Editing Construction grammar (section)

=== Grammatical construction ===
In construction grammar, as in general [[semiotics]], the [[grammatical construction]] is a pairing of form and content. The formal aspect of a construction is typically described as a [[syntax|syntactic]] template, but the form covers more than just syntax, as it also involves [[phonology|phonological]] aspects, such as [[Prosody (linguistics)|prosody]] and [[Intonation (linguistics)|intonation]], sometimes in the form of [[Prosodic Construction|prosodic constructions]]. The content covers [[semantics|semantic]] as well as [[pragmatics|pragmatic]] meaning.

The semantic meaning of a grammatical construction is made up of conceptual structures postulated in [[cognitive semantics]]: [[Image schema|image-schema]]s, frames, conceptual metaphors, conceptual metonymies, prototypes of various kinds, mental spaces, and bindings across these (called "blends"). Pragmatics just becomes the cognitive semantics of communication—the modern version of the old [[John R. Ross|Ross]]-Lakoff performative hypothesis from the 1960s.

The form and content are symbolically linked in the sense advocated by [[Ronald Langacker|Langacker]].

Thus a construction is treated like a [[Sign (semiotics)|sign]] in which all structural aspects are integrated parts and not distributed over different modules as they are in the componential model. Consequentially, not only constructions that are lexically fixed, like many idioms, but also more abstract ones like [[argument structure]] schemata, are pairings of form and conventionalized meaning. For instance, the [[ditransitive]] schema [S V IO DO] is said to express semantic content X CAUSES Y TO RECEIVE Z, just like ''kill'' means X CAUSES Y TO DIE.

In construction grammar, a grammatical construction, regardless of its formal or semantic complexity and make up, is a pairing of form and meaning. Thus words and word classes may be regarded as instances of constructions. Indeed, construction grammarians argue that all pairings of form and meaning are constructions, including phrase structures, [[idiom]]s, [[word]]s and even [[morpheme]]s.