Some publications on Construction Grammar are available on Adele
Goldberg's website:

http://mccawley.cogsci.uiuc.edu/~adele/

I quote from an encyclopedia entry that is listed on her publications
page (it can be downloaded from her website and provides a nice
thumbnail sketch of the theory, though no analyses or diagrams; these
can be found in other papers on the site):

"A CONSTRUCTION is defined to be a pairing of form with meaning/use such
that some aspect of the form or some aspect of the meaning/use is not
strictly predictable from the component parts
or from other constructions already established to exist in the
language.   On this view, phrasal patterns, including the constructions
of traditional grammarians, such as relative clauses, questions,
locative inversion, etc. are given theoretical status. Morphemes are
also constructions, according to the definition, since their form is not
predictable from their meaning or use. Given this, it follows that the
lexicon is not neatly delimited from the rest of grammar, although
phrasal constructions differ from lexical items in their internal
complexity. Both phrasal patterns and lexical items are stored in an
extended `constructicon.'

Elements within the constructicon vary in degrees of idiomaticity. At
one end of the idiomaticity continuum, we find very general, abstract
constructions such as the Subject-Predicate construction; on the other
end, we find simple lexical items and constructions with all of their
lexical fillers specified but with non-compositional meanings (e.g.,
kick the bucket). In between, we find the full range of possibilities:
for example, idioms which have freely fillable positions (keep/lose x's
cool), compositional collocations with fixed word order (e.g., up and
down), phrasal patterns that are only partially productive (e.g. the
English ditransitive), phrasal patterns which are partially
morphologically specified (The Xer, the Yer)."

From Adele E. Goldberg. To appear?. Construction Grammar.  Brown and
Miller (eds).
Elsevier Science Limited's Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories.

What makes 'go Xing' such a good candidate for constructionhood is that
its semantics is unpredictable--the learner has to learn that this
construction is used only for certain activity types. Its special
meaning is what makes the construction special, along with its special
form of 'go Xing'. The learner experiences this phrase in contexts in
which leisure activities are being talked about, and  learns to connect
'go Xing' with 'a leisure activity'. Expressions such as 'go
housecleaning' are not heard, while lots of examples of leisure
activities (and certain other types as I have noted) are. A child who
creatively says something like 'go churching' might elicit chuckles and
perhaps a modeled correction like 'yes, we're going to church now',
giving the child a clue that what they said wasn't conventional.

Constructions are learned through exposure, and a learner figures out
whether something is a construction or not in the same way a learner
learns words and morphologically complex words (words with suffixes or
prefixes on them). I believe Constr. Grammar does have a formal-analysis
component, but I don't recall clearly, as it has been awhile since I
read any detail on it. I don't know their position on Universal Grammar
(as constraints that govern what constructions are learnable). The
formal part of the theory is, in fact, the aspect of it that I don't
like. In Cognitive Grammar, structure is highly underspecified meaning.
'Reflexive', for example, would be something like 'AGENT ACTS UPON SELF'
connected to templates recording the structural patterning of typical
reflexives in the language, e.g. something equivalent to 'NP V ...self'.
Notions such as NP, V, etc. receive semantic definitions (NP would be
'grounded thing', for example, with detailed definitions of 'grounded'
and 'thing' that are less simplistic than they appear here). These are
frames similar to subcategorization frames. They aren't viewed as formal
objects; they're viewed as schematic concepts stored in the mind.

Jim writes," It seems that constructions have properties of
both unanalyzed wholes and expressions whose interpretation depends on some
sort of formal analysis (which all things being equal, construction grammamr
would prefer not to do.) Obviously, a construct with these conflicting
properties would be hard to identify."

Why do these properties conflict? 'Go VERBing' has clear formal
structure--linear order, certain kinds of elements with certain
morphological markings--but functions holistically to symbolize the
notion 'set out to undertake a leisure activity', or 'undertake a
leisure activity'. I don't understand why it's hard to identify this as
a construction.

Crosstalk between more cognitively-oriented linguists and formal
linguists is difficult because certain groups of cognitively-oriented
linguists don't believe in a separate, non-semantic portion of the
language that has its own governing properties. We have equivalents of
formal units, but they are semantic units, and they are governed
semantically. At least, we strive in every case to make a semantic
explanation, just as formalists aim for formal explanations. Discourse
linguists look for explanations in social purpose of talk and in
information-processing imperatives.

I don't know if Jim or other linguists of formal orientation can make
sense of this, but this is the best I can do in a thumbnail.

Why is learnability an important issue for the list? Forgive me if this
sounds like a stupid question.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba   Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, California Polytechnic State University
One Grand Avenue  • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. (805)-756-2184  •  Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone.  756-2596
• E-mail: [log in to unmask] •  Home page: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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