Constructional Approaches to Language - Böcker

This book weaves together constructions, imperatives, dialogicity, and discourse units. How can that be? This is precisely the question it sets out to answer by working at the crossroads of Construction Grammar (CxG), Corpus Linguistics (CL), and Interactional Linguistics (IL). Profiting from this cross-fertilising synergy, the book singles out BELIEVE (YOU) ME, BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THINK AGAIN and MIND YOU as its objects of study, offers an empirical analysis of their properties and situates them within an entrenched and far-reaching, yet conveniently ‘camouflaged’, network of dialogic perspectivisation. In so doing, the book provides novel insights into the mental state verbal fillers of the constructions alongside their imperative-induced non-compositionality and dialogicity which motivate their function as discourse unit framing agents and, per extension, discourse operators. The book thus makes a case for CxG’s ability to go beyond its word-, or phrase-based ‘comfort zone’ and address phenomena at a micro-, meso- and macro-discourse level with across-the-board benefits.

Over the last decade, Construction Grammar has become increasingly popular in the study of language contact and multilingualism. Indeed, constructional approaches, including Diasystematic Construction Grammar, not only offer a useful theoretical framework for empirical studies, but also provide a fresh look at fundamental questions in contact linguistics. This volume continues the series of works on Constructions in Contact (the first two volumes were published in 2018 and 2021). It presents new research on the constructionist modelling of language contact phenomena, the impact of multilingualism on argument structure constructions and the role of phonological units in language contact. The volume thus combines classical areas of constructional research with innovative ones, demonstrating the broad applicability of Construction Grammar for contact linguistics.