Frame Semantics is foundational to Construction Grammar in both chronological and conceptual terms. Originally developed by Charles J. Fillmore in the late 1970s to 1980s as a theory of semantics that prioritizes language users’ human experience, it views the meaning of linguistic elements in terms of a network of empirical information, which, in turn, motivates the concept represented by the linguistic elements. The theory laid a rich foundation for a variety of approaches associated with Construction Grammar and remains an intellectual resource for further research developments. This chapter focuses on the seminal ideas of Frame Semantics, further advanced in relation to Construction Grammar and the FrameNet project. After an overview of the theory, a variety of frame concepts (e.g., cognitive frame, interactional frame, and linguistic frame) are discussed. We then turn to how frames can effectively explain grammatical ‘well-formedness’ as illustrated by two case studies that were conducted on the path from Frame Semantics to the establishment of Construction Grammar. The last section discusses implications and prospects for the theory of Frame Semantics.

Framenets and constructiCons are applied instantiations of the linguistic frameworks known as Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar, respectively, in the form of computational, semiformally structured linguistic resources. The resources have a common history, both theoretically and in design: They are built as English-language resources in the framework of the Berkeley FrameNet initiative. They enjoy the double nature of being descriptive linguistic resources as well as finding frequent use in a computational linguistic context, where they have been used both in NLP applications and as underlying knowledge bases in areas such as computer-assisted language learning. The chapter provides a bird’s-eye view on these resources: their theoretical foundations; design principles and how they are compiled; theoretical and methodological interrelations; the challenges involved in building framenets and constructiCons for new languages and for cross-linguistic application; the differences and interactions between linguistic and computational linguistic work on framenets and constructiCons; application to language pedagogy; and outstanding theoretical and methodological 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.

Grammatical gender in German has traditionally been described as a rather arbitrary system. This is not the case in regard to terms of person reference, where natural gender assignment is the norm: masculine and feminine grammatical gender largely correlate with the extralinguistic assignment of male and female gender. Neuter gender predominantly denotes inanimate entities. The use of neuter gender in reference to women nevertheless has a long history in German, usually with pejorative connotations. In contemporary standard German, the use of neuter articles and pronouns instead of feminine ones appears as a discursive tool to denigrate and dehumanize women whose gender performance does not conform with hegemonic concepts of femininity. The dehumanizing use of neuter gender can further be found in online hate speech directed at trans women and nonbinary individuals. This chapter presents an analysis of the discursive manipulation of grammatical gender as a linguistic tool of dehumanization. It first presents an overview on the distribution of neuter grammatical gender for nouns denoting women within the language system and uses this as a backdrop to analyse occurrences of neuter reference to women and nonbinary people in hateful social media discourse. These findings are explained and theorized from a frame semantic perspective.

All aspects of linguistic knowledge are ultimately based on speakers’ experience with lexical expressions, but of course, knowledge of language, notably, grammar, exceeds their memory of particular lexical tokens. It is a standard assumption of the usage-based approach that grammar involves a taxonomic network of constructions ranging from prefabricated strings of lexical expressions to highly abstract schemas. Chapter 4 describes the taxonomic organization of constructions and their development in L1 acquisition and language change. It includes a detailed discussion of current research on statistical grammar learning in infancy, the acquisition of constructions during the preschool years and two case studies on the rise of constructional schemas in language history.

Chapter 6 is concerned with symbolic associations between form and meaning. Cognitive linguists have analyzed the conceptual foundations of linguistic symbols in great detail, but they usually look at the semantic pole of lexemes and constructions from a synchronic perspective. In the dynamic network approach, the focus of analysis is on the development of symbolic associations. Combining frame semantics with research on symbol learning in L1 acquisition, Chapter 6 argues that symbolic associations evolve from recurrent paths of interpretation that become entrenched in memory as a consequence of automatization. The proposed analysis challenges the traditional distinction between encoding and inference and provides the basis for a dynamic theory of meaning in which linguistic elements are seen as cues or stimuli that activate a specific concept, i.e., the figure node, of an open-ended network of world knowledge. Since the activation status of the network varies with speakers’ (and listeners’) mental states in a particular situation, linguistic cues can give rise to different interpretations in different contexts.