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. Constructions on our view are much like the nuclear family (mother plus daughters) subtrees admitted by phrase structure rules, EXCEPT that (1) constructions need not be limited to a mother and her daughters, but may span wider ranges of the sentential tree; (2) constructions may specify, not only syntactic, but also lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information; (3) lexical items, being mentionable in syntactic constructions, may be viewed, in many cases at least, as constructions themselves; and (4) constructions may be idiomatic in the sense that a large construction may specify a semantics (and/or pragmatics) that is distinct from what might be calculated from the associated semantics of the set of smaller constructions that could be used to build the same morphosyntactic object.
