Approaching German syntax from a constructionist perspective

Abstract

Over the last decade or so, Construction Grammar (CxG) has evolved into an influential paradigm in linguistic research. CxG subsumes a family of related constructional approaches to language including Cognitive Construction Grammar (Lakoff 1987, Goldberg 1995, Boas 2013), Berkeley Construction Grammar (Fillmore et al. 1988, Kay and Fillmore 1999, Fillmore 2013), Sign-based Construction Grammar (SBCG; Sag 2011, Boas and Sag 2012, Michaelis 2013), Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001, 2013), and Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 2008; Broccias 2013), among others (for an overview see Hoffmann/Trousdale 2013, Ziem and Lasch 2013, and Lasch and Ziem 2014). Although such approaches differ not only in methodological terms but also with respect to the types of linguistic phenomena addressed, they all embrace the view that both lexicon and grammar essentially consist of constructions, i.e. non-compositional (and compositional) formmeaning pairings of varying abstractness and syntagmatic complexity. Building on this basic assumption, this volume investigates a variety of grammatical phenomena in German from a constructional point of view, including argument structure constructions, prepositional constructions, comparative correlatives, and relative clause constructions. Each contribution is anchored in a constructional approach to language, and the constructional nature of each phenomenon addressed is demonstrated in detail. Why German? Since its beginnings in the 1980s, constructional research has primarily focused on English, although languages such as Czech, Finnish, French, and Japanese have also received considerable attention. Since the 2000s, there has also been a significant amount of constructional research on German, including Järventausta (2006), Imo (2007), Nikula (2007), Chang (2008), Cloene and Willems (2006a, b), Deppermann (2007), Rostila (2008), Felfe (2012), Zeldes (2012), Hein (2015), and Lasch (2017); as well as a number of edited volumes such as Fischer and Stefanowitsch (2006), Stefanowitsch and Fischer (2008), Günthner and Bücker (2009), Engelberg et al. (2011), Lasch and Ziem (2011),