Our goal is to present, by means of the detailed analysis of a single grammatical problem, some of the principal commitments and mechanisms of a grammatical theory that assigns a central role to the notion of grammatical construction. To adopt a constructional approach is to undertake a commitment in principle to account for the entirety of each language. This means that the relatively general patterns of the language, such as the one licensing the ordering of a finite auxiliary verb before its subject in English, often known as SAI, and the highly idiomatic patterns, like kick the bucket, stand on an equal footing as data for which the grammar must account. An explicit grammar that covers the full range of constructions must represent all constructions, of whatever degree of generality or idiomaticity, in a common notation and must provide an explicit account of how each sentence of a language is licensed by a subset of the leaves of the inheritance hierarchy of constructions which constitutes the grammar of that language. Language-internal generalizations are captured by inheritance relations among constructions. Cross-language generalizations are captured by the architecture of the representation system and by the sharing of abstract constructions across languages. The particular grammatical phenomenon used here to introduce construction grammar (CG) is the construction that licenses the surprising syntactic and semantic features of a sentence like What are they doing resuscitating constructions?

The hypotheses that (1) with regard at least to scope, deep structure is identical to logical structure, e.g. a quantified expression is a sister of the S that is its scope, and (2) the rules relating deep structure to surface apply according to a strict principle of cyclicity, explain both why there are many systematic parallels between surface syntactic structure and logical structure (e.g. cases where surface c-command relations match logical scope relations) and why there are the derivations there are from these parallels (as where a tensed auxiliary verb in English can be in the scope of a following floated quantifier, contrary to an otherwise valid generalization).

The approach is put to work in accounting for distinctions (explored in Heycock 1995) between cases in which anaphora constraints seem to require 'reconstruction' of an underlying structure vs. those in which they do not. The resulting analysis, which exploits some hitherto overlooked details of the logical structures and an improved statement of the restrictions on anaphoric relations, has no need of reconstruction.

This article critically examines Aoun and Li's (1993) syntactic analysis of quantifier scope interpretations in English, Chinese, and Japanese, and it shows that (i) there are serious theoretical problems with Aoun and Li's account of scope interpretations for the double object and topicalization constructions; (ii) there are ambiguous sentences that Aoun and Li's analysis predicts to be unambiguous; and (iii) there are unambiguous sentences which their analysis predicts to be ambiguous. While problem (iii) makes their analysis insufficient, problems (i) and (ii) make it untenable. We propose a quantifier scope analysis that is free from any of the above three problems. We claim that the quantifier scope interpretations of a given sentence result from the interactions of various principles, some syntactic, others nonsyntactic. We propose an expert system that takes all these principles into consideration, and arrives at a composite opinion of the relative strengths of the potential scope interpretations of a given sentence. We speculate that wide idiolectal variations in quantifier scope interpretations are due to differences among speakers on the relative weights these principles receive in their respective expert systems.