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This chapter provides a survey of various approaches within the field of dependency grammar. First, the basic concepts of Tesnière’s Éléments de syntaxe structurale (1959) such as actants, circonstants, junction, and translation are outlined. Then the application of the concept of dependency in different approaches such as that taken in Hudson’s Word Grammar and in Mel’čuk’s approach are discussed. Section 7.4 focuses on the development of valency theory and related approaches and their application to English, discussing the complement–adjunct distinction, the idea of optionality of complements and the approach taken to the description of valency in the Valency Dictionary of English. Finally, it will be shown how valency and dependency can be related to more recent constructionist theories.

This chapter emphasizes the shared communicative motivation of ellipsis constructions that leads to cross-linguistic similarities and certain predictable functional constraints. More specifically, ellipsis is licensed by a system of motivated constructions, i.e. learned pairings of form and function. Constructions capture a range of restrictions on form and function, including those related to semantics, discourse context, register, genre, and dialect. Generalizations across constructions are captured by a network of constructions with partially overlapping representations. Semantic recoverability is facilitated not by copying and deleting syntactic structure at the ellipsis site, but by a cognitive process that ‘points’ to information that is, typically but not always, available from the memory trace of an antecedent. This mechanism is independently required for fragments, non-elliptical expressions such as ditto and respectively, and the many examples that do not display the ‘connectivity’ effects that are predicted by copy and deletion accounts.

The chapter provides an outline of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010), a recent model of morphology. The theory follows the basic tenets of Construction Grammar in treating form–meaning pairs (‘constructions’) as the basic units of language and assuming a continuum rather than a split between grammar and lexicon. Words and multi-word units are stored in memory if they have noncompositional properties and/or are conventionalized and frequent. Lexical items show a rich internal structure and are highly interconnected. Generalizations over stored items are captured in schemas: constructions consisting partly or entirely of variables. If productive, such schemas serve as templates for new words and word forms. Relations between schemas are captured in second-order schemas, which are particularly useful in modelling inflectional paradigms and paradigmatic word formation. The model offers a flexible architecture that complements construction-based syntax and accommodates both regularities and idiosyncrasies, as well as variation and change.

Analytic philosophy of language was originally based on a fundamentally disembodied view of meaning and language. In contrast, research in cognitive linguistics and neuroscience emphasizes the central role of the body and brain in shaping meaning, concepts, and thought. Meaning is not, in the first instance, linguistic. Instead, language depends on and recruits prior sensory, motor, and affective processes. This article surveys some of the more important embodied structures and processes of meaning-making that give rise to the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of natural languages. This includes body-part projections, perceptual concepts, image schemas, emotions, body-based grammatical constructions, and conceptual metaphors, as those are understood from the perspective of simulation semantics, embodied construction grammar, and the neural theory of language. In addition to the four Es of cognition—embodied, embedded, enactive, extended—we need to add three more Es—emotional, evolutionary, and exaptative.

This chapter surveys theoretical approaches to Persian syntax, with an emphasis on more recent work. It begins with a brief discussion of what constitutes a theoretical, as opposed to descriptive, approach, and proceeds with a look at Linguistic Typology, Construction Grammar, and Cognitive, Functionalist, and Corpus approaches. At the end of the chapter, formal approaches such as RRG, HPSG, and LFG are touched upon as well as formal generative work prior to Minimalism, which is covered in the previous chapter. The discussion in each case is intended to showcase the way in which aspects of Persian syntax have been addressed. The advantages to considering Persian both in a historical context and within the family of other Iranian languages is highlighted, and a number of distinctive constructions within the language are discussed in light of how they have been treated within the literature.

This chapter presents a survey of ergativity in Jaminjung, a Mindi language of northern Australia. Jaminjung is morphologically ergative but displays nominative-accusative traits in several syntactic constructions. It also exhibits differential (“optional”) agent marking since in most environments, ergative case may be present or absent, depending on multiple factors. These include factors which are known to trigger splits in split ergative systems – animacy, degree of impingement on the patient, and aspect – but also information structure: the presence of ergative marking strongly correlates with focus. A further interesting phenomenon is the occasional use of the ablative case as an alternative to the ergative case in marking agents, also related to information structure, verb class and animacy. Taking a construction-based perspective, it is argued that agent marking in Jaminjung is neither purely lexically nor purely structurally determined, but can be accounted for by a number of violable constraints, without strict ranking.

Meanings are assembled in various ways in a construction-based grammar, and this array can be represented as a continuum of idiomaticity, a gradient of lexical fixity. Constructional meanings are the meanings to be discovered at every point along the idiomaticity continuum. At the leftmost, or ‘fixed,’ extreme of this continuum are frozen idioms, like the salt of the earth and in the know. The set of frozen idioms includes those with idiosyncratic syntactic properties, like the fixed expression by and large (an exceptional pattern of coordination in which a preposition and adjective are conjoined). Other frozen idioms, like the unexceptionable modified noun red herring, feature syntax found elsewhere. At the rightmost, or ‘open’ end of this continuum are fully productive patterns, including the rule that licenses the string Kim blinked, known as the Subject-Predicate construction. Between these two poles are (a) lexically fixed idiomatic expressions, verb-headed and otherwise, with regular inflection, such as chew/chews/chewed the fat; (b) flexible expressions with invariant lexical fillers, including phrasal idioms like spill the beans and the Correlative Conditional, such as the more, the merrier; and (c) specialized syntactic patterns without lexical fillers, like the Conjunctive Conditional (e.g., One more remark like that and you’re out of here). Construction Grammar represents this range of expressions in a uniform way: whether phrasal or lexical, all are modeled as feature structures that specify phonological and morphological structure, meaning, use conditions, and relevant syntactic information (including syntactic category and combinatoric potential).

This paper deals with a well-known problem in the discussion of argument linking, the flexibility that we find with particular verbs, and the constraints governing the integration of verbs with so-called argument structure constructions. We will show that traditional approaches as well as construction grammar need additional machinery to deal with variable argument linking. I will present an optimisation approach to variable argument linking that uses construction grammar as format for morphosyntax.

From the start of cognitive linguistics, in the 1980s, researchers working within this framework have given ample attention to mood and modality. This is understandable since these categories crucially involve speaker attitude and perspective and cognitive linguistics has always concerned itself with the ways in which language users present a subjective construal of reality. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of how mood and modality are analyzed within different strands of cognitive linguistics, ranging from the models of force dynamics and Mental Spaces to Cognitive Grammar. Specific topics discussed include the polysemy of modal verbs, the analysis of tense as modality, and the highly detailed account of modal verbs offered by Langacker in terms of “grounding” and “subjectivity”. The emerging framework of construction grammar focuses on the linguistic contexts, that is constructions, in which modal forms are used, regarding these as constraints on polysemy.

This chapter focuses on Cognitive Construction Grammar (CCG), which aims at providing a psychologically plausible account of language by investigating the general cognitive principles that serve to structure the network of language-specific constructions. It traces the foundations of CCG, discusses the major organizing principles and the architecture of CCG, and describes the organization of constructional knowledge in CCG. The chapter also compares CCG with other strands of Construction Grammar to show what ideas they share and where they differ, and looks at the interaction of multiple constructions, the role of networks, and inheritance hierarchies, as well as frequency and productivity from a CCG perspective.

This chapter explores some of the ways in which cognitive linguists have interfaced with sociolinguistics in order to enrich and refine their analyses. It describes cognitive linguistic research on English and Dutch where the analysis benefits from taking a broader, social perspective than is usual for cognitive linguists. Furthermore, it discusses work on Lancashire dialect to illustrate some ways in which a cognitive perspective can be used to actually feed back into sociolinguistic theory and practice. The chapter also stresses the need for greater dialogue between construction grammarians and sociolinguistics in order to achieve a psychologically and socially plausible account of linguistic variation.