Construction Grammar

Construction grammar is a perspective on language that assumes linguistic knowledge to consist exclusively of form‐meaning pairs. Lexicon and grammar constitute a continuum in construction grammar, and partially schematic structures like idioms and collocations can easily be handled within this framework. Rooted in cognitive linguistics, construction grammar makes only minimal assumptions concerning the architecture of the language faculty. Instead, it anchors language knowledge in general cognition and in language usage that can be observed in real‐life social situations. Construction grammar has been proven particularly useful for the description of first and second language acquisition, language emergence, typology, and change as well as to account for linguistic interaction. The few assumptions construction grammar makes have received increasing support from empirical work over the past decade. Furthermore, the fact that construction grammar encompasses a family of approaches, in which different perspectives and possibilities are openly discussed, increases its credibility as a serious endeavor into investigating the nature of human language.