Editing Construction grammar (section)

== History ==
Construction grammar was first developed in the 1980s by linguists such as [[Charles J. Fillmore|Charles Fillmore]], [[Paul Kay]], and [[George Lakoff]], in order to analyze idioms and fixed expressions.<ref name="croft2001">{{cite book |last=Croft |first=William |author-link=William Croft (linguist) |title=Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=New York |year=2001 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ESa_E-q8hbwC |page=15 |isbn=978-0-19-829954-7 }}</ref> Lakoff's 1977 paper "Linguistic Gestalts" put forward an early version of CxG, arguing that the meaning of an expression was not simply a function of the meanings of its parts. Instead, he suggested, constructions themselves must have meanings.

Another early study was "There-Constructions," which appeared as Case Study 3 in George Lakoff's ''[[Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things]]''.<ref>{{cite book | author=Lakoff, George| title=Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind| url=https://archive.org/details/womenfiredangero00lako| url-access=registration| location=Chicago | publisher=University of Chicago Press| year=1987 | isbn=9780226468037}}</ref> It argued that the meaning of the whole was not a function of the meanings of the parts, that odd grammatical properties of [[Deictic]] There-constructions followed from the pragmatic meaning of the construction, and that variations on the central construction could be seen as simple extensions using form-meaning pairs of the central construction.

Fillmore et al.'s (1988) paper on the English ''let alone'' construction was a second classic. These two papers propelled cognitive linguists into the study of CxG. Since the late 1990s there has been a shift towards a general preference for the usage-based model.{{citation needed|date=September 2015}} The shift towards the usage-based approach in construction grammar has inspired the development of several [[corpus linguistics|corpus]]-based methodologies of constructional analysis (for example, [[collostructional analysis]]).