A Constructional Approach to Grammar

This is review of Construction Grammar, an approach that is newly established and grounded in Cognitive Linguistics. The notion of construction has, as Goldberg (1995: 1) points out, a time-honored place in linguistics, and it is defined as a pairing of form and meaning. Construction Grammar claims that grammatical constructions have meaning independent of the words they contain. For example, the constructional meaning of the ditransitive construction in English is claimed to be X causes Y to receive Z. Construction Grammar also emphasizes that to adopt constructional approach is to undertake in principle commitment to account for the entirety of each language (Kay Fillmore, 1999), from the relatively general patterns of the language to those highly idiomatic patterns.In this paper, we concentrate on major research topics of Construction Grammar, which include constructional studies on argument structure, lexical semantics and marked constructions. We then proceed to tentative discussion of the main features of Construction Grammar, its main strengths and weaknesses, and its possible future development.