ABSTRACT
How do speakers express their ideas in formal strings and how do listeners interpret formal strings as meaningful messages? Children need to learn the way that meaning is expressed formally in order to both produce and comprehend language; that is, they need to learn the form-function correspondences of their language: the constructions. Over the past two decades, a new approach to language has been developed in which constructions take center stage as the basic units of language. According to the constructionist perspective, language consists of a network of learned, interrelated form-function correspondences.
