Constructional Approaches to English Grammar

Book excerpt: This collection of articles brings together new research from both established and emerging international experts in the study of English grammar, all of whom have engaged with the notion of 'construction' in their work. The research here is concerned with both synchrony and diachrony, with the relationship between Construction Grammar and other linguistic theories, and with a number of issues in the study of grammar, such as raising and control phenomena, transitivity, relative clause structure, the syntax of gerunds, attributive and predicative uses of adjectives, modality, and grammaticalization. Some of the articles are written within a constructional framework, while others highlight potential problems with constructional approaches to English grammar; some of the articles are based on data collected from corpora, some on introspection; some of the articles suggest potential developments for diachronic construction grammar, while others seek to compare Construction Grammar with other cognitive linguistic theories, most particularly Word Grammar. The research reported in this volume presents a series of ways of looking at the relationship between constructions and patterns in English grammar, either now or in the past. The book addresses scholars and advanced students who are interested in English grammar, constructional approaches to language, and the relationship between functional and formal issues in linguistic description and theory.