Syntax is perhaps one of the most successful projects in the history of theoretical linguistics. It’s also garnered the most philosophical attention. Thus, this chapter focuses on syntactic metatheory. It surveys a number of prominent frameworks from minimalism to construction grammar, dependency grammar, lexical functional grammar and head-driven phrase structure grammar.The main aim is to find a common argument structure and strategy across diverse theoretical positions. In the tradition of recent work on scientific modelling in the philosophy of science, the approach that’s adopted in this chapter works from a bottom-up review of the cross-framework literature. I’ll make a case for a general explanatory strategy or scientific project at the core of linguistic syntax. The core idea is that this general scientific strategy is relatively stable across syntactic frameworks. In other words, the chapter aims to address the question of what minimalism, dependency grammar, radical construction grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, and lexical functional grammar have in common. The answer is a general formal strategy that focuses on rules in creating structural units, captures recursive phenomena, and, most importantly, treats syntactic information as explanatorily autonomous from other systems.

Formularity, or the poet’s reliance on prefabricated linguistic features in the composition of his verses, has been the most debated feature of Oral-Formulaic Theory. This chapter reviews the history of Homeric formularity (Part 1), while introducing new key insights from the fields of linguistics (esp. usage-based linguistics, corpus linguistics, and language acquisition studies) and the cognitive sciences (Parts 2-5). Parts 2-3 argue that formularity is a general feature of human language and cognition. Homer’s formularity is quantitatively notable, however, in that it involves sequences that are particularly long when compared to repeated sequences in corpora of both contemporary written or spoken English and ancient prose and hexameter authors. This is interpreted as a sign of Homer’s extreme mastery of his medium, which was arguably necessitated by the oral-improvisational nature of the task. Part 4 develops a new theory of Homeric formularity, borrowing insights from connectionism, lexical priming, and construction grammar, and introduces fine-grained distinctions between conceptual associations, collocations, constructions, metrical constructions and structural formulas.

Sociopragmatics typically refers to sociocultural parameters of the communicative use of language (Leech 1983; Thomas 1983). This concept has long been taken up in the area of applied linguistics (Kaspar & Rose 2002) and historical pragmatics (Jucker 2006; Culpeper 2009). Context per se is difficult to pin down and, therefore, its association with language in a principled manner is a challenging task. In view of the above, and within a Construction Grammar framework (Fried and Östman 2004), this chapter aims to show that the object of sociopragmatic analysis can in fact be viewed as the domain of socioculturally defined genres that are often associated with particular (genre) constructions reflecting a speaker’s knowledge of the language (Nikiforidou 2016). The question to be addressed in this view is to what extent speakers’ understanding of context is systematic, conventional, and, hence, an inherent part of grammar and the description of language. The data to be discussed include recipes, labels, couple talk, stage directions, and TV talk. It will be argued that sociopragmatic context, typically encoded at the meso-level of genre, can be accounted for as a set of specifications that are routinely incorporated in the description of a language’s grammatical constructions.

This chapter reviews recent developments that reflect a convergence of work in various branches of linguistics and psycholinguistics around the implications of the incremental sequencing of speech units for understanding grammar and the cognitive processing that underlies the production, comprehension, and interpretation of utterances. Notions from Functional Discourse Grammar are used to present a view of syntactic structure as arising from the incremental extension of holophrases, i.e. minimal utterances. By prioritizing the timecourse of language processing, the chapter interprets syntactic hierarchy as arising from chunk-and-pass operations supported by predictive processing. Spoken dialogue is identified as the primary arena for these processes, with grammaticality subordinated to situational appropriateness. Linguistic data are seen as protocols of joint action aimed at the incremental co-creation of meaning. All of these notions make essential reference to context as constantly active, prior to and during the utterance of the linguistic signal, and as a crucial component of the operations and processes that take place in verbal interaction.

Chapter 2 contains a detailed overview of Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory. Special attention is given to identifying their respective strengths and weaknesses, particularly with regard to questions about the semantics–pragmatics interface. This will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the issues at hand and pave the way for a genuine integration of the two theories.

Chapter 5 concludes that combining Construction Grammar with Relevance Theory is advantageous. Merging these two frameworks amplifies their respective strengths, resulting in more precise and accurate descriptions of language use as well as a deeper understanding of the cognitive processes involved in verbal communication. It is shown how English modals serve as an effective testing ground of the new theoretical model that arises from this integration (Leclercq, 2023), and future research prospects are suggested.

The chapter begins with a brief overview of research on the of-binominal, in general, before focusing on the constructions addressed in this study. It presents the constructions discussed in this work: prototypical N+PP, head-classifier, pseudo-partitive, evaluative binominal noun phrase, evaluative modifier, and binominal intensifier, and the research gap that the monograph fills. Furthermore, it briefly introduces the two theories used: Construction Grammar (CxG) and Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) and presents the rationale behind examining the results from two theoretical paradigms. This chapter, furthermore, explains the choice of corpora used in the research (primarily the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and details the construction of the dataset: those constructions included and excluded from the data set.

Chapter 8 examines the findings from both Part I and Part II of this study from a CxG perspective. It begins with an introduction to CxG theory, constructional network models, and the most recent work on horizontal relationships in the network. I argue that the most interesting aspect of the CxG account is the network perspective on language change; this allows for speculation on how the language system might have influenced syntactic and semantic changes found. Furthermore, it is shown that both the allostruction model and multiple inheritance links are needed in order to explain the changes found in this grammaticalization path. In particular, the CxG analysis posits a link to the simple NP frame starting with the head-classifier, which would account for the internal changes that took place in the EBNP, evaluative modifier, and binominal intensifier. The persisting inheritance link between these constructions and the N+of-PP schema would offer a plausible explanation for the reappearance of the indefinite determiner in the EBNP. Competition between these two schemata, N+of-PP and simple NP, would explain the formal and functional changes found in the grammaticalization path.

The final chapter briefly summarizes the key findings in Parts I and II and compares and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the models discussed in Chapters 8 and 9. In particular, it is argued that one of the fundamental differences between these two approaches is the information they seek to model. FDG offers defined primitives and combinatorial constraints that function as a basis of analysis and constrain possible outcomes. In the context of this project, this means that FDG allows us to capture the distinction between the six of-binominal categories discussed by using the language-specific tools that already exist in the model. However, the FDG account lacks a network view of these phenomena. The CxG analysis offers a network perspective on the changes in constructions and links these constructions to more entrenched patterns in the language systems. This means that it can capture the co-evolution of constructions in the language system. Finally, this chapter discusses some remaining open questions and suggests potential avenues of future research.

This chapter focuses on the empirical basis of corpus linguistics, describing how linguistic corpora have played an important role in providing corpus linguists with linguistic evidence to support particular analyses of language. It opens with a discussion of how to define a corpus, and then traces the history of corpus linguistics, noting that as early as the fifteenth century, concordances were created based on the Bible. Later developments included the creation of the Quirk Corpus (print samples of spoken and written English) in 1955 at the Survey of English Usage in University College London, followed (in the 1960s) by the Brown Corpus (edited written American English). There are now online corpora, such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Tools for creating and analyzing corpora have also improved considerably: tagging corpora with part-of-speech information can be done with high levels of accuracy. The chapter closes with a description of the many different areas (e.g. lexicology and sociolinguistics) that have benefited from the use of linguistic corpora as well as a sample linguistic analysis demonstrating that corpus-based methodology and the theory of construction grammar can provide evidence that appositives in English are a type of construction.