ABSTRACT
This chapter advocates an approach to grammar that differs from most current approaches in several ways. The overarching claim is that the proper units of a grammar are more similar to the notion of construction in traditional and pedagogical grammars than to that of rule in most versions of generative grammar. This is not to say that the generative ideal of explicitness is foregone; nor is the necessity of providing for recursive production of large structures from smaller ones set aside. The let alone construction has several features in common with what are sometimes called FOCUS CONSTRUCTIONS. The linguistic processes that are thought of as irregular cannot be accounted for by constructing lists of exceptions: the realm of idiomaticity in a language includes a great deal that is productive, highly structured, and worthy of serious grammatical investigation. It has come to seem clear to us that certain views of the layering of grammatical operations are wrong.
