The Meaning of Constructions

The hallmark of Construction Grammar, its revision of the hypothesis of syntactically transparent semantic compositionality, can be and has been taken to extreme by expecting syntactic patterns to behave semantically like lexical items. However, just because syntactic constructions used to be falsely believed to be transparent does not mean that they should now be vividly colorful. That would be going from one extreme to another.The semantic capabilities of syntactic constructions are contingent on their position on the lexicon-syntax continuum, which in this study is assumed to accommodate the traditional lexicon-syntax division. The lexicon-syntactic divide may have been dismissed too soon. Even if the boundary is inherently and irreparably fuzzy and no practical way of demarcating the two magisteria can be found, this is no reason to abandon the distinction. It is one thing to establish the fuzziness of the boundary, and quite another to conclude that it means the absence of that boundary.