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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
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00033.die
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