Abstract This short paper reviews differences and points of convergence between Construction Grammar and Dependency Grammar, with the aim of fostering a dialogue between the two frameworks. Steps towards such a dialogue have already been taken with regard to Word Grammar, and dependency-based concepts such as the catena have been discussed against the background of constructional approaches. Furthermore, the compatibility of the two frameworks has been suggested in recent psycholinguistic work. To contextualize these issues, this paper discusses four points of divergence between Construction Grammar and Dependency Grammar, namely, the assumption of phrasal constructions vs. dependency structure, the place of meaning, the autonomy of the language system, and the treatment of idiosyncratic syntactic constraints.
In this paper, we discuss the prevalent diversity of constructionist approaches in relation to the idea of Construction Grammar as a coherent field of linguistic study. We do so, based on the views of about 190 constructionist researchers, as expressed in a questionnaire in 2021. While the responses show both variety and agreement, the main dividers appear to be whether all constructionist approaches are usage-based, on the one hand, and the stance towards formalization, on the other. We argue that the diversity of approaches is on the one hand a strength, in that a great variety of linguistic phenomena can be accounted for from a constructionist viewpoint. On the other hand, it is a weakness if these accounts are not mutually compatible. If Construction Grammar is to truly work as a model of language as a whole, the various approaches must not only get to co-exist - and flourish - but also be made to fit together. This is not a call for conformity, but rather for communication and cross-fertilization.
Understanding how language comprehension works remains a central challenge. While meaning is traditionally viewed as incrementally constructed through compositional processes, numerous studies show that non-compositional mechanisms also play a crucial role. In this paper, we propose a unified framework grounded in Construction Grammar and Distributional Semantics that integrates both aspects. In this perspective, we extend Sign-Based Construction Grammar by formalizing meaning as the interaction of three semantic components: constructions, frames, and events, to which distributional information is integrated. We further introduce a processing mechanism in which meaning emerges through activation dynamics, evaluated and controlled via similarity and unification.
Formal rhetorical figures (schemes) have been largely neglected by Construction Grammar (CxG). The losses of this omission are substantial. Like metaphors, schemes leverage general-purpose neurocognitive principles and evoke communicative functions. They give utterances salience and memorability, making them highly compatible with usage-based models, and they align form with function. Their association with ludic functions also makes them of considerable interest to creativity-of-everyday-language linguists. Focusing on inverse-repetition figures (exemplified by "all for one and one for all") and a few collocate figures, this paper argues for integrating rhetorical schemes much more fully into CxG.
Two structurally unrelated constructions can affect each other's realization through a process that has been called constructional contamination. According to this effect, lexemes participating in a grammatical alternation will deviate in their stochastic preference for an alternant if they appear frequently in a contaminating construction that is formally similar to the alternant in question. In the present article, we evaluate whether such contamination effects can also be found between two constructions in Dutch which share the same form, including the verb krijgen 'to get' and a past participle, but have distinct meanings (a "receptive" vs. a "resultative" meaning), and, if so, whether these effects occur in both directions. We zoom in on word order differences: if krijgen and the participle appear in a verb cluster, both word orders are possible in the receptive krijgen-construction, while, for the resultative krijgen-construction, the order with krijgen preceding the participle is reported to be ungrammatical in the grammatical literature but is not altogether absent from real-language corpora. Logistic regression analyses, based on data culled from the SoNaR-corpus, show that the word order in both constructions is indeed affected by constructional contamination, thus showing that this phenomenon can be bidirectional. Additionally, we demonstrate that these contamination effects differ between two national varieties of Dutch, viz. Belgian vs. Netherlandic Dutch, and we argue that contamination can sometimes also result in a disambiguating reflex. These results suggest that subtle differences in the organization of the constructional network can result in (partly) different contamination effects.
