This volume gives an easily accessible, yet comprehensive, sophisticated, and example-rich introduction to Construction Grammar as it has been developed from the early 1980s by Charles J. Fillmore and his associates. It also provides a succinct account of the historical and intellectual background of the model and shows how Construction Grammar can easily be applied to typologically very different languages and to a variety of language-specific phenomena. All of the contributors to the volume came out of the Fillmorean school at UC-Berkeley and have worked consistently on applying and further developing the model in various domains of linguistic analysis.

Table of contents

Historical and intellectual background of Construction Grammar Jan-Ola Östman and Mirjam Fried 1

Construction Grammar: A thumbnail sketch Mirjam Fried and Jan-Ola Östman 11

Predicate semantics and event construal in Czech case marking Mirjam Fried 87

Lexically (un)filled constructional schemes and construction types: The case of Japanese modal conditional constructions Seiko Yamaguchi Fujii 121

On the interaction of information structure and formal structure in constructions: The case of French right-detached comme-N Knud Lambrecht 157