Construction grammar (CxG) is a framework for syntactic analysis that takes constructions - pairings of form and meaning that range from the highly idiomatic to the very general - to be the building blocks of sentence meaning. Offering the first comprehensive introduction to CxG to focus on both English words and the constructions that combine them, this textbook shows students not only what the analyses of particular structures are, but also how and why those analyses are constructed, with each chapter taking the student step-by-step through the reasoning processes that yield the best description of a data set. It offers a wealth of illustrative examples and exercises, largely based on real language data, making it ideal for both self-study and classroom use. Written in an accessible and engaging way, this textbook will open up this increasingly popular linguistic framework to anyone interested in the grammatical patterns of English.

Beyond Alternations provides a unified account of the semantic effects of the German applicative ("be-") construction. Using natural data from a variety of corpora, the authors propose that this pattern is inherently meaningful and that its meaning provides the basis for creative extensions.

This study presents a semantic framework for analysing all aspectual constructions in terms of the event state distinction, and describes the grammatical expression of aspectual meaning in terms of a theory of grammatical constructions. In this theory, grammatical constructions, like words, are conventionalized form-meaning pairs, which are best described not only with respect to their intrinsic semantic values, but also with respect to the functional oppositions in which they participate.

"The investigations reported in the these chapters constituting this work were undertaken separately and their results were not meant to be potential chapters of a single book. Nevertheless, the result has been that these investigations form a whole in jointly reflecting the interaction and mutual reinforcement of three guiding principles of recent work in Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) and to a not insignificant degree in constructional Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG)"--

In null instantiation (NI) an optionally unexpressed argument receives either anaphoric or existential interpretation. One cannot accurately predict a predicator's NI potential based either on semantic factors (e.g., Aktionsart class of the verb) or pragmatic factors (e.g., relative discourse prominence of arguments), but NI potential, while highly constrained, is not simply lexical idiosyncrasy. It is instead the product of both lexical and constructional licensing. In the latter case, a construction can endow a verb with NI potential that it would not otherwise have. Using representational tools of sign based construction grammar, this Element offers a lexical treatment of English null instantiation that covers both distinct patterns of construal of null-instantiated arguments and the difference between listeme-based and contextually licensed, thus construction-based, null complementation.

"The investigations reported in the these chapters constituting this work were undertaken separately and their results were not meant to be potential chapters of a single book. Nevertheless, the result has been that these investigations form a whole in jointly reflecting the interaction and mutual reinforcement of three guiding principles of recent work in Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) and to a not insignificant degree in constructional Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG)"--