Constructional approaches to grammar

There are four main varieties of constructional approach to grammar. The first is the theory called Construction Grammar that was developed by Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay and their colleagues. While this theory is broadly generative in orientation, it set the scene for the development of cognitive approaches that adopted the central thesis of Fillmore and Kay’s approach, namely that grammar can be modelled in terms of constructions rather than ‘words and rules’. In part, Construction Grammar is motivated by the fact that certain complex grammatical constructions (e.g. idioms like kick the bucket or throw in the towel) have meaning that cannot be predicted on the basis of their sub-parts and might therefore be ‘stored whole’ rather than ‘built from scratch’. We look in detail at Construction Grammar in Chapter 19, and in Chapter 20 we intro duce three constructional approaches that are set firmly within the cognitive framework: (1) a model that we call Goldberg’s Construction Grammar, developed by Adele Goldberg; (2) Radical Construction Grammar, developed by William Croft; and (3) Embodied Construction Grammar, a recent approach developed by Benjamin Bergen and Nancy Chang. It is worth pointing out that Cognitive Grammar could be also be classified as a constructional approach to grammar because Langacker also adopts a constructional view of certain types of grammatical unit. However, as we will see in later chapters, Langacker defines the construction in a different way from these models. Cognitive Grammar and constructional approaches to grammar share another feature in common: both are inventory-based approaches to the study of grammar. In other words, both types of approach view the grammar as an inventory of symbolic units rather than a system of rules or principles. This amounts to the claim that the language system does not work predominantly by ‘building’ structure (as in generative models of grammar) but by ‘storing’ it. We will return to this issue later in the chapter (section 14.4). Despite these important similarities, we have classified Langacker’s model separately from constructional approaches because Cognitive Grammar places a greater emphasis on the cognitive mechanisms and principles that underlie the grammar. Figure 14.4 summarises the main similarities and differences between Cognitive Grammar and constructional approaches to grammar.

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المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Units of grammar

Grammar

Grammatical terminology

Cognitive approaches to grammaticalization

Cognitive Grammar

The Conceptual Structuring System Model

Distinct cognitive approaches to grammar

The architecture of the model

The usage-based thesis

The symbolic thesis

Guiding assumptions

What is a cognitive approach to grammar?