Constructionist approaches: Past, present, future

Construction Grammar (CxG) has developed into a broad and highly diverse family of approaches that have in common that they see constructions, i.e. form-meaning pairs at various levels of abstraction and complexity, as the basic units of language. This “element” gives an overview of the origin and the current state of the art of constructionist approaches, focusing, on the one hand, on basic concepts like the notion of “constructions”, while at the same time offering an in-depth discussion of current research trends and open questions. We discuss the commonalities and differences between the major constructionist approaches, the organization of constructional networks as well as ongoing research on linguistic creativity, multimodality and individual differences.