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This volume gives an easily accessible, yet comprehensive, sophisticated, and example-rich introduction to Construction Grammar as it has been developed from the early 1980’s 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 1–10

Construction Grammar: A thumbnail sketch Mirjam Fried and Jan-Ola Östman 11–86

Predicate semantics and event construal in Czech case marking Mirjam Fried 87–119

Lexically (un)filled constructional schemes and construction types: The case of Japanese modal conditional constructions Seiko Fujii 121–155

On the interaction of information structure and formal structure in constructions: The case of French right-detached comme-N Knud Lambrecht 157–199

Index 201–208

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"The book as a whole is an interesting introduction to Construction Grammar as a formal theory of language, and shows that the framework is sufficiently flexible and accurate to account for linguistic facts across languages. The volume, and in particular Chapter 2, will thus be an extremely useful reference for anyone interested in constructional approaches." -Valeria Quochi, Linguistics Department, University of Pisa, Italy, on Linguist List, Vol. 16.2277 (2005)

"[...] a valuable source for anyone interested in current research in Construction Grammar. The structure of the book seems unusual in combining a textbook introduction with research articles. This combination however turns out to be very useful, as it allows the reader to familiarize with the theoretical framework before seeing it applied to a number of different phenomena." -Martin Hilpert, Rice University, in Studies in Language, Vol. 31:2 (2007)