It follows from the usage-based view of language adopted in most strands of Construction Grammar that the constructicons of speakers of what is considered to be one and the same language will differ along social, or ‘lectal’, lines. This chapter explains the inherent theoretical importance of lectal variation for Construction Grammar and surveys existing construction-based work on synchronic language variation. Four major research strands are discussed: (i) studies aimed at the analysis of the form and/or meaning poles of constructions from specific lects; (ii) comparisons of the properties of a given construction or a set of related constructions across different lects; (iii) quantitative studies of grammatical alternations which include lectal variables in their research design; and (iv) studies of social variables involved in the propagation of constructional changes through communities of speakers. The chapter also identifies a number of challenges and open questions.

In this chapter, a central tenet of Construction Grammar is explored: the idea that linguistic knowledge on all levels (e.g., lexicon, morphosyntax, pragmatics) is related in a network fashion, with the building blocks of language (i.e., constructions) forming different types of connections (i.e., links). In general, we discuss the ingredients of constructional networks with our main focus on construction-external links (vertical and horizontal). Another aim of the chapter is to embed constructional networks into a larger domain-general theory of networks but also to demarcate constructional modeling from other network models in linguistics, like Connectionism or models of sociolinguistic propagation. We also glance at how diachronic network change is currently being conceptualized and end by a discussion of open issues.

This chapter presents an overview of some of the central concepts of constructional syntax. Focusing on key insights from Berkeley Construction Grammar and Cognitive Construction Grammar, it discusses how construction entries of different types from the inventory of constructions interact with each other to license constructs. This chapter also outlines a novel methodology for discovering constructions in a corpus that allows for a systematic way of compiling construction entries that are relevant for research in Construction Grammar and constructicography.

Construction Grammar and typology share many assumptions and each approach can fruitfully inform the other. Both fields start from a pairing of form and function and treat lexicon, morphology, and syntax as a continuum of varying strategies to express function. Cross-linguistic comparison leads to a distinction between language-particular categories and structures, determined by distributional analysis, and comparative concepts that are cross-linguistically valid. Strategies are morphosyntactic formal structures that are defined language-independently and constructions are comparative concepts; as such, constructions and their components can be aligned across languages, and strategies allow the alignment of morphosyntactic structures used for constructions across languages. Typologists have also developed representations of the conceptual relations between the functions of different constructions in terms of conceptual spaces. Typological diversity also suggests that the only universal syntactic structure is the part–whole relation between a construction and its constituents. Both Construction Grammar and typology give a prominent role to diachrony, seeing constructions as lineages.

Recent progress in deep learning and natural language processing has given rise to powerful models that are primarily trained on a cloze-like task and show some evidence of having access to substantial linguistic information, including some constructional knowledge. This groundbreaking discovery presents an exciting opportunity for a synergistic relationship between computational methods and Construction Grammar research. In this chapter, we explore three distinct approaches to the interplay between computational methods and Construction Grammar: (i) computational methods for text analysis, (ii) computational Construction Grammar, and (iii) deep learning models, with a particular focus on language models. We touch upon the first two approaches as a contextual foundation for the use of computational methods before providing an accessible, yet comprehensive overview of deep learning models, which also addresses reservations construction grammarians may have. Additionally, we delve into experiments that explore the emergence of constructionally relevant information within these models while also examining the aspects of Construction Grammar that may pose challenges for these models. This chapter aims to foster collaboration between researchers in the fields of natural language processing and Construction Grammar. By doing so, we hope to pave the way for new insights and advancements in both these fields.

In this chapter, we argue that it is highly beneficial for the contemporary construction grammarian to have a thorough understanding of the strong relationship between the research fields of Construction Grammar and artificial intelligence. We start by unraveling the historical links between the two fields, showing that their relationship is rooted in a common attitude towards human communication and language. We then discuss the first direction of influence, focusing on how insights and techniques from the field of artificial intelligence play an important role in operationalizing, validating, and scaling constructionist approaches to language. We then proceed to the second direction of influence, highlighting the relevance of Construction Grammar insights and analyses to the artificial intelligence endeavor of building truly intelligent agents. We support our case with a variety of illustrative examples and conclude that further elaboration of this relationship will play a key role in shaping the future of the field of Construction Grammar.

Syntax is perhaps one of the most successful projects in the history of theoretical linguistics. It’s also garnered the most philosophical attention. Thus, this chapter focuses on syntactic metatheory. It surveys a number of prominent frameworks from minimalism to construction grammar, dependency grammar, lexical functional grammar and head-driven phrase structure grammar.The main aim is to find a common argument structure and strategy across diverse theoretical positions. In the tradition of recent work on scientific modelling in the philosophy of science, the approach that’s adopted in this chapter works from a bottom-up review of the cross-framework literature. I’ll make a case for a general explanatory strategy or scientific project at the core of linguistic syntax. The core idea is that this general scientific strategy is relatively stable across syntactic frameworks. In other words, the chapter aims to address the question of what minimalism, dependency grammar, radical construction grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, and lexical functional grammar have in common. The answer is a general formal strategy that focuses on rules in creating structural units, captures recursive phenomena, and, most importantly, treats syntactic information as explanatorily autonomous from other systems.

Formularity, or the poet’s reliance on prefabricated linguistic features in the composition of his verses, has been the most debated feature of Oral-Formulaic Theory. This chapter reviews the history of Homeric formularity (Part 1), while introducing new key insights from the fields of linguistics (esp. usage-based linguistics, corpus linguistics, and language acquisition studies) and the cognitive sciences (Parts 2-5). Parts 2-3 argue that formularity is a general feature of human language and cognition. Homer’s formularity is quantitatively notable, however, in that it involves sequences that are particularly long when compared to repeated sequences in corpora of both contemporary written or spoken English and ancient prose and hexameter authors. This is interpreted as a sign of Homer’s extreme mastery of his medium, which was arguably necessitated by the oral-improvisational nature of the task. Part 4 develops a new theory of Homeric formularity, borrowing insights from connectionism, lexical priming, and construction grammar, and introduces fine-grained distinctions between conceptual associations, collocations, constructions, metrical constructions and structural formulas.

Sociopragmatics typically refers to sociocultural parameters of the communicative use of language (Leech 1983; Thomas 1983). This concept has long been taken up in the area of applied linguistics (Kaspar & Rose 2002) and historical pragmatics (Jucker 2006; Culpeper 2009). Context per se is difficult to pin down and, therefore, its association with language in a principled manner is a challenging task. In view of the above, and within a Construction Grammar framework (Fried and Östman 2004), this chapter aims to show that the object of sociopragmatic analysis can in fact be viewed as the domain of socioculturally defined genres that are often associated with particular (genre) constructions reflecting a speaker’s knowledge of the language (Nikiforidou 2016). The question to be addressed in this view is to what extent speakers’ understanding of context is systematic, conventional, and, hence, an inherent part of grammar and the description of language. The data to be discussed include recipes, labels, couple talk, stage directions, and TV talk. It will be argued that sociopragmatic context, typically encoded at the meso-level of genre, can be accounted for as a set of specifications that are routinely incorporated in the description of a language’s grammatical constructions.

This chapter reviews recent developments that reflect a convergence of work in various branches of linguistics and psycholinguistics around the implications of the incremental sequencing of speech units for understanding grammar and the cognitive processing that underlies the production, comprehension, and interpretation of utterances. Notions from Functional Discourse Grammar are used to present a view of syntactic structure as arising from the incremental extension of holophrases, i.e. minimal utterances. By prioritizing the timecourse of language processing, the chapter interprets syntactic hierarchy as arising from chunk-and-pass operations supported by predictive processing. Spoken dialogue is identified as the primary arena for these processes, with grammaticality subordinated to situational appropriateness. Linguistic data are seen as protocols of joint action aimed at the incremental co-creation of meaning. All of these notions make essential reference to context as constantly active, prior to and during the utterance of the linguistic signal, and as a crucial component of the operations and processes that take place in verbal interaction.