Talk:Construction grammar

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An essential aspect of students' induction into these schools of linguistics is mastery of the web of influence and inherited, borrowed, and repurposed assumptions. This presents a daunting challenge for an encyclopedia at a much more detailed level, in addition to the broad orientation to related strands that is given here.

A minor instance of common knowledge in the field that may have to be explicated and attributed is the example "X get ants in X's pants means X IS SHAKING WITH FEAR". I and those I have asked get a meaning of agitation, but not fear. Is this one of those "my idiolect, your idiolect" things with which Generative Semantics was so fraught? The context ("just like") presents this as common background knowledge, and of course that "just like" itself covers some assumptions. /Bn (talk) 15:37, 4 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Construction grammar

CxG was spurred on by the development of Cognitive Semantics, beginning in 1975 and extending through the 1980s. Lakoff's 1977 paper, Linguistic Gestalts (Chicago Linguistic Society, 1977) was an early version of CxG, arguing that the meaning of the whole was not a compositional function of the meaning of the parts put together locally. Instead, he suggested, constructions themselves must have meanings.

CxG was developed in the 1980s by linguists such as Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay, and George Lakoff. CxG was developed in order to handle cases that intrinsically went beyond the capacity of generative grammar. --KYPark (talk) 17:49, 26 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]