Review article
Why Construction Grammar is radical
This article reviews some of the foundational assumptions of
Croft'sRadical Construction Grammar. While constructions
have featured prominently in much recent work in cognitive linguistics, Croft
adopts the ‘radical’ view that constructions are the primary objects of
linguistic analysis, with lexical and syntactic categories being defined with
respect to the constructions in which they occur. This approach reverses the
traditional view, according to which complex expressions are compositionally
assembled through syntactic rules operating over items selected from the
lexicon. The ubiquity of idioms, especially so-called constructional idioms,
provides compelling evidence for the essential correctness of the radical
constructional view. The possibility of a radical constructional approach to
phonology is also discussed.
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Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Macis, Marijana & Norbert Schmitt
2017.
Not just ‘small potatoes’: Knowledge of the idiomatic meanings of collocations.
Language Teaching Research 21:3
► pp. 321 ff.
Vartiainen, Turo
2016.
A Constructionist Approach to Category Change.
Journal of English Linguistics 44:1
► pp. 34 ff.
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