Formalizing paradigms in Construction Grammar

Construction Grammar sees the language system as consisting solely of
conventionalized pairings of form and meaning, i.e. constructions. Constructions may be
of any size and complexity, and they may be abstract (or schematic) to any de-
gree. They may be templates for sentences, lexical items, inflectional morphemes,
discourse patterns (Östman 2005) that organize whole texts or even genres, etc.
However, the notion of constructions seems incapable of capturing patterns found
within the grammar: systematic similarities between constructions and, notably,
paradigms of different sorts. For instance, inflection paradigms consist of sets of
constructions, but nothing in common varieties of Construction Grammar explains
how those constructions join together to form a paradigm. The paper argues that
in addition to constructions, the language system must also include specifiable
relations which hold between the constructions of a language and which organize them
into a functional system. Crucially, such relations are necessary for the
organization of paradigms, be they of morphological, syntactic or other nature. Relations
between constructions within the grammar can be – and have previously been –
described in terms of inheritance (e.g. Goldberg 1995), taxonomic and meronomic
links (Croft 2001), and the like. However, such very abstract links can only
capture simple relations between constructions. Yet, more complex relations, notably
of an analogical nature, exist widely within the grammar of apparently all human
languages. To capture such analogical relations, the paper uses the notion of
meta-construction, briefly introduced in Leino & Östman (2005). Metaconstructions may
be thought of as generalizations of constructions, partly in the same sense as
constructions may be seen as generalizations of actual expressions. It will be argued
that such analogical relations, formalizable as metaconstructions, hold paradigms
together and also facilitate both producing and interpreting complex expressions.