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 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/