.1 Defining constructions: a first try

C is a CONSTRUCTION iffdef C is a form–meaning pair <Fi, Si> such

This definition captures three important notions. First, a construction

categorise sudden in all of a sudden? Is the by in by and large a preposition,

c­onstructions. At the most general level, this concerns the Subject–

1.2.2 Defining constructions: beyond non-predictability

assessment is that there are many expressions that are semantically

opens up the definition to cover forms that are frequent enough to be

1.3 Identifying constructions

1.3.1 Does the expression deviate from canonical patterns?

first observation would be that a phrase consisting of a preposition, a

1.3.2 Does the expression carry non-compositional meaning?

following an act such as the Royal Shakespeare Company is considered

1.3.3 Does the expression have idiosyncratic constraints?

(13) I brought John a glass of water.

The first pair of examples illustrates a constraint on the English

1.3.4 Does the expression have collocational preferences?

parent, and without noticeable constraints on its behaviour, it might still

out, stores information about language use in a highly detailed fash-

ings, or a high enough frequency to be remembered as such (Goldberg

1.5 Outline of the following chapters

2.1 Analysing ‘simple sentences’

The remaining sections of this chapter are organised in the following

2.2 Argument structure

Table 2.1 Thematic roles

Resultative construction. Compare the phrase played the piano to pieces

The scene-encoding hypothesis predicts that across many languages,

2.3 Valency-increasing constructions

2.3.1 The Ditransitive construction

constructions. At the most general level, this concerns the Subject–

learners of English to make mistakes such as informations, evidences, and