Article published in:
The Wealth and Breadth of Construction-Based Research
Edited by Timothy Colleman, Frank Brisard, Astrid De Wit, Renata Enghels, Nikos Koutsoukos, Tanja Mortelmans and María Sol Sansiñena
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 34] 2020
► pp. 42–51

Grammatical categories as paradigms in Construction Grammar

| Leibniz Universität Hannover
| Leibniz Universität Hannover
This squib discusses the question whether Construction Grammar can account for the assumption of universal grammatical categories (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994) that are prone to language change, e.g. tense. Most publications in Construction Grammar tackle individual constructions, such as the way-construction (Jackendoff 1990). But it remains unclear how grammatical categories as a universal phenomenon can be described in constructionist terms. We propose that there is a way to (a) describe grammatical categories, which per definition are encoded paradigmatically, as constructions themselves and (b) to thereby strengthen the assumption of a set of universal grammatical categories.
Keywords: constructions, paradigms, grammar, grammatical categories
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Grammatical functions and grammatical categories
  • 3.What’s (in) a paradigm?
  • 4.Bridging the gap: Paradigms and constructions
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 May 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00033.die
References

References

Ackerman, Farrell, James P. Blevins, and Robert Malouf
2009 “Parts and Wholes: Implicative Patterns in Inflectional Paradigms.” In Analogy in Grammar: Form and Acquisition, ed. by James P. Blevins, and Juliette Blevins, 54–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Blevins, James P.
2016 Word and Paradigm Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Boas, Hans C.
2008 “Determining the Structure of Lexical Entries and Grammatical Constructions in Construction Grammar.” Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 61: 113–144. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014 “Zur Architektur einer konstruktionsbasierten Grammatik des Deutschen.” In Grammatik als Netzwerk von Konstruktionen. Sprachwissen im Fokus der Konstruktionsgrammatik, ed. by Alexander Lasch, and Alexander Ziem, 37–63. Berlin: de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bühler, Karl
1989 [1934] Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Stuttgart: UTB.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan L., Revere D. Perkins and William Pagliuca
1994 The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Croft, William
2001 Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Diessel, Holger
2019 The Grammar Network: How Linguistic Structure is Shaped by Language Use. New York: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Diewald, Gabriele
1991 Deixis und Textsorten im Deutschen. Berlin: de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2009 “Konstruktionen und Paradigmen”. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 37 (3): 445–468. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2020 “Paradigms Lost – Paradigms Regained: Paradigms as Hyper-Constructions”. In Nodes and networks in diachronic construction grammar, ed. by Lotte Sommerer, and Elena Smirnova, 278–315. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dryer, Matthew S., and Martin Haspelmath
(eds.) 2013 The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://​wals​.info, last accessed on 2020-08-18.)
Fried, Mirjam, and Jan-Ola Östman
2004 “Construction Grammar: A Thumbnail Sketch”. In Construction Grammar in a Cross-Language Perspective, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman, and Mirjam Fried, 11–86. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E.
1995 Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
2006 Constructions at Work. The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hippisley, Andrew
2016 “Network Morphology”. In The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology, ed. by Andrew Hippisley, and Gregory Stump, 482–509. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray
1990 Semantic Structures. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman
1971 [1957] “Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb”. In Selected Writings: Vol. II: Word and language, ed. by Roman Jakobson, 130–147. The Hague/Paris: Mouton.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman and Krystyna Pomorska
1982 Poesie und Grammatik: Dialoge. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W.
1985 “Observations and Speculations on Subjectivity.” In Iconicity in Syntax. Proceedings of a Symposium on Iconicity in Syntax, Stanford, June 24–26, 1983, ed. by John Haiman, 109–150. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2002 “Deixis and Subjectivity.” In Grounding: The epistemic footing of deixis and reference, ed. by Frank Brisard, 1–28. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lehmann, Christian
2015 [1982] Thoughts on grammaticalization. Third edition. Language Science Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leiss, Elisabeth
1992 Die Verbalkategorien des Deutschen: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie der sprachlichen Kategorisierung. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nielsen, Peter Juul
2016 Functional Structure in Morphology and the Case of Nonfinite Verbs. Leiden: Brill. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nørgård-Sørensen, Jens, Lars Heltoft, and Lene Schøsler
2011 Connecting Grammaticalisation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Plank, Frans
(ed.) 1991 Paradigms: The Economy of Inflection. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Politt, Katja
2019 “Verbale Konstruktionen in grammatischen Paradigmen”. In Varianz in der konstruktionalen Schematizität, ed. by Dániel Czicza, Volodymyr Dekalo, and Gabriele Diewald, 217–236. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.Google Scholar
to appear. Parts and wholes – Formen und Funktionen von Paradigmen. PhD Dissertation, Leibniz Universität Hannover.
Plungian, Vladimir A.
1998 Грамматические категории, их аналоги и заместители [Grammatical categories, their analogs and alternatives]. Habilitation dissertation, Lomonosov Moscow State University.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C., and Graeme Trousdale
2013 Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar