ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how a constructional approach to grammar can be extended to deal with regular sentence-level grammatical patterns. It looks at Goldberg's constructional approach, and saw that she defines a construction as any form-meaning pairing whose properties cannot be predicted by its subparts, if it has subparts. The Radical Construction Grammar (RCG) model is developed by Croft, and sets out to explore the implications of linguistic typology for syntactic theory. RCG is in many respects compatible with Langacker's Cognitive Grammar. Embodied Construction Grammar is a theory of construction grammar developed by Benjamin Bergen and Nancy Chang, together with various collaborators. In this model, the emphasis is on language processing, language comprehension or understanding. Constructional approaches to grammar share two key features in common, by definition. Firstly, despite differences in how 'construction' is defined, these approaches recognise grammatical constructions as symbolic units. The second shared feature is the assumption of a structured inventory.
