Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language

Abstract

Adele Goldberg's Constructions at work is a welcome sequel to her (1995) Constructions, by now a landmark in linguistics. The new book extends her previous analyses and explores new and exciting territories. Since G is arguably the leading figure in Construction Grammar currently, the theory is here pitched against the background of alternative approaches, functional syntax and Generative grammar, in order to convince the reader that whether one agrees with G or not, the book is must reading. Part I of Constructions at work (Chs. 1-3) sums up the basic claims of Construction Grammar. Constructions are form-function pairings, and the idea is that grammar is "constructions all the way down " (p. 18). In other words, clause-level syntactic constructions, phrases, collocations, words, and morphemes are all analyzed in a similar, "construction " fashion. In addition, linguistic expressions (constructions) are taken to reflect both very high-level, abstract generalizations (elegant rules), as well as low-level generalizations, and even idiosyncratic phenomena. These analyses, moreover, are not mutually exclusive, so the same linguistic string may receive