Publications
Publication details [#51164]
Nikiforidou, Kiki. 2009. Constructional analysis. In Östman, Jan-Ola and Jef Verschueren, eds. Handbook of Pragmatics. 2009 Installment. (Handbook of Pragmatics 13). John Benjamins.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
Construction Grammar developed as a non-modular, non-derivational, unification-based grammatical theory aimed at covering the facts of language as a whole. Although the different constructional approaches that arose are not intended as pragmatic theories or methods as such, they all assign a special place to pragmatic research and have often yielded fine-grained, detailed analyses of the pragmatics associated with particular linguistic forms. In this respect, constructional analysis allows for the natural integration of pragmatics into grammatical theory. The present essay explores some of the ways in which this integration has been realized in different studies, illuminating the potential of construction grammar for describing (and even formalizing) all kinds of conventional linguistic knowledge, including pragmatic and discoursal. It is also argued that an overlapping area of interest between construction grammar(s) and much work in grammaticalization lies precisely in conventional/constructional pragmatics.