Training, Language and Culture

Hoffmann and Turner’s Creative Construction Grammar is a compact, ambitious intervention in construction grammar and cognitive linguistics. Its purpose is to give construction grammar a fuller account of how speakers create, combine, learn, and alter form-meaning pairings in live use. The book begins from a familiar construction-grammar premise: linguistic knowledge consists not of a lexicon plus independent syntactic rules, but of learned pairings of form and meaning, ranging from words and idioms to argument-structure patterns and multimodal routines. Its distinctive claim is that construction grammar has not yet said enough about the mental work that permits speakers to put such pairings together in new utterances. Hoffmann and Turner propose that the missing account is blending theory.