Constructional Reorganization

Description: 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. Review: [...] This book offers invaluable insights into the systematic nature of language, on the one hand, and its variability and susceptibility to change, on the other. The contributions in this volume provide illuminating accounts of extant constructions and emergent constructions in languages other than English, this showing how fruitfully the synchronic analysis and the diachronic analysis can be combined within CxG(s). -- Francisco Gonzalvez-Garcia, University of Almeria, in Review of Corpus Linguistics Vol. 9:2 (2011) Contents: 1. 1. Grammar as a Construction Site (by Leino, Jaakko); 2. 2. Resolving form-meaning discrepancies in Construction Grammar (by Boas, Hans C.); 3. 3. Language change, variability, and functional load: Finnish genericity from a constructional point of view (by Leino, Pentti); 4. 4. Precategoriality and argument structure in Late Archaic Chinese (by Bisang, Walter); 5. 5. Variations in Japanese honorification - deviations or a change in the making? (by Matsumoto, Yoshiko); 6. 6. Constructing reasoning: The connectives for att (causal), sa att (consecutive) and men att (adversative) in Swedish conversations (by Lindstrom, Jan K.); 7. Subject index; 8. Index of constructions