The framework of Construction Grammar extends naturally to morphology. Constructions in a lexicon–grammar continuum elegantly capture the regularities and idiosyncrasies that typically co-occur in complex words. Yet, Construction Morphology is not just Construction Grammar applied to morphology. Morphological phenomena come with their own challenges and place specific demands on the theory. This chapter outlines the contributions that a constructionist approach to morphology makes to constructionist thinking more broadly. The focus is on two construction-based approaches: Construction Morphology and Relational Morphology. Three topics are highlighted especially. First, idiomaticity and other types of non-compositionality are discussed in the context of the relations within and across morphological constructions. Second, the chapter addresses productivity, specifically limited productivity as is often seen in word-formation. The third topic is paradigmaticity and the role of ‘horizontal’ connections between complex words and between morphological schemas. The chapter aims to show that morphology, the grammar of words, is instructive for the larger theoretical framework.

We present an overview of constructional approaches to signed languages, beginning with a brief history and the pioneering work of William C. Stokoe. We then discuss construction morphology as an alternative to prior analyses of sign structure that posited a set of non-compositional lexical signs and a distinct set of classifier signs. Instead, signs are seen as composed of morphological schemas containing both specific and schematic aspects of form and meaning. Grammatical construction approaches are reviewed next, including the marking of argument structure on verbs in American Sign Language (ASL). Constructional approaches have been applied to the issue of the relation between sign and gesture across a variety of expressions. This work often concludes that signs and gesture interact in complex ways. In the final section, we present an extended discussion of several grammatical and discourse phenomena using a constructional analysis based on Cognitive Grammar. The data come from Argentine Sign Language (LSA) and includes pointing constructions, agreement constructions, antecedent-anaphor relations, and constructions presenting point of view in reported narrative.

This chapter gives brief descriptions of six different contemporary theories of morphology, looking at their philosophical bases, their main concerns and leading questions, and where they stand on the balance between storage versus rules and on the status of the morpheme. The theories we consider are Distributed Morphology (DM), Construction Morphology (CxM), Paradigm Function Morphology (PFM), Natural Morphology (NM), Naïve Discriminative Learning (NDL), and the Lexical Semantic Framework (LSF).

This paper discusses synthetic compounds in Polish, focusing on compound nouns which contain either a deverbal suffixal derivative or a nominalized verb stem as their right-hand constituent. Competition is investigated between such right-headed morphological compounds and left-headed phrasal nouns consisting of a head noun followed by its genitive attribute. Furthermore, Polish compound nouns are compared, in respect of their productivity and their semantic interpretation, with Japanese compound nouns headed by nominalized verb stems, and with English synthetic compounds. Examples are provided (on the basis of the National Corpus of Polish and Google searches) of non-institutionalized Polish compound nouns (with agentive or event reading) which can be viewed as forming semantic niches (in the sense of Hüning 2009), extendable through analogy. It is argued that the framework of Construction Morphology (as outlined by Booij 2010), with its postulation of low-level construction schemas, can provide an appropriate account of the process of analogical compound formation in Polish.