Constructional Reorganization

The present volume consists of several novel and different applications of the Construction Grammar framework to areas such as language change, variation, and the internal organization of grammar. The book is a collection of articles which bring together the framework of Construction Grammar and the constantly changing language system. Thereby, two main questions are addressed which are of paramount interest to linguists working with the notion of grammatical construction: Where do constructions come from? And, how are the grammatical constructions in a given language organized to form the coherent whole which we refer to as “grammar”? The book connects the latest developments in grammatical theory and Construction Grammar with empirical findings and data, language-specific research traditions, and cross-language issues. It is aimed at linguists interested in Construction Grammar, constructional approaches to grammar more generally, language variation and change, and the internal architecture of grammar.

The present volume consists of several novel and different applications of the Construction Grammar framework to areas such as language change, variation, and the internal organization of grammar. The book is a collection of articles which bring together the framework of Construction Grammar and the constantly changing language system. Thereby, two main questions are addressed which are of paramount interest to linguists working with the notion of grammatical construction: Where do constructions come from? And, how are the grammatical constructions in a given language organized to form the coherent whole which we refer to as “grammar”? The book connects the latest developments in grammatical theory and Construction Grammar with empirical findings and data, language-specific research traditions, and cross-language issues. It is aimed at linguists interested in Construction Grammar, constructional approaches to grammar more generally, language variation and change, and the internal architecture of grammar.

Martin Hilpert combines construction grammar and advanced corpus-based methodology into a new way of studying language change. Constructions are generalizations over remembered exemplars of language use. These exemplars are stored with all their formal and functional properties, yielding constructional generalizations that contain many parameters of variation. Over time, as patterns of language use are changing, the generalizations are changing with them. This book illustrates the workings of constructional change with three corpus-based studies that reveal patterns of change at several levels of linguistic structure, ranging from allomorphy to word formation and to syntax. Taken together, the results strongly motivate the use of construction grammar in research on diachronic language change. This new perspective has wide-ranging consequences for the way historical linguists think about language change. It will be of particular interest to linguists working on morpho-syntax, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.

Category change, broadly defined as the shift from one word class to another, is often studied as part of other changes, such as grammaticalization or lexicalization, but not in its own right. This volume offers a survey of different types of category change and their properties, e.g. abrupt versus gradual changes, morphological versus syntactic changes, or context-independent versus context-sensitive changes. The purpose of this collection of papers is to explore the concepts of linguistic category and category change from the perspective of Construction Grammar. Using data from a variety of languages, the authors address a number of themes that are central to current theorizing about category change, such as the question of whether or not categories should be considered discrete entities, how new categories arise, or whether category change can be considered as the emergence of a new construction, i.e. a new form-meaning pairing. The novel approach advanced in this volume will be of interest to historical linguists as well as to general linguists working on the nature of linguistic categories.

This Handbook is the first authoritative reference work solely dedicated to the theory, method, and applications of Construction Grammar, and will be a resource that students and scholars alike can turn to for a representative overview of its many sub-theories and applications.

The papers in this volume provide a contrastive application of Construction Grammar. By referencing a well-described constructional phenomenon in English, each paper provides a solid foundation for describing and analyzing its constructional counterpart in another language. This approach shows that the semantic description (including discourse-pragmatic and functioanl factors) of an English construction can be regarded as a first step towards a "tertium comparationis" that can be employed for comparing and contrasting the formal properties of constructional counterparts in other languages. Thus, the meaning pole of constructions should be regarded as the primary basis for comparisons of constructions across languages - the form pole is only secondary. This volume shows that constructions are viable descriptive and analytical tools for cross-linguistic comparisons that make it possible to capture both language-specific (idiosyncratic) properties as well as cross-linguistic generalizations.

This textbook reader discusses the importance of organization and reorganization in the contemporary structure of the American federal government. First, it deals with the decision to change structural arrangements within the bureaucracy. Through a range of conceptual readings, it explores why reorganization and changing the structure of government continues to happen, allowing the reader to understand the multiple and often conflicting goals involved in changing organizational structure. It highlights two contrasting approaches to reorganization: a management approach and a policy approach.Secondly, it discusses the consequences of reorganization activity by focusing on the results of a number of federal government reorganizations. The examples include the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Education, and proposals to establish a U.S. Department of Food Safety.This is an ideal text for courses in public management, public policy, and political science courses covering the Presidency and Congress.

This volume brings together ten contributions by leading experts who present their current usage-based research in Diachronic Construction Grammar. All papers contribute to the discussion of how to conceptualize constructional networks best and how to model changes in the constructicon, as for example node creation or loss, node-external reconfiguration of the network or in/decrease in productivity and schematicity. The authors discuss the theoretical status of allostructions, homostructions, constructional families and constructional paradigms. The terminological distinction between constructionalization and constructional change is revisited. It is shown how constructional competition but also general cognitive abilities like analogical thinking and schematization relate to the structure and reorganization of the constructional network. Most contributions focus on the nature of vertical and horizontal links. Finally, contributions to the volume also discuss how existing network models should be enriched or reconceptualized in order to integrate theoretical, psychological and neurological aspects missing so far.

Construction Grammar is enthusiastically embraced by a growing group of linguists who find it a natural way to formulate their analyses. But so far there is no widespread formalization of construction grammar with a solid computational implementation. Fluid Construction Grammar attempts to fill this gap. It is a fully operational computational framework capturing many key concepts in construction grammar. The present book is the first extensive publication describing this framework. In addition to general introductions, it gives a number of concrete examples through a series of linguistically challenging case studies, including phrase structure, case grammar, and modality. The book is suited both for linguists who want to know what Fluid Construction Grammar looks like and for computational linguists who may want to use this computational framework for their own experiments or applications.