Ungerer and Hartmann

Construction Grammar (CxG) has developed into a broad

and highly diverse family of approaches that have in common
that they see constructions – that is, form–meaning pairs at
various levels of abstraction and complexity – as the basic
units of language. This Element gives an overview of the origin
and the current state of the art of constructionist approaches, Construction
focusing, on the one hand, on basic concepts like the notion
of “constructions” while on the other offering an in-depth
Grammar
discussion of current research trends and open questions. It
discusses the commonalities and differences between the
major constructionist approaches as well asthe organization
of constructional networks and ongoing research on linguistic

Constructionist

Constructionist Approaches
creativity, multimodality, and individual differences. This title is
also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Approaches
About the Series Series Editors
Construction Grammar is the leading Thomas Hoffmann
cognitive theory of syntax. The present Catholic University of
Elements series will survey its theoretical
building blocks, show how Construction
Grammar can capture various linguistic
Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Alexander Bergs Tobias Ungerer and
Stefan Hartmann
Osnabrück University

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phenomena across a wide range of
typologically different languages, and
identify emerging frontier topics from
a theoretical, empirical and applied
perspective.

This title is also available as Open Access on

Cambridge Core at www.cambridge.org/core

Cover image: FrankRamspott/

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Elements in Construction Grammar
edited by
Thomas Hoffmann
Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Alexander Bergs
Osnabrück University

CONSTRUCTIONIST
APPROACHES

Past, Present, Future

Tobias Ungerer
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Concordia University
Stefan Hartmann
University of Düsseldorf
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 Constructionist Approaches

Past, Present, Future

Elements in Construction Grammar

DOI: 10.1017/9781009308717
First published online: June 2023

Tobias Ungerer
Concordia University
Stefan Hartmann
University of Düsseldorf
Author for correspondence: Stefan Hartmann, hartmast@hhu.de

Abstract: Construction Grammar (CxG) has developed into a broad and

highly diverse family of approaches that have in common that they see
constructions – that is, form–meaning pairs at various levels of
abstraction and complexity – as the basic units of language. This
Element gives an overview of the origin and the current state of the art
of constructionist approaches, focusing, on the one hand, on basic
concepts like the notion of “constructions” while, on the other hand,
offering an in-depth discussion of current research trends and open
questions. The authors discuss the commonalities and differences
between the major constructionist approaches as well as the
organization of constructional networks and ongoing research on
linguistic creativity, multimodality, and individual differences. This title
is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Keywords: construction grammar, cognitive linguistics, usage-based

linguistics, network approaches to grammar, linguistic theories

© Tobias Ungerer and Stefan Hartmann 2023

ISBNs: 9781009308731 (PB), 9781009308717 (OC)
ISSNs: 2753-2674 (online), 2753-2666 (print)
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Discovering Idiomaticity: The Case for Constructions 3

3 From Sign-Based to Radical: “Flavors” of Construction

Grammar 15

4 Connecting the Dots: The Construct-i-con 26

5 Creativity, Multimodality, Individual Differences: Recent

Developments in Construction Grammar 43

6 Conclusion and Outlook 51

References 54
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Constructionist Approaches 1

1 Introduction
In this Element, we introduce a family of approaches that regard constructions –
that is, form–meaning pairs at various levels of abstraction and complexity – as
the main units of linguistic knowledge. Traditional approaches to grammar
often assume that our knowledge of language consists of two components: the
lexicon as a repository of morphemes, words, and a very limited set of idioms,
on the one hand, and the grammar as a set of rules for combining the items in the
lexicon on the other (see e.g. Pinker 1994; Taylor 2012). In such approaches, the
lexicon is usually kept at a minimum – as Di Sciullo and Williams (1987: 3)
famously put it, “[t]he lexicon is like a prison – it contains only the lawless, and
the only thing that its inmates have in common is lawlessness.” Constructionist
approaches take a radically different stance. Their starting point is the observa-
tion that there is much more idiomaticity in language than is usually assumed.
Broadly speaking, idiomatic units are complex constructions whose meaning
cannot be fully derived from their constituent parts (but see Wulff 2008, 2013
for a more nuanced treatment of idiomaticity and its relation to composition-
ality). Consider, for example, the much discussed way-construction, exempli-
fied in (1) (all from the News on the Web corpus, Davies 2016–).

(1) a. Mr. Musk bluffed his way through the crisis. (October 5, 2018, US,
MarketWatch, NOW corpus)
b. Last month Tesla CEO Elon Musk bullied his way to reopening his electric
car factory in California ahead of local health officials’ recommendations.
(June 11, 2020, KE, nairobiwire.com, NOW corpus)
c. Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk teased his way through the car’s
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press

introduction, showing pictures of the company’s past (April 1, 2016, PK,

BusinessRecorder, NOW corpus)
d. Elon Musk tweets his way through his pending Twitter acquisition.
(May 21, 2022, US, wral.com, NOW corpus)

As Israel (1996) points out, one important feature of this construction is that it
always entails the subject’s movement (in a literal or metaphorical sense), even
if the lexical semantics of the verb do not imply any kind of movement. Thus,
the meanings of the sentences in (1) cannot necessarily be derived from the
meanings of their constituent parts. In these examples, the whole is more than
the sum of its parts – in other words, we are dealing with structures that are not
fully compositional. As we will show in Section 2, the insight that noncompo-
sitionality is more ubiquitous in language than one might think was one of the
main starting points of constructionist approaches. Language, on this view, is
highly idiomatic. Constructionist approaches therefore depart from the classic
position that words and morphemes are the main “building blocks” of language
 2 Construction Grammar

that are combined via a set of rules, and instead propose a joint format for the
representation of meaning-bearing units of varying sizes and at different levels
of abstraction: constructions.
Speaking of “constructionist approaches” underlines that Construction
Grammar (CxG), which has grown into a large research field over the last
decades with a variety of journals, textbooks, and book series dedicated to it,
is not a uniform paradigm but has rather developed into a heterogeneous set of
“Construction Grammars,” plural (see e.g. Hoffmann 2017a, b). While different
approaches differ substantially in some of the assumptions they make as well as
in their goals, Goldberg (2013) and Hoffmann (2022: 10–16) summarize four
basic assumptions that are common to all “flavors” of Construction Grammar, in
addition to the basic concept of linguistic constructions:

• They do not assume a strict division between lexicon and grammar but
instead postulate a lexicon-syntax continuum.
• They assume that constructions do not exist in isolation and that our know-
ledge of constructions should not be conceived of as an unstructured list (as is
sometimes the case in conceptualizations of the mental lexicon). Instead, they
are organized in a taxonomic network, a construct-i-con. We will deal with
the inner workings of this “grammar network” (Diessel 2019) in Section 4.
• They are surface oriented, that is, they do not posit some sort of “deep
structure” with abstract syntactic representations and operations. Instead, it is
assumed that constructions emerge (historically) and are learned (ontogenetic-
ally) via generalizations over concrete instances that language users encounter.
• Given this surface orientation, they do not assume a “Universal Grammar”
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press

that underlies all human languages but instead expect a considerable amount
of cross-linguistic variability. To the extent that there are universals of
language (see Evans & Levinson 2009 for a skeptical stance), they are
explained as generalizations deriving from domain-general cognitive pro-
cesses and functional pressures (Hoffmann 2022: 16).

In the remainder of this text, we will give an overview of the historical

development, the current state of the art, and potential future outlooks of
constructionist approaches. Of course, many excellent introductions to the
framework already exist: for book-length introductions, see Hilpert (2019)
and Hoffmann (2022); for chapter-length summaries, see Fried and Östman
(2004), Croft and Cruse (2004: 257–290), Croft (2007), Diessel (2015),
Hoffmann (2017a) and Boas (2021); see also Hoffmann and Trousdale’s
(2013) handbook. Compared with these earlier overviews, our focus here will
be especially on recent developments in the field, including current research
topics as well as ongoing debates that yet need to be resolved.
 Constructionist Approaches 3

In Section 2, we provide an overview of the genesis of CxG, before address-

ing varying definitions of the concept of “construction” and discussing the
question of whether morphemes and words should also count as constructions.
In Section 3, we compare different constructionist approaches with regard to
three parameters: their degree of formalization, their research foci, and the
methods they prefer to use. Section 4 focuses on the structure of the con-
struct-i-con, addressing its psychological underpinnings and the different
types of links it may contain as well as some open research problems (see
also Diessel’s [2023] contribution to the Elements in Construction Grammar
series for an in-depth treatment of constructional networks). Finally, Section 5
discusses some further current developments in CxG, zeroing in on three
research topics that have increasingly gained attention in recent years: linguistic
creativity, multimodality, and individual differences between language users.
Section 6 offers a brief conclusion.

2 Discovering Idiomaticity: The Case for Constructions

2.1 The Early Days of CxG
Historically, the emergence of CxG is closely connected to the endeavor of
establishing a counterpart to Chomskyan generative linguistics, which was the
dominant paradigm especially in North American linguistics for much of
the second half of the twentieth century (see e.g. Harris 2021).1 While the
concept of “constructions” in the constructionist sense as well as the term
“Construction Grammar” emerged in the 1980s, especially in the works of
Fillmore (1988; Fillmore, Kay, & O’Connor, 1988) and Lakoff (1987), Boas
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press

(2021: 43) points out that the intellectual roots of CxG – and of its “sister
theory,” frame semantics – lie in Fillmore’s (1968) seminal paper “The Case for
Case.” Specifically, he argues that the idea of “deep cases” foreshadows what
later came to be known as semantic roles, which in turn play a key role in the
interaction of verbs and constructions in CxG. But while the notion of
“construction” already appears in earlier works, Fillmore et al.’s (1988) paper
on the let alone construction is nowadays usually seen as the key starting point
of CxG (see e.g. Boas 2021: 49).
Fillmore et al. (1988) argue that idiomaticity is not just an “appendix” to the
grammar of the language – instead, idiomatic patterns are themselves product-
ive, highly structured, and worthy of grammatical investigation. In the case of
let alone, they argue that neither can its properties be exhaustively derived from
its lexical makeup and grammatical structure, nor can it be treated as a fixed
1
We can only give a relatively brief overview of the history of constructionist approaches here; for
more in-depth discussions, see Boas (2021) and Hoffmann (2017b).
 4 Construction Grammar

expression. At the syntactic level, Fillmore et al. analyze let alone as

a coordinating conjunction; at the semantic and pragmatic level, they see it as
a paired-focus construction that evokes a certain scale. For example, in (2a),
“taking the first step” and “taking the second step” can be interpreted as the
contrastively focused elements, and as points on a scale. In (2a), this scale is
fairly obvious, as it is in (2b), where approach and equal can be considered
classic examples of lexical items that form a so-called Horn scale, that is, a scale
where the stronger term entails the weaker one while the weaker term implicates
the falsity of the stronger one (e.g. <warm, hot>, <some, many, most, all>; see
Cummins 2019: 49).

(2) a. I barely knew what step to take first, let alone what step to take second, let
us not talk about the third. (A08, BNC)
b. The old Herring and Addis tools were made with a finesse and temper that
modern tools do not approach, let alone equal. (A0X, BNC)
c. [R]eference to its existence, let alone study of its function, has been
sedulously avoided. (A69, BNC)
d. I don’t have time to feed the children, let alone prepare my lecture.
(Fillmore et al. 1988: 531)

In some cases, however, the scales evoked by let alone are more complex, as
(2c) and especially Fillmore et al.’s example (2d) illustrate: Here, the conjuncts –
reference to its existence and study of its function in (2c), feed the children and
prepare my lecture in (2d) – do not belong to the same semantic domain. Thus,
the scales evoked by let alone can be strongly context-dependent.
Apart from let alone, Fillmore et al. (1988: 510–511) mention a number of
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press

other constructions in passing, some of which have been investigated in more

detail in later constructionist work; for example, the what with construction
(what with the kids and all; see e.g. Trousdale 2012) and the incredulity
response construction (Him a doctor?!?; see e.g. Szcześniak & Pachoł 2015).
Fillmore et al.’s article thus spawned a series of further constructionist analyses,
starting in the early 1990s – for example Kay’s (1990) paper on even and
Michaelis’ (1993) study of the English perfect construction – and growing in
number ever since.
In the following, we cannot provide a summary of all the phenomena that
have been studied from a constructionist perspective over the last thirty-five
years, as there are too many. Instead, we will focus on the key notion of
“construction,” exploring how the concept has developed over time in the
context of the changes that CxG as a paradigm has undergone. In particular,
we will focus on Goldberg’s (1995, 2006, 2019) definitions of constructions, as
the evolution of the concept in her writing arguably reflects important develop-
ments in CxG, which is why the different definitions she has provided over the
 Constructionist Approaches 5

years are often cited and compared to each other in introductory texts (e.g.
Hilpert 2019; Ziem & Lasch 2013). We will also discuss what kinds of units can
be seen as constructions, which naturally depends on the definition of construc-
tion that one adopts.

2.2 “Construction”: An Evolving Concept

A major contribution to defining the notion of construction was made by
Goldberg (1995) in a monograph that also constitutes the first book-length
summary of the constructional approach and can therefore be seen as a further
milestone in CxG history.2 In this book, Goldberg outlines many of the key
issues that have been at the heart of constructionist approaches ever since: the
important role that aspects of meaning (semantic and pragmatic) play in the
analysis of grammar; the interaction between constructional meaning and verb
meaning; the notion that constructions motivate each other within a network of
stored knowledge (see Section 4); and a usage-based account of the partial
productivity of constructions based on learning mechanisms such as indirect
negative evidence (see Goldberg 2019 for a more recent account of this mech-
anism in terms of “statistical preemption”).
Crucially, Goldberg (1995) also proposes what may be the best-known
definition of “construction”:

C is a construction iffdef C is a form-meaning pair <Fi, Si> such that some

aspect of Fi or some aspect of Si is not strictly predictable from C’s compo-
nent parts or from other previously established constructions. (Goldberg
1995: 4)
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The definition captures two central elements. First, drawing on the traditional
concept of a Saussurean sign (Goldberg 1995: 6), constructions are regarded as
units of form that inherently carry meaning, contrary to their generativist
conception in terms of meaningless structural rules. In Goldberg’s approach
as well as subsequent work, “meaning” has come to be understood in a broad
sense, comprising lexical, semantic, pragmatic, discourse-functional, and social
aspects, while “form” is usually taken to include phonological, syntactic, and
morphological information (but see e.g. Herbst & Uhrig 2020 for discussion).3
Second, Goldberg uses nonpredictability as a criterion for what counts as

2
To be more precise: the first published book-length summary. A CxG textbook by Fillmore and
Kay (1993), used in Berkeley linguistics classes, was distributed via a local copy shop (see e.g.
www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/bcg/ConGram.html, last accessed September 14, 2022).
3
The question of what should count as “form” is where CxG deviates from the related approach of
Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987): While most Construction Grammarians include syntactic
constituents (e.g., NP, VP), syntactic functions (e.g., subject, object), and possibly other gram-
matical categories (e.g., case, agreement) within the form pole (see e.g. Hoffmann 2022: 39–40),
 6 Construction Grammar

a construction and what does not: Any pattern that has “unique” properties that
go beyond the properties of its subparts and those of other, partially similar,
constructions is recognized as a construction in its own right. Nonpredictability
is closely linked to the notions of idiomaticity and noncompositionality, which
are also often used to argue for the construction status of a pattern (see Pleyer
et al. 2022 for the multifaceted meanings of “compositionality”). Crucially,
however, the nonpredictability criterion applies not only to idiomatic construc-
tions which, in previous generative work, had been relegated to the “periphery”
of language (Chomsky 1981); it also allows for highly frequent and seemingly
“regular” or “core” patterns, such as the caused-motion pattern illustrated in (3),
to be treated as constructions. The fact that (3b) implies a motion event, even
though it contains an intransitive nonmotion verb, suggests that the “caused
motion” meaning is associated with the construction itself and is not predictable
from the lexical items it contains. As a result, Goldberg’s definition allows for
a wide view of “constructions” that covers both broad grammatical generaliza-
tions and the many less-frequent idiomatic patterns whose role was emphasized
by early CxG work.

(3) a. Pat pushed the piano into the room. (Goldberg 1995: 76)
b. Sally sneezed the napkin off the table. (Goldberg 1995: 6)

Goldberg’s (1995) definition has, however, not remained unchanged over

time; rather, it has continued to evolve as subsequent research has brought to
light some of its limitations. First, scholars have come to agree that, apart from
their nonpredictability, the frequency of linguistic patterns is another major
determinant of their status as constructions. Early evidence that speakers track
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press

and record frequencies in the linguistic input came from studies showing that
more frequent units tend to be phonologically more reduced than less frequent
ones (Bybee 2000; Losiewicz 1992). Moreover, the long-standing research on
formulaic patterns in language (Bolinger 1976; Kuiper & Haggo 1984; Pawley
1985) has highlighted that speakers rely heavily on lexically fixed chunks in
natural speech. As illustrated in (3) and (4), speakers routinely prefer certain
frequent expressions over less frequent alternatives, even when the words they
contain have similar meanings and they are both sanctioned by the same abstract
construction, such as the noun-phrase construction in (4) and the transitive
construction in (5). This suggests that speakers store highly frequent chunks
as constructions in their own right, even when they can be predicted from their
component parts or based on an abstract template they instantiate.

Cognitive Grammar restricts linguistic form to phonological information only and regards
“grammatical form” as a reflex of underlying semantic constraints (Langacker 2005: 104–107).
 Constructionist Approaches 7

(4) a. innocent bystanders (preferred)

b. uninvolved people (dispreferred)

(5) a. it boggles my mind (preferred)

b. it giggles my brain (dispreferred)
(all adapted from Goldberg 2019: 53)

Apart from these fully lexicalized instances, there is also ample evidence that
speakers encode frequency information about partially lexicalized subtypes of
more abstract constructions. For example, Gries and Stefanowitsch’s (2004)
corpus results indicate that speakers’ use of the ditransitive and the to-dative
construction varies depending on the verb: While verbs such as give, tell, and
show are more often used with the ditransitive, as illustrated in (6), verbs such as
allocate, wish, and accord are preferably used with the to-dative, as in (7). Even
though the sentences in (6) and (7) are all instances of more abstract generaliza-
tions, the fact that speakers prefer one variant over the other suggests that they
associate distinct frequency-based information with each verb-specific pattern.

(6) a. She told the children the story. (preferred)

b. She told the story to the children. (dispreferred)

(7) a. She allocated the seats to the guests. (preferred)

b. She allocated the guests the seats. (dispreferred)

As a result, many researchers have argued for the existence of lexically specific
constructions even when their form and meaning seem predictable from the more
abstract schemas they instantiate (Booij 2002; Bybee & Hopper 2001; Langacker
2005). An often-cited example is I love you (Langacker 2005: 140), which, due to
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press

its high frequency, is likely to be stored as a separate construction, even though it

is fully compositional. Given this evidence, Goldberg (2006) proposed
a modified definition of constructions, which explicitly incorporates the fre-
quency criterion and which has again been widely used since:

Any linguistic pattern is recognized as a construction as long as some aspect

of its form or function is not strictly predictable from its component parts or
from other constructions recognized to exist. In addition, patterns are stored
as constructions even if they are fully predictable as long as they occur with
sufficient frequency. (Goldberg 2006: 5)

But the story does not end there, and aspects of the 2006 definition have also
come under scrutiny. Zeschel (2009), for instance, raises doubts about the use of the
nonpredictability criterion for delineating constructions. In particular, he takes issue
with the categorical nature of the criterion: By regarding patterns as either predict-
able or nonpredictable, analysts are forced to draw sharp distinctions between the
 8 Construction Grammar

features that set apart one construction from another and the ones that fail to do so.
As Zeschel (2009: 187–188) argues, however, these decisions are often difficult to
make because tests for the presence of a certain feature are not always available;
because features might vary in their salience depending on the context; and because
interindividual variation among speakers means that constructions are not really
characterized by strictly necessary properties but rather by statistical tendencies.
Similarly, with respect to compositionality, it has been argued that patterns are not
either compositional or noncompositional but that compositionality is a matter of
degree (Langacker 2008: 169).
As an alternative to the nonpredictability criterion, Zeschel (2009) advocates the
use of Langacker’s (1987, 2005) entrenchment criterion, according to which
a pattern is recognized as a construction if it is sufficiently entrenched, that is,
cognitively routinized (on the concept of entrenchment, see e.g. Blumenthal-
Dramé 2012 and Schmid 2017b). Since entrenchment is naturally a gradient
concept, this view entails that the distinction between what is a construction and
what is not may be continuous rather than categorical, with higher degrees of
entrenchment providing increasingly stronger evidence that a pattern has construc-
tion status. Crucially, the entrenchment of a unit is commonly assumed to depend
on several factors, among them the frequency and the similarity of its instances:
The more instances a pattern comprises, and the more similar these instances are to
each other (while being simultaneously dissimilar to instances of other patterns),
the more likely speakers are to group them together under a construction (Bybee
2013; Schmid 2020; see also Section 4.3 for discussion). Crucially, the notion of
similarity is closely related to the nonpredictability criterion used in Goldberg’s
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earlier definitions: The more dissimilar a pattern is to already existing units, the less
predictable it is. If, instead, a group of instances are highly similar to an extant
construction, they can be subsumed under that generalization, thereby further
strengthening it, rather than forming a construction in their own right. The
entrenchment criterion, grounded in similarity, can therefore be used to identify
constructions in a similar way as the nonpredictability criterion, while simultan-
eously recasting the distinction in gradient rather than in categorical terms (see later
in this section for a discussion of this gradient view).
These comments help explain the differences between Goldberg’s earlier
accounts and her third and most recent definition of constructions, as stated in
her 2019 monograph:

[C]onstructions are understood to be emergent clusters of lossy memory

traces that are aligned within our high- (hyper!) dimensional conceptual
space on the basis of shared form, function, and contextual dimensions.
(Goldberg 2019: 7)
 Constructionist Approaches 9

As is evident from this quote, Goldberg’s latest definition completely does away
with the notion of nonpredictability. Instead, the similarity among instances is
used to group them together in “clusters” that correspond to constructions.
Moreover, Goldberg couches her view of constructions in more psychological
terms than in earlier definitions, relying on the concepts of “memory traces,”
“emergent clusters,” “conceptual space,” and “lossiness.” The latter concept is
borrowed from computer science and characterizes speakers’ memories as
partially abstracted (“stripped-down”) versions of the original input. The strong
psychological component of the definition can be related to theoretical and
methodological trends in CxG, where more and more emphasis has been placed
on the cognitive reality of constructions, rather than on their description alone,
and in which psycho- and neurolinguistic paradigms have become ever more
important sources of evidence (see e.g. Hoffmann 2020).
While Goldberg’s (2019) definition is the outcome of several decades of
constructionist theorizing, it surely will not mark the last attempt to come
to terms with the concept of “constructions.” One obvious question raised
by the definition, for example, is how much formal, functional or context-
ual information has to be shared by a group of instances (or memory
traces) for them to be classified as a construction. Clearly, determining
an adequate threshold for similarity is an important task for future empir-
ical research (see also Section 4.3). Another striking feature of the 2019
definition is that it no longer makes reference to frequency as a necessary
or sufficient criterion for construction status, in contrast to Goldberg’s
2006 account (see the earlier definition in this section). This omission is,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press

in fact, intentional, as Goldberg (2019) identifies a problem with the earlier

frequency criterion. According to the 2006 definition, a pattern is only
recognized as a construction if speakers have witnessed it with sufficient
frequency. The paradox that Goldberg (2019: 54) identifies is this: How
can speakers accrue experience with a pattern if they only store it once
they have already encountered it with sufficient frequency? In other words,
if speakers do not retain individual instances of a new pattern, then each
newly witnessed instance would seem to be the first of its kind, and
speakers would never reach the frequency threshold required for forming
a constructional representation. There is, in fact, ample evidence that
speakers do store single instances of use, also called “exemplars” (Abbot-
Smith & Behrens 2006; Ambridge 2020; Bybee 2010). The latter are an
important feature of the view of grammar as an emergent system (Hopper
1987) that many cognitive linguists and Construction Grammarians sub-
scribe to (e.g. Ellis & Larsen-Freeman 2006; Goldberg 2006; MacWhinney
2019).
 10 Construction Grammar

Given these arguments, researchers are faced with a potential dilemma: On

the one hand, if scholars maintain Goldberg’s (2006: 18) well-known claim that
“it’s constructions all the way down,” that is, that speakers’ grammatical
knowledge in toto consists of constructions, then they need to count a single
stored exemplar of a new pattern as a construction. This would undermine the
frequency criterion of the 2006 definition discussed earlier in this section and
allow a potentially exploding number of constructions into the theory. If, on the
other hand, scholars reserve the label “construction” for groups of stored
exemplars that have grown sufficiently large, then they seem to give up the
claim that grammatical knowledge consists of constructions only, and instead
treat constructions as generalizations over more atomic units.
There are several ways to (potentially) resolve this problem. One rather radical
approach would be to abandon the notion of constructions entirely and to
reconceptualize linguistic knowledge in terms of a network of associations.
Schmid’s (2020) entrenchment-and-conventionalization model goes in this direc-
tion, although he retains the notion of construction (however, he abandons the
idea of constructions as “nodes” in a network; see Schmid 2017a). A second
approach would also be quite radical as it would abandon one of the major tenets
of CxG: retaining the concept of construction as a heuristic device but dropping
the idea that constructions are cognitively plausible entities. This would, however,
entail the question of why the concept of constructions is needed in the first place.
A third, and potentially the most promising, approach is to adopt a gradualist
notion of constructionhood (see Ungerer 2023) – an idea that is also implicit in
Goldberg’s latest definition and Langacker’s entrenchment criterion, as discussed
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earlier in this section. On this view, construction status is not conceived of as

a binary concept according to which a linguistic unit either counts as
a construction or does not. Instead, this approach assumes a gradient scale of
constructionhood, understood as the degree to which a pattern is mentally
encoded. This view, of course, entails challenges of its own: For example, the
question remains of how degrees of constructionhood can be measured and
whether such quantification could be used to define a threshold that patterns
have to cross to be included in the constructional inventory of a given analysis
(see also Section 4.3). However, there are good arguments in favor of
a reconceptualization of constructions in gradualist terms – for instance, dia-
chronic studies show very clearly that the emergence of constructions is usually
a gradual process (Hartmann 2021; Traugott & Trousdale 2013).
As this discussion has illustrated, the concept of “construction” has under-
gone a considerable evolution over the last thirty years, and yet researchers are
still grappling with its definition and operationalization. The different defin-
itions of the concept have important consequences for the question of which
 Constructionist Approaches 11

linguistic units can be regarded as constructions – including the question of

whether words and morphemes should count as constructions, which is the issue
to which we now turn.

2.3 The Lower Boundary: Words and Morphemes

as Constructions?
As the preceding sections have shown, Construction Grammarians initially
focused on the analysis of idiomatic phrasal constructions such as let alone,
before extending their purview to more general clause-level patterns like the
ditransitive construction. Subsequent research, however, has also applied CxG
principles to the “lower” end of the grammatical system, that is, to the lexical
and morphological level. One important question in this context is how far
“down” the notion of construction extends: Does it include words or even
morphemes? We will address this question in two steps, starting with (bound)
morphemes and then discussing the status of lexical items. As we shall see, this
topic is another example of a seemingly simple question that has given rise to
a complex and still ongoing debate.
Starting with the morphological level, some authors have relatively straight-
forwardly assumed that morphemes are constructions (e.g. Boas 2013; Goldberg
2006). This seems to make intuitive sense for free morphemes that form mono-
morphemic words such as car or about. These units match the definitions of
“construction” laid out in the previous section: They combine a linguistic form
with a meaning, and they are not predictable from other similar items or from their
component parts. The same argument has also been made for bound morphemes
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like pre- or -ing (Goldberg 2006: 5), which are traditionally regarded as carrying
lexical or grammatical meaning. This is, however, where Booij (2010) disagrees:
He argues that morphemes should not be regarded as constructions “because
morphemes are not linguistic signs, i.e. independent pairings of form and mean-
ing” (Booij 2010: 15). In his view, bound morphemes are not meaningful on their
own but only when combined with other items, which is why they are best
accounted for by frame-and-slot patterns such as [[X]A-ness]N (as in greatness).
According to Booij, the latter templates are constructions, but the morphemes that
occur in them are not.
Booij’s view is appealing, even though one might wonder whether there
is really a fundamental difference between regarding bound morphemes as
constructions while stipulating that they cannot occur without a base, and
positing a morphological construction that combines the morpheme with its
(underspecified) base. Perhaps some scholars intend the former option as
a shorthand version of the latter: Croft (2001), for example, states that
 12 Construction Grammar

morphemes can be constructions (p. 25), but he simultaneously illustrates them

with constructional frames like [NOUN-s] (p. 17). Another complication is that
the “independence” of a unit (whether it is free or bound) is sometimes difficult
to assert, and that the distinction between morphemes and free words may rather
be a continuum (Haspelmath 2011). This becomes particularly clear if we look
at processes of grammaticalization in which affixes arise from lexical items, as
in the development of English -dom (e.g. in kingdom) from Old English dom
‘judgment, doom’ (Traugott & Trousdale 2013: 170).
Moving on to the lexical level, there is also disagreement about whether
words should count as constructions, even though the reasons for this debate are
different. On one side of the discussion, some scholars defend a fairly radical
version of the lexicon–syntax continuum (see Section 1), according to which
words like apple are, in terms of their status as constructions, fundamentally the
same as clause-level constructions like the ditransitive and differ from the latter
only in their degree of abstraction (Hoffmann 2022: 10). In contrast, other
researchers (e.g. Dąbrowska 2009; Diessel 2015) have argued that simple
words should not be regarded as constructions, while complex words such as
armchair and forgetful should. This is not, however, because these authors do
not perceive monomorphemic words as meaningful; rather, they advocate
a narrower understanding of the term “construction,” restricting it to “grammat-
ical patterns that involve at least two meaningful elements, e.g., two mor-
phemes, words or phrases” (Diessel 2019: 11). Meanwhile, on this view, both
simple words and constructions (in the narrow sense) are subsumed under the
concept of signs in their traditional Saussurean sense as pairings of form and
meaning.4 This understanding of “sign” therefore corresponds to other scholars’
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use of “construction” in its wide sense – as a result, researchers who adopt the
latter view (e.g. Booij 2010; Traugott & Trousdale 2013) often use both terms
interchangeably.
The question of whether “sign” or “construction” should serve as the coverall
term for the basic units of language may be partly a terminological issue. As
Diessel (2019: 11) notes, restricting the term “construction” to complex units
echoes its use in traditional grammar (see also Langacker 1987: 83–87). On the
other hand, it could be argued that the label “Construction Grammar” implies
a wide understanding of the concept, according to which it encompasses
the entirety of speakers’ grammatical knowledge (in line with Goldberg’s

4
The concepts of “sign” and “construction” are also distinguished in Sign-Based CxG (Sag 2012;
see Section 3), even though they are used somewhat differently. In this theory, signs correspond to
lexemes and fixed multiword expressions; several signs can combine into composite units called
“constructs.” Meanwhile, “constructions” are descriptions (i.e. sets of constraints) that license
constructs, whereas “listemes” license signs.
 Constructionist Approaches 13

[2006: 18] claim that “it’s constructions all the way down”; see Section 2.2).
Terminology aside, however, the deeper underlying question is whether or not
there is a fundamental distinction between simple and complex constructions
(or, using the alternative terms, between lexical and constructional signs).
Diessel (2019: 11) argues that such a distinction is indeed crucial because
“lexemes and constructions are learned and processed in very different ways.”
According to his view (Diessel 2019: 107–111), lexemes are characterized by
the fact that they tap directly into speakers’ world knowledge and are embedded
in rich semantic networks.5 (Complex) constructions, on the other hand, do not
tap directly into encyclopedic knowledge; rather, they provide speakers with
“processing instructions” for how lexemes should be combined and interpreted
together. Diessel’s view also draws support from neurolinguistic evidence
suggesting that there are considerable differences in the processing of lexical
items compared with units above the word level (Pulvermüller, Cappelle, &
Shtyrov 2013).
Nevertheless, the distinction between lexemes and constructions is compli-
cated by several factors. First, the central notion of complexity deserves closer
attention. At first glance, a complex construction can be relatively easily defined
as a pattern that is composed of multiple discernible units or constituents
(comparable to the distinction between simplex and complex words; see e.g.
Booij 2012: 7). One question, however, is which features of constructions are at
issue: Does complexity concern their form or also their meaning? Dąbrowska
(2009: 217), for example, taking a Langackerian Cognitive Grammar perspec-
tive, argues that relational words such as verbs qualify as constructions because
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they are complex at both the semantic and the phonological levels. This view
rests on the assumption that the semantics of a verb include representations for
the participants involved in the event or action encoded by the verb. For
example, Dąbrowska suggests that the lexical representation of trudge contains
representations for the walker and the setting, similar to the more abstract
intransitive motion construction, which includes representations for the mover
and the path.6

5
Note that Diessel’s (2019: 11) use of the term “lexemes” also includes morphemes, which is again
relevant to the earlier discussion in this section about the status of morphemes as constructions.
6
This is closely connected to the concept of valency (Tesnière 1959), that is, the capability of
linguistic units to combine with different “actants,” which has started to gain increasing attention
in CxG. The complex ways in which the valency of individual verbs interacts with the construc-
tions in which they occur (Goldberg 1995) casts some more doubt on the strict division between
the lexical and the constructional level. Several scholars have indeed argued that a constructionist
approach to language can be fruitfully combined with a theory of valency (see e.g. Herbst 2007,
2011; Stefanowitsch 2011).
 14 Construction Grammar

Another challenge for the distinction between simple and complex linguistic
units is that words differ in their degree of analyzability, as has been convincingly
demonstrated in the psycholinguistic literature (Hay 2003; Hay & Baayen 2002).
This has ramifications not only for their production and processing but also for
their phonetic realization (Bell, Ben Hadia, & Plag 2021) and even for the
occurrence of spelling variants (Gahl & Plag 2019). For instance, a word like
discernment can be segmented more readily than a word like government (Hay
2003: 136). This can be explained by assuming that complex words lead
a “double existence” as instances of a (morphological) construction on the one
hand and as lexical items in their own right on the other. The same has been
argued for phrasal idioms such as pull strings, which seem to be simultaneously
analyzed into their component parts and processed holistically (Bybee 1998: 424–
425). The fact that expressions can thus be perceived as simple and complex at the
same time, and that they may vary in how strongly they lean toward one pole or
the other, suggests that the distinction between lexemes and complex construc-
tions may be more gradient than is sometimes assumed.
Summing up, there seem to be arguments both in favor of and against
drawing a distinction between simple and complex signs, and consequently
between a wide and a narrow use of the term “construction.” While this casts
doubt on radical conceptions that do not assume any qualitative differences
between lexical and grammatical (or syntactic) constructions, it does not invali-
date the idea that lexicon and grammar form opposite ends of a continuum.
Regarding the question of what counts as a construction, these findings also
support the idea of reconceptualizing constructionhood as a gradient and
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dynamic notion that can accommodate a range of construction types that behave
in potentially dissimilar ways.

2.4 Summary
In this section, we have given a brief historical overview of the evolution of
constructionist approaches, focusing on the key concept of construction itself.
We have reviewed several definitions of constructions, arguing for a gradient
and dynamic notion of constructionhood that is also compatible with the most
recent definition of constructions proposed by Goldberg (2019). We have also
sketched out some ongoing controversies about what types of linguistic units
should be seen as constructions. In particular, the jury is still out regarding the
question of whether words and morphemes can be considered constructions.
An aspect that we have not yet addressed is to what extent the theoretical
disagreements about the definition of constructions affect scholars’ daily research
practice. In some cases, the practical ramifications for linguistic analyses may be
 Constructionist Approaches 15

arguably quite limited: For example, researchers can use similar constructionist
principles to account for lexical and morphological processes without agreeing
on the exact definitions of terms like “construction” and “sign.” This may also
explain why constructionist scholars can have very compatible views of language
and still continue to debate the exact nature of these key concepts.

3 From Sign-Based to Radical: “Flavors”

of Construction Grammar
The present Element could have been called Construction Grammar. But as
CxG has developed into a highly diverse field, it has become quite common
to follow, for instance, Goldberg (2013) in speaking of “constructionist
approaches.” It is, of course, not always possible to tell different approaches
clearly apart, nor to allocate individual researchers to a specific constructionist
framework. After all, CxG is a very dynamic field of research that takes
a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach to language, which entails that
many details concerning its theoretical foundations are continually in flux.
Nevertheless, we can distinguish different types of CxG along some key
parameters. Ziem and Lasch (2013), for example, propose a coarse-grained
distinction between formal constructionist approaches, on the one hand, and
cognitive, usage-based, and typologically oriented approaches, on the other.
Among the formal approaches are Berkeley CxG (Fillmore et al. 1988), Sign-
Based CxG (Sag 2012), Fluid CxG (Steels 2011) and Embodied CxG (Bergen &
Chang 2005).7 Meanwhile, the main frameworks that fall into the other (less
formal) group are Cognitive CxG (e.g. Goldberg 1995) and Radical CxG (Croft
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2001).8 We cannot give an extensive overview of each of those different

approaches here – for more in-depth introductions to the individual frameworks,
we refer the reader to the excellent summaries that already exist (see e.g. the
contributions in Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013 and the further references in
Table 1 in Section 3.4). Instead, we will discuss some important commonalities
and differences between the six above-mentioned approaches, focusing on three
key areas: formalization, research foci and methods. We will address these

7
Note that, for ease of reading, we use partial abbreviations (e.g. Sign-Based CxG) in the following
rather than the full acronyms (in this case, SBCG) that are otherwise common.
8
We focus here on six major frameworks that have explicitly assumed the label “CxG.” We do not
discuss Langacker’s (1987, 2008) Cognitive Grammar in detail, even though the framework
shares many of its assumptions with (especially usage-based) CxG and is sometimes regarded as
a type of CxG (e.g. Langacker 2005). We also cannot address the Parallel Architecture
(Jackendoff 2002; Jackendoff & Audring 2020). Furthermore, the limited space here does not
allow us to discuss a few of the lesser-known constructionist approaches, such as Dynamic CxG
(Dominey et al. 2017), Template CxG (Barrès 2017), and Utterance CxG (Cienki 2017).
 16 Construction Grammar

aspects in turn, considering in particular the more recent developments that

have taken place in each framework.

3.1 Formalization
Even though all constructionist approaches employ some degree of formaliza-
tion, a rough distinction can be drawn between approaches that use more
elaborate and strictly defined formal conventions and those that do not. As
mentioned at the beginning of Section 3, Berkeley, Sign-Based, Fluid, and
Embodied CxG can be counted among the more formal frameworks, while
Cognitive and Radical CxG constitute less formal variants.
The formal Construction Grammars share two important characteristics.
First, they represent constructions in the form of feature structures, and more
specifically as attribute-value matrices (AVMs). Each construction is character-
ized by a number of syntactic attributes, for example syntactic category and
valence, and semantic attributes, such as reference and thematic roles; each of
these attributes is assigned a unique value. This is illustrated in Figure 1 with
a Sign-Based CxG analysis of the subject–predicate construction, which
licenses basic declarative clauses (Michaelis 2013). As the diagram shows,
the construction specifies two daughters that combine into a mother node. The
head daughter H, in this case the verb, is defined by several syntactic features:
its category (finite verb), its valents (the other daughter X, here the subject), and
its marking (i.e. the absence of a grammatical marker such as the complement-
izer that). The mother node is similarly unmarked, and has an empty valence list
because it selects no further arguments. Naturally, specific frameworks vary
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somewhat in terms of the attributes they use and how flexibly they handle them.
Especially the computationally oriented approaches, Fluid CxG and Embodied
CxG, tend to be relatively agnostic regarding what specific features should be
included in the representations, as long as they improve the performance of the
models (Steels 2017: 188).
The second hallmark of formal Construction Grammars concerns the
specific mechanism they use to combine feature structures: unification.

Figure 1 Sign-Based CxG formalism: a feature-based analysis of the subject–

predicate construction (reproduced from Michaelis 2013: 142)
 Constructionist Approaches 17

This operation has played a long-standing role in constraint-based theories

such as Gazdar et al.’s (1985) Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar
(GPSG) and Pollard and Sag’s (1987) Head-Driven Phrase Structure
Grammar (HPSG), both of which heavily inspired Sign-Based CxG (see
Michaelis 2015: 151). Unification is defined as an operation by which two
structures that have matching feature values combine into a new structure
that “contains no more and no less than what is contained in its component
AVMs” (Fried & Östman 2004: 33; see also Shieber 1986). For example,
returning to the example in Figure 1, the verb unifies with an argument
that matches its valence specification in order to form a subject–predicate
phrase.
In contrast to the aforementioned approaches, the less formal Construction
Grammars – Cognitive CxG and Radical CxG – use neither AVM-style
feature structures nor unification. The lack of formalism in these approaches
is intentional, as Goldberg (2013: 29) highlights: “I have avoided using all
but the most minimal formalization in my own work because I believe the
necessary use of features that formalism requires misleads researchers into
believing that there might be a finite list of features or that many or most of
the features are valid in cross-linguistic work. The facts belie this
implication.”
Goldberg (2006: 216–217) provides several further arguments against the use
of AVMs for representing constructions. For example, she remarks that formal-
ist approaches often do not account for the rich frame semantics of constructions
and instead describe their semantic features in terms of simple “constants.”
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Moreover, she argues that formal analyses tend to overemphasize syntactic

features over semantic ones, and that the formalisms are usually too unwieldy
to capture the amount and complexity of speakers’ constructional knowledge.
Finally, the aforementioned quote from Goldberg (2013) also questions the
typological validity of the features used in formal approaches, a theme that is
particularly prominent in Croft’s Radical CxG. Croft (2001, 2020) argues
against the universality of grammatical categories such as word classes (e.g.
noun, adjective) and syntactic relations (e.g. subject, object). Based on evidence
from typologically distant languages, he shows that both the syntactic environ-
ments that define word classes and the linking mechanisms between verbs and
their arguments vary considerably across languages. As a result, he suggests
that word classes are characterized by language-specific constructions and that
syntactic relations can be derived from underlying semantic relations (again, in
construction-specific ways).
It is debatable whether Goldberg’s and Croft’s criticisms – also considering
that some of them were stated a while ago – still paint an accurate picture of
 18 Construction Grammar

formal Construction Grammars, and if so, how the problems they identify
could be resolved. For one, some of the authors’ remarks have been accom-
modated by the formal approaches: Features, for example, can have complex
values, so the semantic attributes of AVMs can be filled by rich semantic
frames, a practice that has been adopted in recent formal work (Sag 2012;
Steels 2017). It also seems feasible that the features posited by these frame-
works could be defined in language-specific ways rather than via universal
primitives, thus accounting for typological variability in their realization (see
e.g. Fried & Östman 2004: 77).
Another question is whether the less formal varieties of CxG deal more
successfully with the challenges identified by Goldberg and Croft. While
nonformal Construction Grammars typically do not rely on elaborate fea-
ture structures, they nevertheless characterize constructions in terms of
their salient properties. Compare Figure 2, which reproduces a Cognitive
CxG analysis of the ditransitive construction (Goldberg 2006; see
Section 2.2 for examples). The upper half of the diagram outlines the
semantic properties of the construction (its overall meaning and the the-
matic roles it comprises), while the lower half specifies its syntactic
functions. Other researchers working in nonformal Construction
Grammars have used even more abbreviated representations, such as the
bracketed notation in (8). Nevertheless, both these representations com-
prise the same features that could also be listed as part of an AVM (e.g. as
a valence list or within a semantic frame). It is also worth noting that
Figure 2 makes use of the same grammatical categories (e.g. syntactic
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functions) that Croft (2000, 2021) criticizes for their lack of crosslinguistic
validity. While these categories may not be crosslinguistically stable, it
appears that, for the purposes of a language-specific analysis, they provide
a useful and ultimately indispensable way of capturing generalizations.

(8) [[SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2] ↔ [X CAUSE Y to RECEIVE Z]] (Traugott &

Trousdale 2013: 59)

Figure 2 Cognitive CxG analysis of the ditransitive construction

(reproduced from Goldberg 2006: 20)
 Constructionist Approaches 19

All things considered, there may be no principled reasons why Construction

Grammars should or should not rely on a certain degree of formalization.
Rather, it seems that the differences between frameworks are largely a result
of their specific research goals (which will be discussed in more detail in the
next section). For example, a primary goal of Sign-Based CxG and related
formal approaches is to account for “the licensing of word strings by rules of
syntactic and semantic composition” (Michaelis 2015: 151) – an enterprise that
these frameworks share with traditional generative grammar. For this purpose, it
seems feasible to employ a rigorous unification-based formalism that captures
how well-formed structures arise from feature matching among their compo-
nent parts. Moreover, unification lends itself to computational implementation
(Knight 1989); and the algorithms are not affected by how detailed and poten-
tially “unwieldy” the AVMs are. For the less formal Construction Grammars, on
the other hand, the readability of the representations is an important consider-
ation, and researchers tend to highlight only those features of constructions that
are relevant for their respective analyses. For the purposes of the latter – which
focus on the mental representation of constructions and their use in naturalistic
speech – the use of precise formalisms may thus be less important.

3.2 Research Foci

As hinted at in Section 3.1, the different “flavors” of CxG are not only distin-
guished by their degree of formalization, but they also differ in terms of the
research questions they tend to emphasize. Broadly, three subgroups can be
distinguished in this context, characterized by their respective focus on
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(i) grammatical description; (ii) computational modeling; or (iii) the cognitive

and typological dimensions of language use.
Starting with the first group, Berkeley CxG and its successor framework, Sign-
Based CxG, have primarily been concerned with providing detailed descriptions
of grammatical phenomena, using the formal tools discussed in the previous
section. As outlined in Section 2.1, the early work by the Berkeley group focused
particularly on analyses of partially filled idioms, such as let alone (Fillmore
et al. 1988) and the What’s X doing Y? construction (Kay & Fillmore 1999). This
interest was soon extended to constructions in other languages that carry specific
syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic properties, such as right-detached comme in
French, as in C’est cher, comme appareil, ça ‘That’s an expensive camera’
(Lambrecht 2004). Moreover, proponents of the framework have also investi-
gated more general, nonidiomatic phenomena, such as extraposition (Michaelis
& Lambrecht 1996) and different verb-complementation patterns (Fillmore
2013).
 20 Construction Grammar

This line of research has been carried on by Sign-Based CxG, which was
partially developed by proponents of the earlier Berkeley approach. In his
detailed overview of the paradigm, Sag (2012) provides Sign-Based analyses
of a broad range of construction types, including lexical classes (e.g. the main
verb construction), inflectional morphology (e.g. the preterite construction),
phrasal structure (e.g. the head-complement construction), and argument struc-
ture (e.g. the ditransitive). It has been suggested that Sign-Based CxG tends to
focus more on the formal-syntactic rather than the semantic aspects of construc-
tions (e.g. Feldman 2020: 151). For example, to account for filler-gap phenom-
ena such as wh-interrogatives and topicalization, Sag (2010) posits an
overarching construction that only has formal specifications but no meaning.
This contrasts with other views, primarily by proponents of Cognitive CxG,
who have called the existence of meaningless schemas into question, arguing
instead that every construction must have a meaning, even if only a highly
abstract one (Goldberg 2006: 166–182; Hilpert 2019: 50–74; Sommerer and
Baumann 2021: 125–126).
Moving on to the second group of theories that share an overall research goal,
Fluid CxG and Embodied CxG aim primarily at constructing computational
models of language processing. As a result, the two frameworks focus particu-
larly on the practical challenges involved in creating functional CxG implemen-
tations. Still, the two approaches differ somewhat in terms of their backgrounds
and research foci. Fluid CxG has been under development at computer science
labs in Paris and Brussels since the late 1990s. Its main goal is to create
a construction-based architecture for language production and comprehension
(Steels 2017). In doing so, the proponents of the framework “do not make any
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claims about biological realism or cognitive relevance” (Steels 2017: 181),

focusing instead on maximizing the descriptive coverage of their models.
Recent analyses have addressed a range of constructions, including English
auxiliaries (Van Trijp 2017) and long-distance dependencies (Van Trijp 2014),
Dutch word order (Van Eecke 2017), and Spanish verb conjugation (Beuls
2017). Moreover, the approach has been used to model aspects of language
evolution (Steels 2012; Steels & Szathmáry 2016). In parallel to these research
contributions, Fluid CxG has generated a number of real-world applications,
among them a model for visual question answering (i.e. answering text ques-
tions about images; Nevens, Eecke, & Beuls 2019) and a platform for analyzing
opinions on social media (Willaert et al. 2020).
Embodied CxG, on the other hand, developed out of the Neural Theory of
Language project (Feldman 2006) at the University of California, Berkeley. As
a result, its proponents aim to model speakers’ grammatical processing specif-
ically in relation to its neural underpinnings. In contrast to the other formally
 Constructionist Approaches 21

oriented Construction Grammars, Embodied CxG emphasizes the analysis of

meaning, and of embodied meaning in particular (Feldman 2020: 151). As
Bergen and Chang (2013) outline, the framework aims to account for the role
of embodied simulation in language processing, that is, speakers’ tendency to
activate perceptual and motor systems in the brain that recreate experiences
similar to the ones that arise during actual perception or movement (Barsalou
1999). Previous studies have used Embodied CxG to analyze phenomena such
as the English caused-motion construction (Dodge & Petruck 2014) and
Hebrew verbal morphology (Schneider 2010), and to model aspects of gram-
matical parsing (Bryant 2008) and acquisition (Mok 2009). Recent work,
meanwhile, has somewhat moved away from linguistic analysis and instead
focused on technological applications in natural language understanding,
including verbal control of robots (Eppe et al. 2016) and a system for providing
health advice (Feldman 2020).
Finally, as a third group that is characterized by similar research goals,
Cognitive CxG and Radical CxG focus on the cognitive, typological, and
contextual factors that underlie and shape speakers’ grammatical knowledge.
In contrast to the above-mentioned frameworks, these approaches identify
themselves as “usage-based” (see e.g. Barlow & Kemmer 2000; Langacker
1988; Tomasello 2003), devoting their attention to how “experience with
language creates and impacts the cognitive representations for language”
(Bybee 2013: 49). As a result, the frameworks are sometimes grouped under
the broader label of “Usage-Based CxG” (e.g. Diessel 2015).9 Compared with
the other approaches discussed above, proponents of usage-based Construction
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Grammars tend to focus less on the form side of constructions and more on
characterizing their rich meanings in psychologically plausible ways, using
concepts such as construal (Langacker 2019), conceptual blending (Turner
2019), and semantic maps for cross-linguistic comparisons (Croft 2022).
Despite their similarities, Cognitive and Radical CxG also differ in terms
of their research questions. Proponents of Cognitive CxG are particularly con-
cerned with how constructions motivate each other in virtue of their mutual
similarities and associative relations (Booij 2017; Goldberg 1995; Lakoff 1987),
a notion that is captured by positing networks of constructions (see Section 4 for
a detailed discussion). In addition, they often study how speakers’ linguistic
behavior is shaped by domain-general cognitive processes such as attention,

9
A reviewer points out that early work in Cognitive CxG can be considered less usage-based than
current approaches, as it did not really capture the dynamic view of grammar that characterizes
the usage-based approach, and instead relied on concepts like inheritance that can be traced back
to more formal approaches to grammar. On this view, Cognitive CxG has experienced a “usage-
based turn.”
 22 Construction Grammar

categorization, analogy, and social cognition (e.g. Bybee 2013; Diessel 2019;
Goldberg 2019). As what is probably the largest strand of CxG to date, Cognitive
CxG has spawned an extensive body of work. While the paradigm became
initially known particularly for its analyses of argument-structure constructions
(e.g. Boas 2003; Goldberg 1995; Perek 2015), its proponents have since tackled
a wide range of other phenomena, including (but not limited to) complex clauses
(Hoffmann 2011), information structure (Goldberg 2005), discourse organiza-
tion (Traugott 2022), tense and modality (Bergs 2010; Cappelle & Depraetere
2016), and phrase-internal structure (Sommerer 2018), as well as inflectional and
derivational morphology (Booij 2010). The framework is also often extended to
diachrony, with many proponents of “Diachronic Construction Grammar”
(Coussé, Andersson, & Olofsson 2018; Sommerer & Smirnova 2020; Traugott
& Trousdale 2013) situating their work broadly within Goldbergian usage-based
CxG (see Section 4.1 for an explanation of key diachronic concepts such as
“constructionalization”). Moreover, there has been considerable research on
language acquisition, focusing in particular on children’s early item-based
constructions (e.g. ___ gone, as in Cherry gone; Tomasello 1992), the emergence
of abstract constructions, and the acquisition of complex sentences (for over-
views, see Behrens 2021; Diessel 2013; Tomasello 2003).
Radical CxG, on the other hand, relies on a smaller body of work, most of
it created by William Croft (e.g. 2001; 2020). The framework has a strong
typological focus, centering on the question of which aspects of speakers’
grammatical knowledge are language- and construction-specific, and which
ones may be universal. In his work, Croft discusses many grammatical core
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phenomena, including word classes, argument structure, syntactic roles, and

grammatical categories like voice, aspect, and tense. Further applications have
extended the framework to aspects of grammar acquisition (Deuchar and
Vihman 2005) and template-based phonology (Vihman & Croft 2007) as well
as modal and discourse particles (Fischer & Alm 2013).

3.3 Methods
Across the different constructionist approaches, there is a broad consensus that
in order to understand the nature and use of constructions, we need evidence
from a wide variety of sources – more technically, we have to triangulate
evidence from different methodological approaches (Baker & Egbert 2016).
Still, we can draw some broad generalizations in terms of which methods the
different approaches are most closely connected to.
First, it should be acknowledged that all types of CxG rely to some extent on
the “introspective” method, that is, researchers’ use of their own intuitive
 Constructionist Approaches 23

judgments to analyze selected examples and develop theoretical accounts (but

see Willems 2012 for potential differences between introspection and intuition).
Introspection plays a crucial role in all theoretical and descriptive approaches to
grammar: As Janda (2013: 6) points out, “[i]ntrospection is irreplaceable in the
descriptive documentation of language” (see also Talmy 2007). While many
Construction Grammarians, especially proponents of the more usage-based
varieties, are skeptical of introspection, perceiving it perhaps as a hallmark of
more traditional (generative) analyses (Willems 2012: 665), the method never-
theless serves an important role in hypothesis generation, theory building, and
the interpretation of results.
Beyond that, most Construction Grammarians agree that introspection needs
to be combined with other sources of evidence, but specific approaches differ in
terms of what methods they use and the extent to which they apply them.
Naturally, the choice of methods is closely related to the research goals of the
different frameworks. As such, Berkeley and Sign-Based CxG tend to rely
relatively strongly on fine-grained theoretical analyses, in line with their goal
of providing a formally rigorous account of the grammatical system.
Nevertheless, work in these areas has also been partially assisted by corpus
methods – see, for example, Brenier and Michaelis (2005) for a corpus-based
study of copula doubling in the context of formal CxG.
Especially Cognitive CxG has developed a broad inventory of empirical
methods to study the synchronic and diachronic use of constructions and draw
inferences about their representation in speakers’ minds. In particular, propon-
ents of the framework draw on an ever-expanding set of corpus-based methods.
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These approaches are guided by the usage-based assumption that linguistic

knowledge is experience-based: Children learn language by detecting patterns
in the input they receive, thus building up a dynamic network of constructions
that is subject to lifelong reorganization (Ambridge & Lieven 2011; Taylor
2012; Tomasello 2003). In line with this, constructionist corpus analyses aim at
gauging language users’ linguistic knowledge on the basis of frequency and
distribution data from authentic usage. They draw primarily on measures of
frequency, dispersion, and association (Divjak 2019; Gries 2008), distributional
semantic methods (Hilpert & Perek 2015; Perek 2016), and (most recently)
artificial neural networks (Budts 2022; Budts & Petré 2020).
One particularly widespread corpus-based method in constructionist work is
collostructional analysis (Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004; Stefanowitsch & Gries
2003, 2005). Following a long tradition of corpus-linguistic approaches that
investigate collocations, that is, words that occur together, collostructional
analysis focuses on the interaction between words and constructions. Consider,
for instance, the into-causative construction, as in They talked us into writing this
 24 Construction Grammar

Element: Using the simplest version of collostructional analysis, simple collex-

eme analysis, Stefanowitsch and Gries (2003: 225) show that words like trick,
fool, and coerce occur at above-chance level in the first verb slot of this
construction, when compared to their total corpus frequency. Using covarying
collexeme analysis, which focuses on the co-occurrence of items in
a construction with two open slots, Stefanowitsch and Gries (2005: 13) further-
more show that fool and thinking are most likely to occur together in the
construction, while other verb pairs like force into thinking or provoke into
accepting are much less likely to co-occur. Importantly, collostructional tech-
niques are also subject to constant refinement, as their methodological rationale
and cognitive underpinnings have been controversially, and sometimes heatedly,
debated (Gries 2015; Küchenhoff & Schmid 2015; Schmid & Küchenhoff 2013).
These corpus approaches have come to be increasingly complemented by
experimental paradigms, which are used especially by proponents of Cognitive
CxG but also inform research in other frameworks such as Fluid and Embodied
CxG (e.g. Bergen 2007; Feldman 2006). Commonly used methods include
acceptability judgments (Dąbrowska 2008; Gries & Wulff 2009), sorting tasks
(Bencini & Goldberg 2000; Perek 2012), artificial language learning
(Casenhiser & Goldberg 2005; Perek & Goldberg 2015), priming (Busso,
Perek, & Lenci, 2021; Ungerer 2021, 2022), and a number of other techniques,
such as sentence repetition (Diessel & Tomasello 2005) and sentence comple-
tion (Perek 2015). Experimental approaches are needed because many aspects
related to the processing, storage, and acquisition of constructions cannot be
satisfactorily answered on the basis of corpus data alone. Among other things,
experimental studies have lent support to the cognitive reality of “construc-
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tions” as meaningful elements of speakers’ linguistic knowledge. Bencini and

Goldberg (2000), for example, presented speakers with a list of sentences that
differed either in terms of the verb they contained or the construction they
instantiated, and asked participants to sort the sentences into categories.
Interestingly, the authors found that participants were more likely to group
instances of the same construction into a category than sentences with the
same verb. This suggests that constructions are psychologically real units that
play an important role for the way speakers categorize the linguistic input.
Meanwhile, artificial language-learning experiments can shed light on how
the input shapes speakers’ acquisition of new constructions. In Perek and
Goldberg’s (2015) study, for example, participants were exposed to made-up
verbs (e.g. moop) that occurred in novel constructions (featuring non-English
word orders). Depending on whether the verbs combined with different con-
structions or always with the same construction during the training phase,
participants used them either more “liberally” or more “conservatively” in
 Constructionist Approaches 25

a subsequent productive task, suggesting that the input determined what con-
structional generalizations speakers formed. Finally, priming studies are par-
ticularly informative about relations between constructions in speakers’ mental
networks. This follows from the assumption that the degree to which one
construction primes, that is, affects the processing of, another construction
functions as an indicator of how similar speakers’ representations of the two
patterns are (Ungerer 2022; see Section 4.1 for details).
While constructionist research has thus drawn on a variety of experimental
methods, the paradigm could further benefit from other techniques used in the
wider context of cognitive linguistics, especially in experimental semantics
(Matlock & Winter 2015) and experimental semiotics (Nölle & Galantucci
2023). Research in the former field, which investigates the meaning not only
of individual words but also of constructions, has obvious implications for
constructionist work. For example, using a mouse-tracking paradigm,
Anderson, Matlock, and Spivery (2013) found interesting differences between
sentences with varying aspectual construal (progressive vs. nonprogressive),
thus supporting the cognitive-linguistic hypothesis that distinct grammatical
constructions yield differences in semantic construal. Experimental semiotics,
meanwhile, addresses the question of how symbolic systems come about by
conducting laboratory studies that involve novel communication systems. For
instance, Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008) and Christensen, Fusaroli and Tylén
(2016) used silent-gesture paradigms to account for the emergence and cogni-
tive underpinnings of cross-linguistically well-attested word-order preferences.
Especially for usage-based CxG, which sees language as a highly dynamic
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system, the results of these studies are particularly relevant because they can
help explain common pathways of language change and grammaticalization (or
“constructionalization”; see Section 4.1).
Returning to other methods used in CxG, constructionist work in the
Berkeley tradition has given rise to a research strand that we have not addressed
so far and which uses lexicographic methods to build large-scale repositories of
constructions. Researchers working in this area, which has become known as
“constructicography” (Lyngfelt et al. 2018), create construction entries that are
then linked up with semantic frames from FrameNet (Fillmore et al. 2012).
A semantic frame is here defined as “any system of concepts related in such
a way that to understand any one concept it is necessary to understand the entire
system” (Petruck 2022: 592). Constructional inventories, or “construct-i-cons”
(see Section 4), are currently being built for several languages, including
English (Perek & Patten 2019), German (Ziem, Flick, & Sandkühler 2019),
Russian (Janda et al. 2018), and Brazilian Portuguese (Torrent et al. 2018).
While such constructional inventories can form the basis for cross-linguistic
 26 Construction Grammar

comparisons, the strand of CxG that has most strongly focused on comparative
methods is arguably Radical CxG. Notably, proponents of this paradigm often
rely on qualitative analyses rather than quantitative tools (but see e.g. Deuchar
& Vihman 2005 for quantitative case studies of language acquisition from
a Radical CxG perspective).
Finally, the methods discussed so far are complemented by computational
approaches, which are used in particular by Fluid and Embodied CxG to model
aspects of language comprehension and/or production. Fluid CxG provides
what is arguably the most advanced computational implementation of CxG to
date. The use of this formalism has been recently facilitated by the release of the
FCG Editor (Van Trijp, Beuls, & Van Eecke 2022), an open-source development
tool with which researchers can customize their own grammars for sentence
parsing and production. Proponents of Fluid CxG have also created models of
language learning and evolution using autonomous robots that play language
games (Steels & Hild 2012). Embodied CxG, meanwhile, has developed its own
development platform, the ECG workbench (Eppe et al. 2016), even though the
latter seems to have more limited functionality than its Fluid CxG counterpart
(Van Trijp et al. 2022: 6–7).

3.4 Summary
In this section, we have provided a brief sketch of the six major variants of CxG,
focusing on their similarities and differences in terms of formalization, research
goals, and methods. The results of our comparisons are summarized in Table 1.
Of course, the broad generalizations we have outlined are limited in several
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ways: They cannot do justice to the whole body of work in the respective areas,
nor is it always possible to decide which specific framework a certain contribu-
tion should be attributed to. For example, the constructicography projects
described in Section 3.3 (i.e. the creation of language-specific constructional
inventories) stand in the tradition of Berkeley-style frame semantics, but they
also share elements with other constructionist approaches, for example with
respect to their usage-based orientation and the use of data-driven methods.
Such overlap across frameworks is to be expected: After all, CxG is an eclectic
and constantly developing field, whose proponents share many of their core
assumptions and thus often enter into fruitful collaborations.

4 Connecting the Dots: The Construct-i-con

Despite the differences that exist between specific constructionist frameworks,
as discussed in the previous section, all Construction Grammarians agree on
certain fundamental assumptions. One of these ideas – that language comes in
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Table 1 Summary of similarities and differences among the six “flavors” of Construction Grammar

Sign-Based
Berkeley CxG CxG Fluid CxG Embodied CxG Cognitive CxG Radical CxG
Formalization High degree of formalization, characterized by attribute value matrices (AVMs) Limited formalization with varying notations
and unification (e.g. boxes, brackets)
Research foci Grammatical description, both of Computational modeling of language Cognitive and typological dimensions of
idiomatic and “regular” comprehension and/or production; language use; usage-based orientation;
constructions; focus on language learning and evolution; focus on constructional meaning; language
constructional form technological applications change and acquisition
Methods Introspective analysis; some Introspective analysis; computational Introspective Introspective
empirical (corpus-based) work; modeling (using customized software); analysis; extensive analysis; (largely
constructicography psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic corpus-based qualitative) cross-
evidence work; linguistic
experimental comparisons
methods
Core Fillmore (2013); Boas and Steels (2011, Bergen and Chang (2005, Boas (2013); Croft (2001, 2013,
references Fillmore et al. Sag 2013, 2013); Feldman, Goldberg (1995, 2020)
(1988); Fried (2012); 2017); Van Dodge, and Bryant 2006, 2019);
and Östman Michaelis Trijp et al. (2015); Feldman Hilpert (2019)
(2004) (2013, (2022) (2020)
2015)
 28 Construction Grammar

the format of form–meaning pairings, or constructions – was introduced in

Section 2. Here we discuss a second core tenet: namely that constructions do not
exist in isolation from each other, but that rather their forms and meanings are
intricately interconnected. To account for these relationships, Construction
Grammarians model language as a network of constructions stored within
speakers’ minds (e.g. Booij 2010; Bybee 2010; Diessel 2019, 2023; Fried &
Östman 2004; Goldberg 1995, 2019; Sommerer & Smirnova 2020; Traugott &
Trousdale 2013). Positing such a constructional network, also known as
a construct-i-con (or “constructicon”), marks another radical departure from
mainstream generative grammar: Rather than assuming that speakers derive
grammatical patterns “on the fly” based on abstract principles and procedural
rules, the constructionist view is that speakers store a vast inventory of linguistic
units, including morphemes and words as well as phrase- and clause-level
structures, as part of their long-term declarative knowledge.10
In the following sections, we will first discuss some key characteristics of the
network model, before taking a closer look at the different types of network
relations that have been proposed. We will then outline some further questions
and open research problems that concern the architecture of constructional
networks and the way in which they can be investigated.

4.1 The Network Model: Characteristics and Applications

Modeling language as a network captures the basic insight that words and
complex constructions do not exist in isolation but share varying types of
relations with each other. Consider the example of the ditransitive construction
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in (9a). By combining the words of the example into phrases (e.g. the and
student into the subject), and those phrases (the subject, verb, and two objects)
into a sentence, speakers naturally establish relationships between the smaller
units. Construction Grammarians typically refer to these links between linearly
co-occurring units as syntagmatic relations (alternatively known as sequential
relations; Diessel 2019). These relations can be captured in a network in which
words (or phrases) are linked to their frequently co-occurring neighbors.

(9) a. The student gave his friend the lecture notes.

b. The student gave the lecture notes to his friend.

10
It should be noted that the view of linguistic knowledge as a network is not unique to CxG, but
that it is also a central feature of other cognitively oriented theories such as Cognitive Grammar
(Langacker 1987), the Parallel Architecture (Jackendoff 2002), and Word Grammar (Hudson
2007). Within the context of the latter, for instance, Hudson (2015: 692) argues that language is
“networks all the way down” (thus adapting Goldberg’s [2006] well-known slogan). Moreover,
several key notions discussed in this section, such as inheritance hierarchies, also play an
important role in other constraint-based frameworks like Head-Driven Phrase Structure
Grammar (HPSG; Pollard & Sag 1987).
 Constructionist Approaches 29

Figure 3 Schematic network diagram

Meanwhile, the example in (9a) also has other types of “relatives”: For
example, it shares a relation of similarity with the to-dative example in (9b).
The to-dative is usually interpreted as the alternating, that is, near-synonymous,
counterpart of the ditransitive construction (Perek 2015; but see Pijpops 2020
for the varying meanings of “alternation”). Based on their similarity, the two
patterns can be substituted along the paradigmatic axis, that is, they can fill the
same position in a piece of discourse. As a result, they can be modeled as units in
a network that are linked via a paradigmatic relation.
Networks are a powerful tool for capturing diverse kinds of relations between
elements. As such, they have been increasingly used to analyze complex
phenomena across the natural and social sciences (Buchanan 2002). Network
science – the interdisciplinary study of networks – has been heralded by some as
the “science of the 21st century” (Barabási 2016: 25). Figure 3 illustrates the
key features of network representations with the help of a schematic diagram.
Networks consist of nodes (or vertices) and links (or edges), both of which can
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represent a variety of things. In the case of constructional networks, nodes can

correspond to different linguistic units, such as morphemes, words, or complex
constructions. Similarly, the links can instantiate varying relations, such as the
syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations introduced above (see Section 4.2 for
further linking types), even though researchers often restrict their analyses to
one linking type only. Moreover, scholars sometimes use alternative graphic
means to draw their diagrams, for example by using annotated boxes for the
nodes and arrows for the links (if the network relations are directed).
Grammatical networks, as they are envisaged by Construction Grammarians,
are situated in the minds of speakers. As such, they are directly involved in the
storage and retrieval of information during the processing of linguistic utter-
ances. Figure 3 provides some additional clues as to how such processing may
operate within the network (see also Diessel 2019; Langacker 2017; Schmid
2020 for discussion). The large circle in the center of the diagram represents the
construction that is activated during a particular usage event; this construction
 30 Construction Grammar

serves as an “entry point” (Schmid 2020: 44) to the network. Following the
principle of spreading activation (Anderson 1983; Collins & Loftus 1975), the
currently active unit is then assumed to trigger the activation of neighboring
network units, leading to a chain of activation. These units can, for instance, be
frequently co-occurring lexical items or constructions, or items that are related
in virtue of their similarity (see the discussion of syntagmatic and paradigmatic
links above). Schmid (2020: 46), for example, assumes that different mental
states representing the same communicative goal are connected via associ-
ations – a form like the boy, then, would trigger (near-)synonyms like the
young man, the teenager, and so on. The strength of activation a unit receives
from another depends on how closely the two are related; with increasing
distance in the network, the amount of activation spread decays. This is illus-
trated by the grayscale of the nodes and links in Figure 3, where fainter shades
represent increasingly lower activation levels.
This brief outline of the network model hints at several reasons for why
networks have acquired such a central role in CxG research. First, the network
model is naturally compatible with a number of frequently observed psycho-
logical effects, both providing a framework for interpreting these effects and
drawing additional empirical support from them. Among the phenomena dis-
cussed by Diessel (2019: 201–202) and Schmid (2020: 53–55) are: (i) frequency
effects, that is, the tendency for more frequent units to be recognized faster and
more accurately, which can be explained via their increased resting activation in
the network; (ii) recency effects, that is, the tendency for recently activated units
to be recognized faster, which can be attributed to their residual activation in the
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network; and (iii) neighborhood effects, that is, slower recognition of units in
dense network neighborhoods, which is likely to arise from competition among
co-activated patterns. Related to recency effects, another pervasive phenom-
enon is priming, defined as a change in speakers’ response to a stimulus after
previous exposure to the same or a similar item (Branigan & Pickering 2017: 6).
Priming occurs both at the lexical level – between words that are semantically,
phonetically, or orthographically related (Goldinger, Luce, & Pisoni 1989;
Meyer & Schvaneveldt 1971; Meyer, Schvaneveldt, & Ruddy 1974) – and
at the level of complex constructions, where the phenomenon is known as
“structural priming” (Branigan & Pickering 2017). Regarding the latter, struc-
tural priming effects have been observed not only between instances of the same
construction (e.g. between two ditransitive sentences; Bock 1986) but also
between distinct but related constructions (e.g. between benefactive and dative
sentences; Ziegler & Snedeker 2018). As a result, priming effects are regarded
as one of the strongest sources of evidence for the network model (Diessel 2019:
204; Ungerer 2021, 2022).
 Constructionist Approaches 31

Second, networks provide a dynamic tool for modeling processes of language

change. Smirnova and Sommerer (2020: 3) argue that all types of linguistic
change can be reconceptualized as network changes, given that the construc-
tional network that makes up a language can change via node creation or loss,
via node-internal changes, or via reconfigurations of the network. The creation
of a new node roughly corresponds to what Traugott and Trousdale (2013) call
constructionalization, while the loss of a node can be characterized in terms of
constructional attrition (Colleman & Noël 2012), that is, the phenomenon
whereby a construction gradually falls out of use. Node-internal changes are
roughly equivalent to Traugott and Trousdale’s constructional changes (but see
Smirnova & Sommerer [2020: 9–18], who argue that constructionalization and
constructional changes often cannot be clearly told apart). For example, the
grammaticalization of a new future marker such as the English going to future
construction could be described as the emergence of a new node in the con-
structional network, while the ongoing change of because, which used to
take only verbal complements and is currently extending its usage domain to
nominal complements (because reasons), could be considered a node-internal
change. Node-internal changes can, in turn, entail the emergence of new nodes
and as such lead to a reconfiguration of the constructional network. Lorenz
(2020), for instance, demonstrates that the contracted forms gonna, wanna, and
gotta have over time developed their own usage profiles, which are distinct from
those of the full forms going to, want to, and got to.
Another example of a linguistic change that can be conceived of as a
reconfiguration in the constructional network is constructional contamination
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as described by Pijpops and Van de Velde (2016). Constructional contamination

occurs when two superficially similar (but unrelated) constructions influence
each other. Their example concerns two etymologically and structurally unre-
lated constructions in Dutch: the partitive genitive, as in iets verkeerd(s) gegeten
‘eaten something wrong’, where a variant with -s alternates with an s-less
variant; and a construction in which the quantifier iets ‘something’ forms an
independent noun phrase while verkeerd “wrongly” functions as an adverb, as
in . . . dat iets verkeerd geïnterpreteerd wordt ‘. . . that something gets wrongly
interpreted’ (Pijpops & Van de Velde 2016: 544–545). The authors show that the
frequent co-occurrence of iets and verkeerd leads to “a measureable preference
for the variant without -s in partitive genitives” (Pijpops & Van de Velde 2016:
545). De Smet et al. (2018), meanwhile, discuss how functional relatedness
between similar forms can both increase and decrease over time, using the
concepts of attraction and differentiation. Attraction means that two forms
become more similar to each other over time, which the authors show to be
the case for [begin + ing-clause] and [begin + to-infinitive]. Differentiation
 32 Construction Grammar

means that two constructions become less similar, which seems to have been the
case for [start + ing-clause] and [start + to-infinitive]. However, as the authors
argue, what looks like differentiation might actually be an epiphenomenon of
underlying attraction processes: As [start + to-infinitive] became increasingly
attracted to [begin + to-infinitive], it became less similar to [start + ing-clause].
This shows that network changes cannot be studied independently from each
other and that the “bigger picture” of the constructional network needs to be
taken into account.

4.2 Types of Network Links

A crucial aspect of the network structure that scholars continue to debate concerns
the types of links that should be part of the network model. Most Construction
Grammarians agree on at least three types of such relations. Two of them were
already introduced in Section 4.1: paradigmatic relations between similar units
and syntagmatic relations between linearly co-occurring units. A third type
consists of symbolic relations, which connect the form and the meaning pole of
constructions (e.g. Croft 2001; Langacker 1987). By positing these symbolic
relations, researchers can use the network model to capture the fundamental CxG
view of grammatical units as form–meaning pairings (see Section 2).
While symbolic links seem to be a natural element of the network model, they
also pose a potential challenge. If constructional networks are assumed to be
“networks of constructions,” that is, networks in which constructions function
as the nodes then symbolic relations are, strictly speaking, not links between
network nodes but part of the nodes themselves. In other words, the nodes in
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such a model would be internally complex units that consist of a pair of

interlinked form and meaning. This view is embraced by Diessel (2019:
11–22), who treats constructions (or “signs,” in his terminology) as the basic
nodes of the network (which is thus a “network of signs”) but also assumes that
these nodes themselves consist of networks (i.e. “signs as networks”). The
result of this is a “nested” network (see also Diessel 2023) that comprises
several layers, with symbolic links only featuring at the construction-internal
layer and not at the layer at which different constructions are related to each
other (see also Smirnova & Sommerer 2020, who distinguish between a “node-
external” and a “node-internal” level). While this offers a possible solution, in
practice it means that symbolic links are often not explicitly represented in
network diagrams, which tend to focus on the relations between constructions
rather than on their internal connectivity.
Returning to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations discussed above,
these links, too, come with their own complexities. Even though the two linking
 Constructionist Approaches 33

(a) Taxonomic (paradigmatic) links (b) Meronymic (syntagmatic) links

Figure 4 Parallels between taxonomic and meronomic hierarchies, including

vertical links (solid lines) and horizontal links (dashed lines)

types encode fundamentally different relations, a crucial feature they share is

that they both give rise to hierarchical organization. Specifically, paradigmatic-
ally related units form taxonomies, that is, series of increasingly more abstract
(or schematic) categories that generalize over the similarities of their subtypes.
This is illustrated with a simple lexical example in Figure 4a, which shows the
relationship between cat and dog and their taxonomic superordinate animal.
Analogously, syntagmatically related units give rise to meronomies, i.e. part-
whole hierarchies in which smaller units are combined into increasingly more
complex units. This is depicted in Figure 4b using the example of the and dog,
which compose into the dog. The important role of meronomies becomes
evident if one considers that phrase-structure diagrams, which are part and
parcel of most grammatical analyses, are part-whole hierarchies of increasingly
more complex units (Croft 2001). Taxonomic and meronomic hierarchies, and
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their underlying dimensions of schematicity and complexity, can therefore be

regarded as fundamental structuring mechanisms of speakers’ grammatical
knowledge, which is modeled via “taxonomic and meronymic networks of
constructional families” (Barðdal & Gildea 2015: 23).
One question in this context, however, is what types of links constructional
networks should incorporate: vertical links between units at different hierarch-
ical levels (illustrated by the solid lines in Figure 4), horizontal links between
units at the same hierarchical level (illustrated by the dashed lines), or both
types of links? Specifically, the question is what functions vertical and horizon-
tal links serve in the network, and whether they constitute distinct or potentially
overlapping mechanisms. This has been primarily discussed in the context of
paradigmatic relations, but the vertical/horizontal distinction can in principle
also be applied to syntagmatic relations (see Budts & Petré 2020: 320–321;
Langacker 1987: 94–96). In discussions of paradigmatic relations, vertical and
horizontal links are often assumed to play fundamentally distinct roles. Vertical
 34 Construction Grammar

links, which were introduced to constructionist theorizing by Lakoff (1987)

and Goldberg (1995), are typically couched in terms of inheritance, based
on the notion that subtypes “inherit,” that is, adopt, the features of their
supertype (also known as a “schema”; see Daelemans, De Smedt, & Gazdar
1992 for the origins of the concept of “inheritance” in the computational
literature). Horizontal relations (also called lateral relations), on the other
hand, have been a more recent addition to the CxG literature (Audring 2019;
Diessel 2015, 2023; Van de Velde 2014; Perek 2015; Smirnova 2021); they
are assumed to relate “similar or contrastive constructions, even when these
constructions are not (immediately) subsumed under a schema” (Diessel
2019: 200). Horizontal links have been posited, for example, between
alternating variants such as the two English verb-particle constructions
(e.g. turn off the TV vs. turn the TV off; Cappelle 2006; see also Colleman
2020; Zehentner 2019) and between members of constructional paradigms,
such as different clause types in Dutch (verb-initial, verb-second, and verb-
final; Van de Velde 2014; see also Sommerer 2020; Diewald 2020).
It has been pointed out (Hoffmann 2020; Ungerer in press), however, that
some of the scenarios that have been analyzed with horizontal links could be
equally captured in terms of vertical relations. For example, alternating
constructions can be either connected via a horizontal similarity link, or
they can be vertically subsumed under a common schema, in analogy to
Figure 4 (compare also Cappelle’s [2006: 18] analysis, which includes both
vertical and horizontal links). Based on this argument, Hoffmann (2020: 150)
argues that the two analyses are empirically indistinguishable in these cases.
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Ungerer (in press) goes a step further and suggests that a horizontal link
between constructions is, by definition, conceptually equivalent to a pair of
vertical relations to a schema. The difference, he argues, is only notational, in
that vertical analyses make the shared content of the subconstructions explicit
while it is merely implicit in a horizontal link. From this perspective, con-
structional networks could contain either vertical or horizontal relations, but
the two would be treated as notational variants rather than as distinct cognitive
mechanisms.
Other researchers do not share this view and have continued to highlight the
differences between vertical and horizontal links. Zehentner (2019: 324), for
instance, suggests that horizontal links may represent similarities of varying
strengths, while schemas only emerge if the connections are “very strong,
systematic and pervasive.” In addition, Diessel 2023: 57–75) argues that only
horizontal links can capture relations of similarity and contrast both within
constructional families and with other neighboring constructions that do
not belong to the family. For example, the verb-particle constructions in
 Constructionist Approaches 35

(10a)–(10b) form a constructional family, but they also resemble sentences in

which an adjective can either follow or precede the object, as in (10c)–(10d);
moreover, (10a) is similar to an intransitive construction with a prepositional
phrase, as in (10e). Diessel argues that the existence of horizontal relations
such as these is supported by psycholinguistic effects such as priming and by
the time course of language acquisition, but that there is no evidence that
speakers store a separate schema for each group of similar constructions. In
contrast to this position, Ungerer (2022, in press) suggests that priming effects
can be equally interpreted as evidence for horizontal links and vertically
related schemas, especially if it is assumed that both links and schemas can
vary in “strength,” that is, in their degree of entrenchment (Hilpert 2015;
Langacker 2017; Schmid 2020).

(10) a. He took off the label.

b. He took the label off.
c. He held the door open.
d. He held open the door.
e. He jumped off the wall.
(all from Diessel 2023: 68)

Moving beyond vertical and horizontal relations, researchers have also sug-
gested a number of other linking mechanisms that could be included in con-
structional networks, besides the “standard” triad of symbolic, paradigmatic,
and syntagmatic relations. Goldberg (1995: 74–81), for example, proposed an
influential four-way classification of network relations into instance links,
subpart links, polysemy links, and metaphorical extension links.11 The former
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two largely correspond to paradigmatic and syntagmatic links, with instance

links describing relations between subtypes and their paradigmatic supertypes,
and subpart links capturing relations between wholes and their parts. Polysemy
and metaphorical links, meanwhile, capture specific types of similarities
between linguistic units. Polysemy links have been posited between the multiple
subsenses of constructions such as the ditransitive, which can not only denote
“successful transfer of possession” but also “intended transfer,” “enabled trans-
fer,” and other related meanings (Goldberg 1995: 75–77; see also Croft 2003).
Metaphorical links have been used, for instance, to relate the literal “change of
location” meaning of the caused motion construction to its metaphorical exten-
sion as “change of state” in the resultative construction (Goldberg 1995: 81–89).

11
Goldberg (1995) characterizes all four linking types in her model as “inheritance links.” Strictly
speaking, however, only instance links correspond to the original conception of inheritance as
a supertype–subtype relation, while the other three relations constitute distinct mechanisms of
information exchange.
 36 Construction Grammar

Given that both of these links rely on similarity, they could be regarded as
special types of paradigmatic relations. Smirnova and Sommerer (2020: 25), for
example, reinterpret Goldberg’s metaphorical links as a kind of (paradigmatic)
horizontal link.12
Diessel (2019; 2023) proposes another type of network link, so-called filler–
slot relations that connect the open slots of constructional schemas to their
lexical or phrasal fillers. Filler–slot relations not only capture general facts
about the distribution of lexical categories, such as the occurrence of adjectives
in attributive position (DET ___ N) or predicative position (NP be ___; Diessel
2019: 21), but they also govern the way in which specific lexical items prefer-
entially combine with certain constructions (e.g. the fact that give occurs more
frequently in the ditransitive than in the to-dative; Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004).
While filler-slot relations are a useful descriptive tool in these contexts,
the question remains of whether they can be ultimately broken down into
a combination of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. Specifically, the
filler seems to stand in a paradigmatic relation with the open slot that it
occupies, and this slot is in turn syntagmatically linked to the rest of the
abstract construction.
Finally, Schmid (2017a; 2020), working within a related usage-based
framework, proposes pragmatic relations (or “associations,” in his termin-
ology) as a fourth type of network link besides symbolic, paradigmatic, and
syntagmatic relations. These pragmatic relations are assumed to connect
linguistic items with their context-dependent meanings, including reference,
deixis, implicature, and speech acts. Schmid (2020: 48) acknowledges that
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pragmatic relations are thus similar to symbolic relations but distinguishes the
context-dependent mappings of the former from the more system-internal
function of the latter. While this view has the advantage of highlighting
contextual factors that are otherwise often backgrounded in constructionist
network analyses, it faces the well-known difficulty of delimiting the bound-
ary between semantics and pragmatics, or context-independent and context-
dependent meaning (Langacker 1987: 154; but see Cappelle 2017 and
Leclercq 2020 for discussions of how the distinction can be maintained in
CxG).

12
One way in which polysemy and metaphorical links may be different from other paradigmatic
links is that they both imply a certain asymmetry. In Goldberg’s (1995) conception, polysemy
links relate the central prototype of a construction to its sense extensions, while metaphorical
links capture the asymmetry between a metaphorical source and a target. This raises its own
questions, for example whether these relations are vertical relations (as suggested by Goldberg’s
analysis in terms of “inheritance”) or horizontal (as argued for metaphorical links by Smirnova &
Sommerer [2020: 25]), also considering that there are relevant differences between organization
by prototypes and taxonomic organization (see Langacker 1987: 380–381).
 Constructionist Approaches 37

4.3 Areas for Further Research

As the preceding comments have shown, the architecture of constructional
networks, and in particular the types of links included in the model, continue
to be a topic of lively discussion among Construction Grammarians. Beyond
that, recent work has given rise to a number of other theoretical and empirical
questions that are likely to remain on the research agenda for the coming years.
We will outline four such research problems in the following, which concern: (i)
the relationship between the network nodes and links; (ii) the empirical basis for
the representations; (iii) the use of formal and computational tools for network
construction and analysis; and (iv) potential limitations of the network model as
well as possible alternatives.
Starting with the first point, scholars continue to debate central aspects of the
network architecture, among them the question of what the ontological status of
the nodes and links is, and what respective roles they play in encoding speakers’
linguistic knowledge. Recent work (Hilpert 2018; Hilpert & Diessel 2017;
Smirnova & Sommerer 2020) has distinguished between “node-centered”
views, which assume that the bulk of the information contained in the network
is stored within its nodes, and “connection-centered” views, which assume that
speakers’ grammatical knowledge resides mainly in the linking patterns between
nodes rather than within the nodes themselves. As Hilpert (2018) argues, the
connection-centered view lends itself particularly to investigating gradual dia-
chronic developments: For example, the extension of may from its deontic to an
epistemic meaning can be modeled as a shift in linking patterns between the
modal auxiliary and the verbs that it typically combines with (Hilpert 2016; see
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also Torrent 2015 and Hoffmann & Trousdale 2022 for related approaches).
Hilpert (2018: 32–34) argues that the connection-centered view not only captures
better the dynamicity of constructional networks over time, but that it is also more
compatible with neurophysiological models and computational implementations
such as artificial neural networks (see e.g. Pulvermüller 2010 for an approach that
combines the latter two).
A radical version of the connection-centered view is presented by Schmid
(2017a: 25), who altogether “rejects the distinction between constructions
serving as nodes in the network and relations between nodes and instead
assumes that linguistic knowledge is available in one format only, namely,
associations.” One challenge for this perspective, however, is that a network
model, by its nature, needs to contain both nodes and links – in other words,
there cannot be a “network without nodes.” As a result, researchers need to
make explicit what kind of information the nodes in their respective models
represent. A second relevant issue is Hilpert’s (2018: 33) observation that
 38 Construction Grammar

node-centered and connection-centered views are often compatible, and that

one can potentially be reformulated in terms of the other (see also the discussion
of schemas and horizontal links in Section 4.2). For example, if an abstract
construction comes to combine with a new class of lexical fillers, this could
either be modeled as a modification of the constructional node itself (e.g. an
extension of its meaning pole) or as a change in the links between network units.
This is especially true if construction nodes are allowed to be internally complex
or “nested,” consisting themselves of patterns of interlinked nodes, as we
suggested in Section 4.1.
In light of these comments, the relationship between nodes and links in the
network may be yet more complex than can be captured with the distinction
between node-centered and connection-centered approaches. One possibility is
that researchers’ choice of what they encode in the nodes and links, respectively,
is not primarily determined by some objective reality of what speakers’ con-
structional networks “are like,” but rather by pragmatic considerations of which
representation best fulfills the purposes of a specific analysis. While an analysis
of macro-changes within a constructional family may benefit from a model in
which each family member is represented as a single constructional node, an
alternative account that zooms into more fine-grained semantic changes may
represent the same constructions as clusters of multiple lower-level units.
Nevertheless, theoretical arguments and neuropsychological evidence may
also place constraints on the plausibility and empirical robustness of certain
types of network representations. A major task for future research is therefore to
identify criteria and, if possible, quantifiable measures that can be used to
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determine and compare the descriptive and explanatory adequacy of different

network models.
The latter point leads naturally to the second area of ongoing research
mentioned at the beginning of this section: the use of empirical data for con-
structing and testing models of constructional networks. As has frequently been
noted (e.g. Croft 2001: 57; Diessel 2019: 16; Tomasello 2003: 98), the question
of which network structures speakers plausibly entertain is an empirical one. In
particular, this applies to the level of abstraction at which speakers form con-
structional generalizations, which crucially determines the types of network
nodes that researchers posit and the level of granularity at which they conduct
their analyses. Traditionally, scholars have largely relied on theoretical argumen-
tation to motivate the existence of constructions at a certain degree of abstrac-
tion. In particular, researchers have increasingly posited lower-level schemas
at intermediate levels of abstraction rather than highly abstract constructions
(e.g. Boas 2003; Dąbrowska 2008; Hartmann 2019; Hilpert 2015). Recently,
attempts have also been made to base such modeling decisions on quantifiable
 Constructionist Approaches 39

factors: Schmid (2020: 234), for example, suggests that the likelihood of
speakers forming a schematic construction depends on the frequency and simi-
larity of its instances, as well as the (syntagmatic) size of the pattern and its
paradigmatic range.
Frequency can be relatively easily quantified using a variety of well-
established corpus measures (Divjak 2019; Gries 2008). Similarity, meanwhile,
is more difficult to measure, but relevant evidence could come from a number of
corpus-based and experimental methods. On the corpus side, collostructional
analysis (see Section 3.3) has been used to compare the typical lexemes that
combine with two constructions and thus obtain at least a rough impression of
their similarity (Gries 2011; Hartmann 2019). In addition, distributional seman-
tic methods such as semantic vector space analysis (see Lenci 2018 for an
overview) yield quantitative measures of the semantic similarity between lex-
emes – or, if averaging over those lexemes, of the abstract constructions in
which they occur – based on their collocational profiles (Hilpert & Perek 2022;
Percillier 2020). On the experimental side, priming effects, in particular, are
regarded as an important indicator of constructional similarity (Perek 2015;
Ungerer 2021, 2022), given that priming tends to be stronger the more similar
prime and target are (Branigan & Pickering 2017; see also Section 4.1).
Even with these methods at their disposal, researchers are still several steps
away from constructing network representations in a fully bottom-up data-
driven way. One challenge is to account for how the different factors, such as
frequency and similarity, interact in order to determine the level of abstraction
at which constructions are represented. Hilpert (2015, 2021) has begun to sketch
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out a tentative model of such interactive processes. Using the example of

English noun-participle constructions, such as [N-based] (e.g. in computer-
based), the author examines whether an abstract schema that subsumes different
noun-participle patterns (e.g. [N-based] and [N-oriented]) has become more
entrenched over the last two centuries (or in Hilpert’s words, how much
“upward strengthening” the schema has received). The results suggest that
some individual noun-participle constructions have become a lot more frequent,
but that there has not been the emergence of many new infrequent and seman-
tically dissimilar subtypes that one would expect if the overall schema became
more productive. Nevertheless, even though Hilpert’s model illustrates import-
ant principles of schema formation and potential tools for investigating them, it
still lacks a precise formalization and an explicit algorithm for determining
degrees of entrenchment among a variety of construction. Further research will
thus need to explore whether a clustering algorithm can be constructed that
generates constructional categories in a (largely) automatized bottom-up way,
based on the frequency and pairwise similarity of their instances.
 40 Construction Grammar

The latter point again raises another question, addressed here as a third
research problem, namely how formal and computational methods can be used
to assist the construction and analysis of constructional networks. In particular,
the question is to what extent constructionist research can benefit from advances
in two areas: first, the use of artificial neural networks (ANNs) to model the
emergence of networks and their changes over time; and second, the use of
“network science” tools for the analysis of large-scale connectivity patterns.
Starting with ANNs, these methods have had considerable success in model-
ing, for example, the acquisition of English past-tense morphology (Rumelhart
& McClelland 1986) and the lexical categories of nouns and verbs (Elman
1990); more recent applications have targeted the emergence of recursive
syntactic structures (Christiansen & MacDonald 2009) and syntactic dependen-
cies (Manning et al. 2020). Importantly, the connectionist architecture of these
networks does not map directly onto the symbolic structures that are, at least
tacitly, assumed in many constructionist network models (but see e.g. Goldberg
[2019: 21], who provides both a symbolic and a distributed example of linguis-
tic representations). Nevertheless, ANNs may still constrain the way in which
symbolic networks are constructed, for example by providing estimates of
the connection strength between patterns that can then be represented with
a symbolic architecture. This is illustrated by Budts and Petré’s (2020) study,
which provides one example of the still rare application of ANNs in
(Diachronic) CxG. Training their model on corpus data between 1580 and
1700, the authors simulate how the distributional profile of periphrastic do
became increasingly similar to those of modal auxiliaries like will, can, and
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may. Based on these results, Budts and Petré characterize the development of do
into an auxiliary during the Early Modern English period as a reconfiguration of
its paradigmatic links with similar constructions (see Section 4.2). In line with
this example, the role of connectionist networks as a fruitful method for CxG
has been recognized (see e.g. Hilpert & Diessel 2017: 71), but their wider
application to different areas of constructionist research is still outstanding.
Concerning the second strand of formal methods, “network science” has
developed as an interdisciplinary field that uses the mathematical tools of graph
theory to describe networks across biology, economics, and the social sciences,
among other areas (Barabási 2016; Buchanan 2002). In linguistics, these methods
have been used to study different types of networks, including lexical networks
(Steyvers & Tenenbaum 2005), phonological networks (Vitevitch 2008), ortho-
graphic networks (Siew 2018), networks of linear word co-occurrences (Ferrer
i Cancho & Solé 2001), and networks of syntactic dependencies (Ferrer i Cancho,
Solé, & Köhler, 2004). While this is not their only application, network science
tools are often used to characterize the macrostructure of larger networks and
 Constructionist Approaches 41

uncover underlying properties that are not apparent to the naked eye. The above-
mentioned studies have, for example, illustrated the “small-world” and “scale-
free” properties that linguistic networks share with many other phenomena in the
natural world: that is, the fact that nodes are on average connected by relatively
few steps and that the networks contain “hub” nodes that connect distant network
regions with each other.
As with connectionist methods, network science tools have so far been only
sparsely applied in constructionist analyses. One notable exception is the work
of Ellis, Römer, and O’Donnell (2016), who analyze semantic networks of
verbs that occur in prepositional verb constructions such as [V about N]. The
researchers use the WordNet database (Fellbaum 1998) to construct networks of
similarity links among these verbs. They then employ formal network measures
such as betweenness centrality, which indicates how often a given node is
passed on the shortest path from any place in the network to any other place,
to identify well-connected “hub” nodes. This provides a data-driven strategy for
identifying semantically more prototypical verbs – which, as Ellis et al. show,
are also more likely to be associated with the constructional frame by partici-
pants in a free-association experiment. Following their example, future work
could explore in more detail how network science methods can be used to
analyze constructional networks, especially if larger networks are constructed
that are no longer amenable to visual inspection.
As a fourth and final topic, while the last decades of constructionist research
have illustrated the descriptive power and cognitive plausibility of construc-
tional networks, it is also worth considering what the limitations of the network
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model are, and what alternative representations may be available. Some poten-
tial limitations of the network model have already been mentioned: For
example, it requires researchers to distinguish between nodes and links, thus
“imposing” a discrete structure on what might ultimately only be continuous
patterns of neural activation (see Schmid 2017a). Moreover, current analyses
tend to focus on a small number of linking mechanisms in constructional
networks, for example the vertical and horizontal relations discussed in
Section 4.2 – but the question is whether this two-dimensional structure can
do justice to the multidimensional (or, in Goldberg’s [2019: 7] terms, “hyperdi-
mensional”) connections that exist within speakers’ linguistic knowledge (see
also Smirnova & Sommerer 2020: 31–34; Van Trijp 2020). A related point
concerns visualization: Bound by the spatial constraints of traditional print
media, the network diagrams used in CxG work usually provide small, simpli-
fied illustrations of the theoretical network architecture rather than detailed
descriptions of their empirical reality. As such, the diagrams have been criti-
cized for providing “static, highly schematized (viz. hierarchical abstraction)
 42 Construction Grammar

and only partial visualizations of the complete grammatical system” (Ibbotson,

Salnikov, & Walker 2019: 671). One option for future research may be to
combine print publications with external interactive tools, for example as part
of electronic supplements, which allow readers to explore more complex
constructional networks (and their changes over time) in a suitable virtual
interface.
These limitations have also led some researchers to suggest alternative tools
for the representation of constructional relations. Fried (2021: 47), for example,
proposes a “constructional map” in which constructions – in her study, different
types of Czech interactive datives – are not represented as discrete nodes but
rather as overlapping shapes within “a contiguous cognitive space.” The author
suggests that this representation can more adequately capture the partial simi-
larity of constructions that share some of their features but are still difficult to
subsume under a taxonomic supertype, as well as the nondiscrete boundaries
of the domains (e.g. semantic and interactional) within which the constructions
are situated. In contrast to a network in which the number of intervening
links, or their weight, expresses the strength of a relation, Fried’s constructional
map uses the amount of overlap among shapes, as well as their distance in the
diagram, to indicate the degree of relatedness between constructions. Naturally,
while this kind of representation might exceed the cognitive plausibility of
a network diagram, it has its own drawbacks, such as a lesser degree of
readability and visual parsimony. It thus remains to be seen how feasible it is
to replace (or complement) networks with such other forms of representation.

4.4 Summary
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In this section, we have discussed how relations between constructions can be

captured in terms of constructional networks. This is a key topic for current
constructionist approaches for several reasons. First, a cognitively plausible
characterization of linguistic knowledge requires an adequate, and empirically
supported, account of how the units that make up a language are organized in the
mind. Second, networks provide researchers with a flexible tool to link up the
description of synchronic and diachronic phenomena with their underlying psy-
chological mechanisms (e.g. categorization and spreading activation). Third,
lexicographic approaches such as the various ongoing “construct-i-con” projects
(Lyngfelt et al. 2018; see Section 3.3), which in turn can prove relevant for
applied-linguistic contexts such as L2 learning and teaching, often rely on
network approaches to characterize the relations between the units they describe.
However, our overview has also highlighted a number of open questions
about how exactly constructional networks can or should be modeled. These
 Constructionist Approaches 43

aspects concern the different types of links that form part of the network
structure, but also questions about the empirical foundations of the representa-
tions and the methods used to investigate them. Nevertheless, we would argue
that the recent attempts to question the theoretical assumptions and practical
implementations of the network model should be seen as an encouraging trend.
As such, they illustrate the lively role that constructional networks are likely to
play within constructionist research in the coming years.

5 Creativity, Multimodality, Individual Differences: Recent

Developments in Construction Grammar
Like all scientific paradigms, constructionist approaches have undergone con-
tinuous development and tend to follow certain trends and “fashions” over time.
In some cases, such trends are closely connected to the overall evolution of
a paradigm, as they may emerge from the realization that some important
aspects have previously been neglected. This is arguably the case when it
comes to the three examples of current developments in CxG that we would
like to discuss in this section. Specifically, we will first address constructionist
research on linguistic creativity, then turn to multimodality, and finally take
a closer look at individual differences among speakers. All these developments
are, in a way, a reaction to the emphasis of “mainstream” CxG on more or less
“regular” constructional patterns in spoken and written language as well as the
tendency to abstract away from the individual language user.

5.1 Linguistic Creativity

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Concerning the first aspect, linguistic creativity, Bergs (2018, 2019) points out
that the term can refer to two rather different things. On the one hand, in contexts
such as child language acquisition, researchers discuss the phenomenon of
children starting to use a specific construction creatively (e.g. Tomasello 2003:
107). In this sense, creative is more or less synonymous to productive. Children –
and also adults – extend an existing rule to new cases, without, however,
“bending” the rules. On the other hand, the term creativity also refers to cases
in which language users go beyond the rules. Bauer (2001: 64), for example,
defines creativity as “the extension of non-productive patterns” (see Barðdal
[2008: 3] for discussion). To distinguish between these two meanings, Sampson
(2016: 19) suggests the term F-creativity (for “fixed creativity”), referring to
“activities which characteristically produce examples drawn from a fixed and
known (. . .) range,” and E-creativity (for “enlarging” or “extending creativity”),
which refers to “activities which characteristically produce examples that enlarge
our understanding of the range of possible products of the activity.”
 44 Construction Grammar

Bergs (2018) identifies three different sources for E-creativity in language: (i)
performance errors, such as slips of the tongue; (ii) language contact, for
instance through borrowing; and (iii) the intentional manipulation of linguistic
material. The latter type of E-creativity, in particular, can be connected to the
notion of linguistic extravagance, which refers to speakers’ desire to talk in
such a way that they are noticed (Haspelmath 1999; Keller 1994; Ungerer &
Hartmann 2020). One example of this is “snowcloning,” that is, the use of
formulaic patterns that usually draw on a more-or-less-fixed template
(Hartmann & Ungerer 2023; Traugott & Trousdale 2013: 183–186).
Frequently mentioned examples of snowclones include [the mother of all X],
as in Hoffmann (2022) is the mother of all Construction Grammar textbooks, or
[X BE the new Y], as in Ungerer and Hartmann are the new Ungerer and
Schmid. Snowclones are interesting from a constructionist perspective for at
least two reasons. First, they are prime examples of partially fixed construc-
tions, as they consist of a lexically fixed part and one or more open slots.
Second, they fulfill specific pragmatic and interpersonal functions: On the one
hand, they typically display extravagant characteristics, such as the hyperbolic
meaning of the mother of all X or the quasi-paradoxical comparisons inherent in
many instances of X is the new Y (e.g. small is the new big). On the other hand,
snowclones also adhere to what Haspelmath (1999) calls the maxim of con-
formity, that is, the desire to talk like others talk (Keller 1994). As such,
snowclones illustrate the interplay between the two opposing maxims of
extravagance and conformity, functioning both as creative patterns while also
being instantly recognizable by members of the (frequently online) communi-
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ties in which they are propagated.

As with many concepts that are part and parcel of constructionist approaches,
we cannot draw a clear line between E-creativity and F-creativity, as they
blend into one another. A construction that emerges as an E-creative pattern
can become an inconspicuous, run-of-the-mill construction if it is used often
enough. A classic example are the developments described by Jespersen’s cycle
(Jespersen 1917; Mosegaard Hansen 2011): An item that is originally used to
emphasize negation, such as French pas (originally ‘step’), becomes a part of
the negation pattern (French ne . . . pas). This is also true for the creative use of
words: The German word Kopf ‘head,’ for example, is cognate to English cup,
which is also what it originally denoted. The human head was metaphorically,
and probably jokingly, referred to as a vessel. The original semantics of the term
is not transparent anymore to present-day language users, however, and Kopf
has become the unmarked default term for “head.”
These examples illustrate a number of challenges that constructionist
approaches face when dealing with creativity. First, social-pragmatic dimensions
 Constructionist Approaches 45

of constructional knowledge have to be taken into account. Most constructionist

approaches are aware of the importance of this dimension, but only few oper-
ationalize it in a systematic way. Schmid (2020), for instance, while not explicitly
working in a constructionist framework, posits pragmatic associations to account
for such phenomena within his entrenchment-and-conventionalization model
(see also Section 4.2). Second, these socio-pragmatic features are a moving target,
illustrating once again the dynamics of linguistic signs and constructions. Like
other aspects of meaning, socio-pragmatic aspects of constructions can bleach,
and as an initially infrequent construction is used more regularly, it can lose its
salience. One concept that aims at capturing this continuum is Barðdal’s (2008)
productivity cline, which ranges from analogical extension to full productivity.
For instance, early uses of the suffix13 -gate ‘scandal,’ as in Koreagate (a 1976
bribery scandal),14 can be seen as analogical coinages based on Watergate. As the
suffix became more and more productive, it is possible that it has gradually lost
the connection to its source and that more recent formations like Partygate
(referring to the prime minister of a peculiar island country celebrating parties
during Covid lockdowns) are not coined in analogy to Watergate anymore but
rather make use of a schema [X-gate] that is now independent from its source.
Third, Hoffmann (2018: 271–272) mentions the importance of taking indi-
vidual differences in the use of creative language into account, citing psycho-
logical research that shows a strong correlation between creativity and
personality traits like openness and extroversion. A crucial question that follows
from this perspective is why and by whom creative constructions are coined, and
how they spread in the language community. This is also connected to some of
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the key questions in historical linguistics: Who are the agents of language
change, and how do linguistic innovations emerge and spread? Research on
linguistic creativity and individual differences (see Section 5.3) can arguably
help provide answers to such questions.

5.2 Multimodality and Signed Languages

Importantly, mechanisms of creativity and dynamic change are of course not
limited to the spoken modality. Recent research has also focused on signed
languages on the one hand, and on co-speech gesture on the other. While both
make use of the manual-visual modality, it is important to note that sign
languages are fully-fledged languages in their own right, while co-speech

13
The morphological status of -gate is subject to debate (see Flach, Kopf, & Stefanowitsch 2018:
246–247), but there is an emerging consensus that it can be seen as a combining form. Flach et al.
(2018) use the alternative term confix for this, while Norde and Sippach (2019) adopt a term
proposed by Arnold Zwicky in a blog post and call such “liberated” parts of words libfixes.
14
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koreagate (last checked 22/10/2022).
 46 Construction Grammar

gesture accompanies spoken language. Following Kendon (e.g. 2004: 99–106)

and McNeill (2016: 5), we can posit a continuum from gesticulation via
pantomime to sign language, with gesture accompanying speech, while signs
in signed languages are “not accompanied by speech [. . .], and the languages
themselves have the essential properties of all languages” (McNeill 2011: 344,
emphasis original).
Lepic and Occhino (2018: 143–146) observe that the field of sign language
linguistics has left a few potentially fallacious assumptions of structuralist
theory unquestioned, including the division of linguistic knowledge into two
types, “lexicon” and “grammar,” and propose that a constructionist analysis
could help overcome a number of problems that arise from these assumptions.
For example, a strict lexicon/grammar division requires linguistic units to be
assigned to one of those categories, even though there is good evidence that
even fully transparent structures may be cognitively entrenched (see
Section 2.2) – Langacker (1987: 42) calls this the rule/list fallacy. In the area
of sign language linguistics, this is relevant for the question of which signs
are considered to be part of the mental lexicon. Lepic and Occhino (2018: 148)
show that traditionally, “unanalyzed” signs have been treated as listed in
the lexicon – however, this is problematic, as “signers readily ‘reanalyze’
the structure of ‘unanalyzed’ signs in the course of normal signing.”
A constructionist approach allows researchers not only to characterize the
internal structure of signs as continuous rather than discrete but also to arrange
them along a gradient cline from gesture to language in the spirit of Kendon’s
and McNeill’s gesture continuum (Lepic & Occhino 2018: 162–167). This also
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press

makes it possible to use similar analytical tools for the investigation of signed
languages on the one hand, and co-speech gesture on the other.
As for the latter, another key discussion within CxG revolves around the
assumption of multimodal constructions: It is a matter of debate to what
extent co-speech gestures can be conceived of as an integral part of con-
structions. For example, Zima (2014) argues that constructions like [Vmotion
in circles] (e.g. we ended up going in circles for twenty minutes) and [all the
way from X PREP Y] (e.g. all the way from the Seattle area down through
Oregon) are accompanied by specific gestures so frequently and systematic-
ally that it makes sense to speak of multimodal constructions. As usage-
based constructionist approaches assume that linguistic knowledge is rooted
in embodied experience (Lakoff 1987), it stands to reason to assume that this
experience is not limited to strictly linguistic features but encompasses
paralinguistic features like prosody, pitch, and intonation as well as features
traditionally seen as nonlinguistic, such as gesture (see e.g. Cienki 2013,
2017; Lanwer 2017).
 Constructionist Approaches 47

Feyaerts, Brône, and Oben (2017) and Schoonjans (2017), however, point to
an important issue in this context: Most authors arguing for multimodal con-
structions “stress the systematicity of the multimodal co-occurrences in corpus
data as an argument for their construction status” (Feyaerts et al. 2017: 147). Yet
as we have seen above, the frequency criterion is a complex issue for CxG in
general, and given that there is usually more room for individual variation in the
domain of multimodal constructions than in the case of linguistic signs, it is
even harder to determine when the co-occurrence of verbal and gestural patterns
can count as a construction. In principle, arguments similar to the ones that have
been brought forward against the frequency criterion in the definition of con-
structions (see Section 2.2) can be used to argue against the assumption of
multimodal constructions. One key aspect that has to be taken into account is
that the nonverbal elements that form part of putative multimodal constructions
are rarely, if ever, obligatory. Ziem (2017), for example, argues that there is no
clear evidence for the existence of inherently multimodal constructions, that is,
constructions in which the nonverbal elements form an integral part of the
construction’s form side. Then again, if we take the idea seriously that language
is a highly dynamic system and that our knowledge of constructions is vast
and redundant, rather than limited and highly economic, it does make sense to
assume that knowledge about typically co-occurring co-speech gestures or
other nonverbal elements can form part of a language user’s knowledge of
a construction. As such, many of the open questions regarding Multimodal
CxG hark back to overarching questions of constructionist approaches (see
Schoonjans 2017), including the crucial question of how the key notion of
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construction is defined and operationalized.

Another example of multimodality concerns the interaction of text and
images, for example in Internet memes (Bülow, Merten, & Johann, 2018;
Dancygier & Vandelanotte 2017). A subtype of these, so-called image-macro
memes, consist of a more-or-less fixed image and a text that can display different
degrees of variability. For example, in the case of the Merkel–Obama meme
studied by Bülow et al. (2018), the image shows Angela Merkel spreading her
arms in front of Barack Obama, who is sitting on a bench. This gesture can be
interpreted quite differently, as suggested by the captions, which vary from Give
Mommy a big hug, referencing an embracing gesture, to Wir sagen 2-Grad-Ziel
und tun nichts. Who cares? ‘We say 2-degree goal and do nothing. Who cares?,’
which indexes an exaggerated shrug gesture signaling indifference. Bülow et al.
(2018) also find that many of the captions contain the pattern soooo combined
with an adjective, for example Echt jetzt? Das Internet gibt es schon soooo
lange? ‘Really? The Internet has already existed for soooo long?,’ which alludes
to Merkel’s much-ridiculed statement (during a press conference with Obama in
 48 Construction Grammar

2013) that the Internet was still Neuland ‘new territory’ for everyone. This
example also shows that Internet memes tap into rich encyclopedic background
knowledge. The same is true for the One does not simply meme investigated by
Dancygier and Vandelanotte (2017), which contains a screenshot from the film
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, accompanied by a variation of
the film quote One does not simply walk into Mordor. One of the examples the
authors discuss is One does not simply save Africa by donating $1, which evokes
cultural knowledge about donation campaigns in addition to the background
knowledge about the film that is required to process the meme. Moreover, by
reproducing a lexically fixed part of the original (One does not simply . . .), this
type of meme shows resemblance to the “snowclones” discussed in Section 5.1
and could thus be seen as a multimodal extension of the latter (see Hartmann &
Ungerer 2023).
The reason for treating Internet memes as constructions is that they can be
considered partially schematic pairings of form and function. The image in
particular contributes aspects of conventionalized meaning that cannot be
compositionally derived from the caption text. For instance, the Scumbag
Steve meme also discussed by Dancygier and Vandelanotte (2017) imposes
a specific viewpoint, characterizing the action or stance expressed in the caption
text as socially inappropriate (e.g. Breaks something expensive of yours –
“Why would you spend that much on it anyway?”). While Dancygier and
Vandelanotte (2017: 591–592) concede that an analysis as constructions may
not be appropriate for all meme types, such as spoof videos (parody videos),
they do argue that image-macro memes can be regarded as multimodal con-
structions. Moreover, they suggest that “Just as construction grammar has long
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recognized clines of constructionality in dimensions of size [. . .] and abstract-

ness [. . .], we might begin to conceive of gradations in terms of modalities
involved (from monomodal to multimodal)” (Dancygier & Vandelanotte 2017:
591).
Finally, another modality that has not yet been explored in detail from
a constructionist perspective but that would merit further investigation is
written language. Within the emerging field of grapholinguistics (Meletis
2020; Meletis & Dürscheid 2022; Neef 2015), written language is regarded as
more than just a representation of spoken language, but rather a modality to be
studied in its own right. For one thing, writing affords a number of resources
that are unique to this modality, such as capitalization and punctuation. For
another, there is psycho- and neurolinguistic evidence that the processes of
reading and writing may not function with recourse to speech (see e.g. Dehaene
2009; Meletis & Dürscheid 2022: 28–29). From a constructionist point of view,
this means that, at the very least, graphemic properties should be taken into
 Constructionist Approaches 49

consideration when describing the form side of constructions (Geyer, Bick, &
Kleene 2022: 247). But going a step further, the question is whether the standard
inventory of constructions should be complemented by graphemic construc-
tions, especially if we adopt a broad notion of constructionhood like the one we
have applied to image-macro memes. Consider, for instance, the expressive use
of multiple exclamation marks <!!!> (see e.g. Busch 2021: 326), or the use of
sentence-internal capital letters in German, whose main role in present-day
language can be considered metalinguistic (viz., marking heads of noun
phrases). These graphic devices fulfill functions that do not have a direct
counterpart in other modalities. If we adopt a broad concept of constructions
in the sense of mentally internalized generalizations that also allows for the
possibility of, for instance, gestural constructions, then it does not seem too far-
fetched to allow for graphemic constructions as well. At the same time, how-
ever, as we have seen, it is an open question whether such an extension of the
construction concept is desirable, or whether a narrower notion of constructions
will prove more useful for linguistic analysis.
In sum, these examples show that language users make use of a wide range of
semiotic resources, both linguistic and paralinguistic as well as nonlinguistic.
Constructionist approaches are arguably well equipped to explore all these
facets of communication, as most of their key concepts are neither tied to
a specific modality nor strictly limited to linguistic signs. In many respects,
however, multimodal CxG is still in its infancy, and a constructionist approach
to grapholinguistics has yet to be developed.

5.3 Individual Differences

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The overarching questions regarding the definition and operationalization of

constructions are closely connected to the last of the three aspects to be
discussed in this section: If we conceive of CxG as a theory of linguistic
knowledge, the question arises of whose linguistic knowledge it is that we are
actually describing. The fact that Construction Grammarians for a long time
tended to abstract away from individual differences might be a bit surprising at
first glance, as the declared goal of the paradigm is “to find out what speakers
know when they know a language and to describe this knowledge as accurately
as possible” (Hilpert 2013: 1–2). From this perspective, it is crucial to take the
level of the individual into account, especially given the mounting evidence that
speakers differ significantly in their linguistic knowledge (e.g. Dąbrowska
2012). In recent years, this perspective has become ever more important in
constructionist approaches, and in usage-based linguistics in general (see e.g.
Petré & Anthonissen 2020). Nevertheless, much work in constructionist
 50 Construction Grammar

frameworks can be criticized for paying lip service to this commitment while at
the same time retaining, at least implicitly, the concept of an “ideal speaker-
hearer” (Chomsky 1965). The latter assumption is also intertwined with poten-
tially problematic notions such as that of a standard language, which in turn is
often tied to language ideologies (see e.g. Walsh 2021).
A perspective that emphasizes individual differences follows straightfor-
wardly from a usage-based account: If language is learned through experience,
as argued by the usage-based approach to language acquisition (e.g. Tomasello
2003; Tomasello & Lieven 2008), each person will build up their own
“construct-i-con” as every individual encounters at least somewhat different
linguistic input. What makes matters even more complex is that a person’s
construct-i-con can change over the course of a lifetime (see e.g. Neels 2020).
Charting intra- and interindividual differences is a challenge for research on
language acquisition, language variation, and language change. But construc-
tionist approaches are arguably well suited to meet this challenge as they, at
least in principle, offer the possibility of modeling individual-specific construc-
tional networks. While there are still some open questions about how exactly
this could be done, the recent surge in research on individual differences
promises significant progress regarding the development of analytical tools
for addressing these issues (see e.g. Anthonissen & Petré 2019; Beaman &
Buchstaller 2021; Schmid & Mantlik 2015; Standing & Petré 2021). The turn
toward individual differences is also a consequence of the commitment of
usage-based approaches to putting actual language use center stage.
As one example of a study investigating individual differences, consider
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Neels’ (2020) analysis of the let alone construction in the works of William
Faulkner. Comparing Faulkner’s novels with the Fiction part of the Corpus of
Historical American English (COHA), Neels shows that Faulkner was way
ahead of his contemporaries in the use of this construction, using it more and
more over his lifespan, and increasingly varying the constituent types in the
X and Y slot of [X, let alone Y] as well as the syntactic positioning of let alone.
To some extent, then, the development of the construction in Faulkner’s idiolect
can be regarded as anticipating the community-wide grammaticalization of the
construction. In a similar vein, Schmid and Mantlik (2015) investigate the
construction [N BE that], such as all the talk is that . . ., in the language use of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors, showing that their usage profiles
differed in terms of the frequency with which they used the construction as well
as the construction’s collocational range. These differences turn out to be much
larger than expected even for authors whose works can be considered very
similar in terms of parameters like genre and style (Schmid & Mantlik 2015:
616). Especially from a diachronic point of view, then, processes at the micro-
 Constructionist Approaches 51

level of individuals can prove highly informative, as they allow us to bridge the
gap between entrenchment, as a process that primarily takes place at the level of
the individual, and conventionalization, as a process that unfolds at the level of
the community (see e.g. Schmid 2020).

5.4 Summary
Summing up, constructionist approaches are currently extending their scope,
taking numerous aspects into account that may have been implicit in the
assumptions of the paradigm but which arguably remained understudied until
fairly recently. We have discussed three examples of topics that are currently
gaining traction in constructionist research: the role of creativity, especially in
the sense of “rule-breaking” creativity that entails extravagant effects; multi-
modal perspectives on language; and individual differences among speakers.
More topics could easily be added to this list, including the recent endeavors in
“constructicography,” that is, attempts to document the constructional inven-
tories of different languages (Herbst 2019; Lyngfelt et al. 2018; see Section 3.3),
the related question of how exactly formal and semantic aspects of construc-
tions can be cross-linguistically mapped onto each other in an empirically valid
way (see e.g. Willich 2022), the question of how multilingualism can be
modeled in a CxG framework (Höder 2012, 2014; Wasserscheidt 2015,
2021), and proposals for how constructionist principles can be applied to
language pedagogy (Boas 2022; De Knop & Gilquin 2016). These examples
show that constructionist approaches continue to evolve in multiple productive
directions, both in terms of theory and those of methodology.
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6 Conclusion and Outlook

Surveying the recent CxG literature, one might gain the impression that con-
structionist approaches are notoriously self-reflexive – compare paper titles like
“Three open questions in Diachronic Construction Grammar” (Hilpert 2018) or
“What would it take for us to abandon Construction Grammar?” (Hoffmann
2020). The present Element is no exception, as giving an overview of current
developments in CxG necessarily requires a discussion of the many different
ways in which basic concepts such as that of “construction” have been, and are
being, implemented in different streams of constructionist research. But we
hope to have shown that the heterogeneity of constructionist approaches can
actually be seen as a strength of the paradigm, as it allows for approaching
research questions in different, yet often complementary, ways.
One reason why much of the recent work in CxG has taken a metatheoretical
perspective is that there are a number of unresolved key questions, some of
 52 Construction Grammar

which we have addressed in this Element. The most important one is probably
that of how exactly the notion of construction is defined, and which types of
linguistic units it encompasses. In Section 2, we showed that there is a broad
consensus that constructions can be conceived of as form–meaning pairs at
various levels of abstraction and complexity. However, it is a matter of debate
whether morphemes and/or words can be considered as constructions. In line
with the recent tendency in usage-based linguistics to conceive of language as
a complex adaptive system (Beckner et al. 2009), we have argued for a dynamic
and gradient notion of constructionhood. Another question is whether
the number of different constructionist approaches, and their theoretical and
methodological divergences, strengthen the paradigm or whether they lead to
a fragmentation of the field. In Section 3, we reviewed six major constructionist
frameworks, arguing that they pursue somewhat different but mutually comple-
mentary research goals, and that their analyses often require different methods
and degrees of formalization. A third issue, which we addressed in Section 4,
concerns the dynamic nature of language and how it can be modeled via
different types of network relations between constructions. We discussed the
potential and challenges of current network models in CxG, addressing aspects
such as the ontological status of the network units, the empirical basis for
network representations, and the use of formal tools like those of network
science for the analysis of connectivity patterns.
Finally, in Section 5, we introduced three topics that have recently become
more important in constructionist research: linguistic creativity, multimodality,
and individual differences. While these examples show that CxG is extending
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press

its scope, taking phenomena into account that had previously been neglected,
there are still a number of desiderata. One is extending constructionist
approaches to a broader inventory of different languages. While there has
been much progress regarding the adaptation of constructionist analyses to
a more diverse set of languages, including ones that are understudied (see e.g.
Hölzl 2018 for a constructionist account of negation constructions in Manchu),
most constructionist theorizing still focuses on a small set of WEIRD languages
(in the sense of Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan 2010, i.e. languages spoken in
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies). This prob-
lem is not limited to constructionist approaches, but it is particularly relevant for
CxG as it is still to some extent an open question how well constructionist
concepts can account for typologically very different languages, including
signed languages, as discussed in Section 5.2. Another challenge concerns the
cognitive plausibility of constructions and relations between constructions.
While there have been many attempts to bring together empirical evidence
using multiple different methods (see e.g. Schönefeld 2011), these are often
 Constructionist Approaches 53

limited to individual case studies that can lead to very different conclusions
when individual researchers try to derive bigger-picture conclusions from them.
Such differences can either give rise to a fragmentation of the field, or to fruitful
and productive discussions. We hope that our approach in the present Element
will contribute to the latter, by highlighting specific points of divergence and
suggesting a number of possible avenues for future research.
Despite the remaining questions and challenges, constructionist approaches
have become a major paradigm in the study of language. The concept of
constructions offers a unified framework for investigating phenomena at differ-
ent levels of linguistic analysis and for modeling grammatical knowledge in
a way that is gradually becoming more and more cognitively plausible. But even
after more than thirty years, the constructionist enterprise has only just begun,
and, to close with the obligatory pun, CxG as a field and as a family of theories is
still very much under construction.
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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Construction Grammar

Thomas Hoffmann
Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Thomas Hoffmann is Full Professor and Chair of English Language and Linguistics at the
Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt as well as Furong Scholar Distinguished Chair
Professor of Hunan Normal University. His main research interests are usage-based
Construction Grammar, language variation and change and linguistic creativity. He has
published widely in international journals such as Cognitive Linguistics, English Language
and Linguistics, and English World-Wide. His monographs Preposition Placement in English
(2011) and English Comparative Correlatives: Diachronic and Synchronic Variation at the
Lexicon-Syntax Interface (2019) were both published by Cambridge University Press. His
textbook on Construction Grammar: The Structure of English (2022) as well as an Element on
The Cognitive Foundation of Post-colonial Englishes: Construction Grammar as the Cognitive
Theory for the Dynamic Model (2021) have also both been published with Cambridge
University Press. He is also co-editor (with Graeme Trousdale) of The Oxford Handbook of
Construction Grammar (2013, Oxford University Press).

Alexander Bergs
Osnabrück University
Alexander Bergs joined the Institute for English and American Studies at Osnabrück
University, Germany, in 2006 when he became Full Professor and Chair of English Language
and Linguistics. His research interests include, among others, language variation and
change, constructional approaches to language, the role of context in language, the syntax/
pragmatics interface, and cognitive poetics. His works include several authored and edited
books (Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics, Modern Scots, Contexts and
Constructions, Constructions and Language Change), a short textbook on Synchronic English
Linguistics, one on Understanding Language Change (with Kate Burridge) and the
two-volume Handbook of English Historical Linguistics (ed. with Laurel Brinton; now
available as five-volume paperback) as well as more than fifty papers in high-profile
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press

international journals and edited volumes. Alexander Bergs has taught at the Universities of
Düsseldorf, Bonn, Santiago de Compostela, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Catania, Vigo,
Thessaloniki, Athens, and Dalian and has organized numerous international workshops and
conferences.

About the series

Construction Grammar is the leading cognitive theory of syntax. The present Elements
series will survey its theoretical building blocks, show how Construction Grammar can
capture various linguistic phenomena across a wide range of typologically different
languages, and identify emerging frontier topics from a theoretical, empirical and
applied perspective.
 Construction Grammar

Elements in the series

The Constructicon: Taxonomies and Networks
Holger Diessel
Constructionist Approaches: Past, Present, Future
Tobias Ungerer and Stefan Hartmann

A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/EICG

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009308717 Published online by Cambridge University Press