Construction Grammar in the twenty-first century

Abstract

Adele Goldberg, Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. vii + 280.

Goldberg's new work ‘investigates the nature of our knowledge of language, how that knowledge is acquired by children, and how crosslinguistic and language-internal generalizations can be explained’. It builds on earlier research on Construction Grammar (CxG) by Fillmore (1986), Lakoff (1987), Fillmore, Kay & O'Connor (1988), and Goldberg (1995), among others. Since the mid-1990s constructions have become more and more popular as an alternative to Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist Program, but it was not until the new millennium that CxG reached a new level of interest that resulted in an ever-growing body of research (for an overview, see Fried & Östman 2004). Besides numerous articles and monographs, the increased interest in CxG is evidenced by a book series and an e-journal devoted to constructional research, as well as the bi-annual International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG). The publication of Goldberg (1995) inspired much constructional research over the past decade, most notably Croft's (2001) typologically oriented approach to CxG and Tomasello's (2003) constructional account of language acquisition.