Staying terminologically rigid, conceptually open and socially cohesive
Journal Article
Overview
abstract
Abstract; When he introduced the framework now known as Construction Grammar, Charles Fillmore said: “Grammatical; Construction Theory differs from […] other frameworks […] in its insistence that syntactic patterns are often tightly associated; with interpretation instructions” (Fillmore 1989: 17). Construction Grammarians view; the patterns, the associations and the interpretive instructionsas a matter of linguistic convention-a fact not generally; appreciated within the wider cognitive-functional community that embraces Construction Grammar, In CxG, we do not use general; principles to explain the existence of the form-function pairs we encounter in a language, but rather treat those as the product; of lexical and constructional licensing (Zwicky 1994). But emergentists and stipulators; share one core belief: grammatical structure is inherently symbolic. Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) makes this insight; formally explicit by treating constructions as licensors of signs-signs that are phrases, lexemes or words-and allowing for; semantic and usage constraints to be directly associated with constructions. But practitioners of Construction Grammar might; reasonably reject the SBCG formalism as incompatible with major foundations of constructional thinking: the top-down nature of; constructional meaning, the idiomaticity continuum and the narrow scope of linguistic generalizations. My task in this article is; to address this concern, illustrating a variety of applications.
