The framework of Construction Grammar extends naturally to morphology. Constructions in a lexicon–grammar continuum elegantly capture the regularities and idiosyncrasies that typically co-occur in complex words. Yet, Construction Morphology is not just Construction Grammar applied to morphology. Morphological phenomena come with their own challenges and place specific demands on the theory. This chapter outlines the contributions that a constructionist approach to morphology makes to constructionist thinking more broadly. The focus is on two construction-based approaches: Construction Morphology and Relational Morphology. Three topics are highlighted especially. First, idiomaticity and other types of non-compositionality are discussed in the context of the relations within and across morphological constructions. Second, the chapter addresses productivity, specifically limited productivity as is often seen in word-formation. The third topic is paradigmaticity and the role of ‘horizontal’ connections between complex words and between morphological schemas. The chapter aims to show that morphology, the grammar of words, is instructive for the larger theoretical framework.

Construction Grammar offers several assets that foster the learning and teaching of foreign languages. The constructionist approach focuses on well-entrenched form–meaning mappings of different degrees of complexity and abstraction. Thus, if learners have acquired the syntax and semantics of specific foreign constructions, they should be able to understand the semantic motivation behind the syntactic forms and infer the meaning of new instantiations. Moreover – an economical principle in the learning process – these units can be learned as part of a network of semantically related constructions. In learning L2-constructions, construction-based teaching strategies can be implemented, that is, the scaffolding strategy, structural priming and embodied construction practice. The scaffolding strategy elaborates on the semantic link between constructions of different degrees of syntactic complexity and on the family resemblance concept. Structural priming focuses on the creative repetition of similar structures with different slot-fillers. Finally, embodied practice applies to constructions referring to concrete events which can be represented with pictures or objects or can be enacted.

Givón’s chapter presents an evolutionary hypothesis suggesting that the earliest rigid word order in human language must have been (S)OV. The hypothesis is supported first by synchronic distributional data suggesting that the vast majority of known language families can be easily reconstructed to SOV on purely internal grounds. Unlike the vast majority of VO languages, SOV languages show no reconstructible traces of any prior VO word order. What is more, a non-contact-induced drift from VO to OV has yet to be conclusively documented. The chapter offers a cultural-communicative explanation of why the early evolved word order of human language must have been SOV, as well as why it has been drifting away from that early order ever since, first to free (pragmatically determined) word order, then to V-first (VSO, VOS), and eventually to SVO. Why some languages have never undergone this drift remains an open question, perhaps related to isolation and/or cultural conservatism.

Framenets and constructiCons are applied instantiations of the linguistic frameworks known as Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar, respectively, in the form of computational, semiformally structured linguistic resources. The resources have a common history, both theoretically and in design: They are built as English-language resources in the framework of the Berkeley FrameNet initiative. They enjoy the double nature of being descriptive linguistic resources as well as finding frequent use in a computational linguistic context, where they have been used both in NLP applications and as underlying knowledge bases in areas such as computer-assisted language learning. The chapter provides a bird’s-eye view on these resources: their theoretical foundations; design principles and how they are compiled; theoretical and methodological interrelations; the challenges involved in building framenets and constructiCons for new languages and for cross-linguistic application; the differences and interactions between linguistic and computational linguistic work on framenets and constructiCons; application to language pedagogy; and outstanding theoretical and methodological issues.

Arbib’s chapter places the old debate over whether the protowords of protolanguage may often be holophrases or are more akin to words of current languages within the context of Bickerton’s changing views on the emergence of languages from protolanguages. He traces Bickerton’s ideas from the Universal Grammar with a default parameters approach of the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis via the “just add Merge” account of Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans to the replacement of Universal Grammar by a notion of Universal Bases of Language in More than Nature Needs: Language, Mind, and Evolution. As a counterpoise, Arbib considers the Mirror System Hypothesis of the evolution of the language-ready brain in which, starting from protowords, words and constructions akin to those of modern languages emerged via cultural evolution with fractionation of holophrases playing a crucial (but not the only) initial role.

This chapter presents an overview of some of the central concepts of constructional syntax. Focusing on key insights from Berkeley Construction Grammar and Cognitive Construction Grammar, it discusses how construction entries of different types from the inventory of constructions interact with each other to license constructs. This chapter also outlines a novel methodology for discovering constructions in a corpus that allows for a systematic way of compiling construction entries that are relevant for research in Construction Grammar and constructicography.

Bakker’s chapter discusses the syntactic development in twin grammars. Twins and other young children are sometimes reported to create their own languages, sometimes called autonomous languages. The grammars of these languages are quite rudimentary, and the lexicon is derived from the language(s) spoken around them. Bickerton claimed that Creoles share structural properties because the languages have been created by children. Bakker looks at the structures of documented autonomous languages and compares them with Creole languages. It appears that the autonomous languages have more in common with pidgins than with Creole languages, structurally, even though they are created by children, like Creole languages. The twin situation influences the rudimentary properties of the autonomous languages.

Spoken language exhibits not only grammatical constructions but also prosodic constructions. While the latter are also form–function mappings, there are differences: Prosodic constructions involve temporal configurations of diverse prosodic features, their functions are primarily pragmatics-related and interactional, they can be present to greater or lesser degrees, and they are frequently superimposed and aligned in complex ways with other prosodic constructions and with grammatical constructions. This chapter illustrates these properties with examples from American English.

Veronique’s paper compares the use of bare and determiner marked NPs in Indian Ocean Creoles (IOC) which consists of Seychelles, Mauritian and Reunion Creoles. These three main IO Creoles share closely related overt indefinite, definite, demonstrative and plural determiners and the use of bare NPs. Réunion Creole is the only IO Creole which has a specific use for prenominal markers: definite singular lo, definite plural lé and indefinite plural dé. The three Creoles exhibit many similarities in the expression of nominal reference but they do not grant the same categorial status to markers -la and sa. As such the paper discusses the significance of this difference for nominal reference in the three languages involved. It concludes that grammatical affinities between IO Creoles do not exclude functional differences due inter alia to the grammaticalization of definite determiners.

The chapter gives a general overview of the approach to constructional analysis called Construction Discourse, where the term ‘discourse’ is implanted with the same rigor and systematicity as the term ‘grammar’ has in Construction Grammar. In Construction Discourse, constructions are not seen as form–meaning pairings, but as form–meaning–discourse constellations. A set of twelve discourse attributes is postulated and some of them are illustrated in more detail. Together, these twelve discourse attributes (and their respective values) are seen as being able to define aspects of ‘context’ that are necessary for a full description and analysis of the dynamicity of language. The intricacies of Construction Discourse are illustrated with a detailed analysis of the Wellerism construction in the Solv dialect of Swedish.

Construction Grammar and typology share many assumptions and each approach can fruitfully inform the other. Both fields start from a pairing of form and function and treat lexicon, morphology, and syntax as a continuum of varying strategies to express function. Cross-linguistic comparison leads to a distinction between language-particular categories and structures, determined by distributional analysis, and comparative concepts that are cross-linguistically valid. Strategies are morphosyntactic formal structures that are defined language-independently and constructions are comparative concepts; as such, constructions and their components can be aligned across languages, and strategies allow the alignment of morphosyntactic structures used for constructions across languages. Typologists have also developed representations of the conceptual relations between the functions of different constructions in terms of conceptual spaces. Typological diversity also suggests that the only universal syntactic structure is the part–whole relation between a construction and its constituents. Both Construction Grammar and typology give a prominent role to diachrony, seeing constructions as lineages.

This chapter explores the potential of Construction Grammar for analyzing literary texts. First, it investigates typical features of literary language from a constructional point of view. Fairy tales, for example, are characterized by their opening lines like “Once upon a time …,” analyzed as a concrete, complex construction. Similarly, many authors, styles, and genres are characterized by particular constructions, or the use of particular words and phrases. The second section deals with creative, innovative, and seemingly ‘rule-breaking’ language in a constructional framework, suggesting that Construction Grammar as a usage-based and cognitively plausible model offers the perfect toolkit to analyze seemingly unruly linguistic behavior. The third part deals with literary genres as linguistic units beyond the sentence, arguing that literary texts are also learned form–meaning pairings and can be treated as constructions. Genres as constructions may change dynamically over time and be subject to prototypeeffects. Drawing on numerous examples, this chapter thus demonstrates that literary language and texts can be productively analyzed using concepts and methods of Construction Grammar.