In this collection a cast of distinguished contributors responds to and elaborates Charles Fillmore's and Paul Kay's "Construction Grammar". In contrast to the modular Chomskyan approach which treats grammatical constructions as epiphenomena, Construction Grammar works on the premise that constructions function as units of grammar in a way similar to words, and that their properties derive from complex interplays between lexicon, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
Contents: 1. Inalienability and the Interpretation of Modified Noun Phrases, Claudia Brugman 2. Making One's Way Through the Data, Adele E. Goldberg 3. Toward a Description of Te-linkage in Japanese, Yoko Hasegawa 4. Conversational Scorekeeping and the Interpretation of Conditional Sentences, James D. McCawley 5. Interaction of Factors in
Construal: Japanese Relative Clauses, Yoshiko Matsumoto 6. The Situated Interpretation of Possessor-Raising, Mary Catherine O'Connor 7. Applicatives and Benefactives: A Cognitive Account, Masayoshi Shibatani 8. Two Ways to Travel: Verbs of Motion in English and Spanish, Dan I. Slobin 9. Reasoning, Mappings, and Meta-metaphorical
Conditionals, Eve Sweetser 10. The Windowing of Attention in Language, Leonard Talmy 11. The Case for `Effector': Case Roles, Agents, and
Agency Revisited, Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. and David P. Wilkins 12. The Interpretation of Deverbal Nominals in Tepehua, James K. Watters