Les Grammaires de Constructions
Une nouvelle linguistique
Mirjam Fried (Princeton) cité à partir d'un site web aujourd'hui disparu:
There is a rapidly growing international community of scholars who have been pursuing the Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics approach to linguistic analysis, which has its historical roots in Berkeley and particularly in the work of Charles Fillmore.
At the heart of what shapes Construction Grammar is the following question: what do speakers of a given language have to know and what can they 'figure out' on the basis of that knowledge, in order for them to use their language successfully? The appeal of Construction Grammar as a holistic and usage-based framework lies in its commitment to treat all types of expressions as equally central to capturing grammatical patterning (i.e. without assuming that certain forms are more 'basic' than others) and in viewing all dimensions of language (syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse, morphology, phonology, prosody) as equal contributors to shaping linguistic expressions.
Ces nouveaux théoriciens de la linguistique reprennent à Chomsky l'hypothèse qu'il existe un savoir grammatical du locuteur; cependant, ce savoir n'est plus seulement syntaxique mais aussi sémantique, pragmatique, etc.
Construction Grammar has now developed into a mature framework, with an established architecture and representation formalism as well as solid cognitive and functional grounding. It is a constraint-based, generative, non-derivational, mono-stratal grammatical model, committed to incorporating the cognitive and interactional foundations of language. It is also inherently tied to a particular model of the 'semantics of understanding', known as Frame Semantics, which offers a way of structuring and representing meaning while taking into account the relationship between lexical meaning and grammatical patterning.
The trademark characteristic of Construction Grammar as originally developed consists in the insight that language is a repertoire of more or less complex patterns – CONSTRUCTIONS – that integrate form and meaning in conventionalized and often non-compositional ways. Form in constructions may refer to any combination of syntactic, morphological, or prosodic patterns and meaning is understood in a broad sense that includes lexical semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure. A grammar in this view consists of intricate networks of overlapping and complementary patterns that serve as 'blueprints' for encoding and decoding linguistic expressions of all types.
Excellente entrée dans Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar
CxG was developed in the 1980s by linguists such as Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay, and George Lakoff. CxG was developed in order to handle cases that intrinsically went beyond the capacity of generative grammar.
The earliest study was "There-Constructions," which appeared as Case Study 3 in George Lakoff's WOMEN, FIRE, AND DANGEROUS THINGS (U. of Chicago Press, 1987). 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.
fillmore_let_alone.pdf — Charles J. Fillmore, Paul Kay, Mary Catherine O'Connor, Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone, Language, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Sep., 1988),
pp. 501-538.
L'une des thèses qui intéresse le plus les ethnologues et l'ethnoscience est celle d'un continuum entre la syntaxe et le lexique:
"Unlike the componential model, CxG denies any strict distinction between the two and proposes a syntax-lexicon continuum. The argument goes that words and complex constructions are both pairs of form and meaning and differ only in internal symbolic complexity. Instead of being discrete modules and thus subject to very different processes they form the extremes of a continuum: syntax> subcategorization frame> idiom> morphology> syntactic category> word/lexicon (these are the traditional terms; construction grammars use a different terminology)."