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17 - Constructions in Typological and Cross-Linguistic Context

from Part V - Constructions in Sociocultural and Typological Variation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2025

By
William Croft
Edited by
Mirjam Fried  and
Kiki Nikiforidou
Mirjam Fried
Affiliation:
Univerzita Karlova
Kiki Nikiforidou
Affiliation:
University of Athens, Greece
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Summary

Construction Grammar and typology share many assumptions and each approach can fruitfully inform the other. Both fields start from a pairing of form and function and treat lexicon, morphology, and syntax as a continuum of varying strategies to express function. Cross-linguistic comparison leads to a distinction between language-particular categories and structures, determined by distributional analysis, and comparative concepts that are cross-linguistically valid. Strategies are morphosyntactic formal structures that are defined language-independently and constructions are comparative concepts; as such, constructions and their components can be aligned across languages, and strategies allow the alignment of morphosyntactic structures used for constructions across languages. Typologists have also developed representations of the conceptual relations between the functions of different constructions in terms of conceptual spaces. Typological diversity also suggests that the only universal syntactic structure is the part–whole relation between a construction and its constituents. Both Construction Grammar and typology give a prominent role to diachrony, seeing constructions as lineages.

Keywords

Construction Grammartypologycomparative conceptdistributional analysisconstructionstrategysemanticsinformation packagingdiachronylineage
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar , pp. 439 - 468
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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