ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the theory of Construction Grammar and its corresponding sister theory Frame Semantics, both developed at the University of California, Berkeley, during the 1980s and 1990s. The first part provides a historical overview of Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics, highlighting their connections with the research of Charles Fillmore on Case Grammar in the late 1960s. This overview is followed by a discussion of the Berkeley FrameNet project (founded in 1997), which has applied the theoretical principles of Frame Semantics to the creation of a lexicographic database of English that also includes detailed information about valence patterns of English verbs, nouns, adjectives, and prepositions. The main part of this chapter discusses the main principles of Construction Grammar and shows how constructionist research addresses topics such as the lexicon-syntax continuum, argument structure constructions and other types of constructions, constructional families and networks, corpus data, productivity, motivation, frequency, the role of formalization, and issues relevant for contrastive linguistics. The chapter continues with a review of how constructionist insights have been applied to grammaticography, yielding a more specific approach that has come to be known as constructicography. The last part of the chapter addresses open issues such as the typology of constructions, interactions of constructions, and systematic discovery methods for finding and analyzing constructions.
