The Importance of Syntactic Constructions in Communicating Meaning - The View Taken by Construction Grammar

Abstract

The paper first briefly presents the basic tenets of A. Goldberg's Construction Grammar, as one of the theories developing within the cognitive linguistic approach to the grammatical ievel of language structure. It thereby especially focuses on those notions put forward by the given theory that may support its claim that syntactic constructions are indispensible in communicating meaning, such as the notion that constructions (including the syntactic ones) are to be treated as symbols (pairings of forn and meaning) and that they themselves can potentially serve as the semantic centre of a sentence and carry meaning in and of themselves irrespective of the actual words and word groups that may appear in them as arguments. All of this is illustrated not only by the construction types typically cited in the relevant literature in the construction grammar theory, but also by several construction types in Serbian.

Keywords: construction grammar, constructions, symbols, English language, Serbian language