The Relations Between Verbs and Their Constructions:On Lexical-Constructional Grammar

Lexical-constructional grammar focuses its study on the relations between verb classes and their alternations. The grammar pays more attention to the role of experiential knowledge. Researchers who use the grammar advocate the verb polysemy approach to compensate for the defective representation of argument structure construction grammar. Although the formal representation of lexical-constructional grammar is more accurate,its formalism appears to be cumbersome. This present paper attempts to describe,through a contrastive study with the projectionist model and argument structure constructional model,the theoretical mechanism of lexical-constructional grammar in treating the relations between verb classes and their alternations and to comment on the advantages and disadvantages of the theory.