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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. 110–121

Maximizing the explanatory power of constructions in Cognitive Construction Grammar(s)

| University of Almería

This paper suggests two possible ways in which cognitively-oriented constructionist approaches (Cognitive Construction Grammar, Radical Construction Grammar, and Embodied Construction Grammar) could enhance the explanatory power of constructions. First, the anatomy of a construction should spell out how the morphosyntactic realizations of arguments are specifically mapped onto their inherent semantico-pragmatic properties, while also including detailed information concerning illocutionary force, information structure, register, politeness, etc. Second, it is argued that coercion should be best understood as a continuum allowing for varying degrees of (in-)compatibility between the verb and the construction taken as a whole. Moreover, parameterization and linguistic cueing prove useful to handle the dynamic interaction of the morphosyntactic, semantico-pragmatic, and discourse-functional hallmarks of constructions, including those which invite metonymic inferencing.

Keywords: cognitive construction grammar(s), subcategorization, argument linking, coercion, metonymy
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.On the formalization of information in the anatomy of constructions
  • 3.On the dynamic interaction between coercion and figurative language
  • 4.Closing remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00039.gon
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