The Lexical Constructional Model

This article reviews briefly some recent work on relationships across a spectrum of functionalist, cognitivist and constructionist approaches to language. It then goes on to chart the history of the model currently known as the Lexical Constructional Model, showing how it has developed from work in a range of earlier approaches: Dikkian Functional Grammar, Coseriu’s Lexematics, Role and Reference Grammar, Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage model, Mel’èuk’s Meaning-Text Theory, and most recently Goldberg’s version of Construction Grammar and the theory of metaphor and metonymy. The strengths of the model are then summarised, and a number of challenges for the future are discussed.