Inside the construct-i-con

This is the third video of a series that accompanies the book 'Construction Grammar and its Application to English'. This video presents chapter 3, which discusses how constructions are interlinked in the construct-i-con.

[holothuroid]

"This seems kinda radical" - I got that reference.

[pawelwysockicoreandquirks]

With its "templates" and inheritance, construction grammar is somewhat reminiscent of programming languages.

[georgemoroz]

Hello, thanks a lot for videos!

I’ve got a question. Is there any difference between kick OBJ Cxn and kick something Cxn? You could say, that kick OBJ Cxn is a representation for some class of Cxns ("kick the habbit", "kick a goal" and "kick something"), and kick something Cxn – is the only one construction. Am I right? But my next question is, why we keep in our construct-i-con lots of Cxns, which can’t appear in a speech? People just say “eat something”, when they don’t care, what would you actually eat. They don’t say “eat” or “eat Cxn” in that situation, do they?

Another question, that I have, is really ugly. But… What do you mean saying language? I didn’t know next to nothing about Construction Grammar before today. So it’s my third video on this topic. As I feel it, construct-i-con is something that we keep in our minds. But why we assume, that what we keep in our minds is a language? May be all we have in our minds is construct-i-cons, but the language is the stuff, we use. So English – it’s not the billions things that billions of English native speaker and L2 speakers have in their mind. English is one thing (I’m giving a rough estimate). The only thing that billions of users have in their heads is reflection of that one big English. And English as a one thing can had a grammar, dictionary and so on. You can ask how we get so big amount of constructions? I suppose, that all that construction that you can find at every step, are just grammaticalized. Yes, speakers don’t necessarily perceive syntactic categories as the same thing, but it is what the grammar of English do. English and Adyghe (the West Circassian language I work with) treats “talk” as a noun or as a verb, depending on its syntactic position, and for example Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Dargwa (the Northeast Caucasian language I work with) and many other languages don’t. So notion of verb is a linguistic model, which allow to explain how languages around the world divedes words into groups.
I don’t think that all I wrote is the naked true. As I said, I’ve never thought about it before.

Sorry for my English, I’m definitely not good at it. 

George Moroz, Moscow

[giraffeli]

Hello professor, thanks for your inspiring videos! I've still been confused about “metaphor links”. Why "STATES ARE LOCATIONS" is metaphor link? It seems like some metonymy relationship instead to me?

[a.b.]

Thank you again for this. I am a little confused, though, because in your book in chapter 3, page 55 (at least in my edition) you say that Goldberg is an advocate of the schematic approach, yet in this video you say she proposes a prototypical approach. Now I wonder, is this a mix-up of scientists or a mix-up of the approaches?

[mebeasensei]

I do not understand Goldberg’s definition one bit. What does not strictly predictable mean? Can you give us an example? Someone? If you need to know all the symbolic references of all the components then what is an idiom? It is not a construction!