Abstract
Language is a symbolic system, whose basic units are arbitrary and conventionalized pairings of form and meaning. In fact, in light of substantive empirical evidence, Construction Grammar approaches advocate the view that not only words but all levels of grammatical description – from morphemes, words, and idioms to abstract phrasal patterns as well as larger discourse patterns – comprise form-meaning pairings, which are collectively referred to as constructions. In this paper, I will discuss the status of multimodal usage-events (multimodal constructs) for the potential entrenchment of multimodal constructions and their implications for human cognition in general. As I will argue, constructionist approaches need to pay more attention to the role of the working memory in assembling and interpreting constructions. Drawing on verbal as well as gesture constructions, I will show that it is essential to distinguish entrenched constructions that are stored in the long-term memory from form-meaning pairings that are assembled in the working memory (online constructions). Once this distinction is made, the precise role of multimodal constructs and the nature of multimodal constructions can finally be disentangled.
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© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Multimodality and construction grammar
- Multimodal constructs – multimodal constructions? The role of constructions in the working memory
- Utterance Construction Grammar (UCxG) and the variable multimodality of constructions
- Apposition: A multimodal construction? The multimodality of linguistic constructions in the light of usage-based theory
- Is there a multimodal construction based on non-deictic so in German?
- Multimodal existential constructions in German: Manual actions of giving as experiential substrate for grammatical and gestural patterns
- On the multimodality of [all the way from X PREP Y]
- Timelines and multimodal constructions: Facing new challenges
- Multimodal form-meaning pairs for blended classic joint attention
- Multimodal rhetoric: Fictive interaction strategies in political discourse
- The “Negative-Assessment-Construction” – A multimodal pattern based on a recurrent gesture?
- The shrug as marker of obviousness
- Multimodal Construction Grammar issues are Construction Grammar issues
- Do we really need a Multimodal Construction Grammar?
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Multimodality and construction grammar
- Multimodal constructs – multimodal constructions? The role of constructions in the working memory
- Utterance Construction Grammar (UCxG) and the variable multimodality of constructions
- Apposition: A multimodal construction? The multimodality of linguistic constructions in the light of usage-based theory
- Is there a multimodal construction based on non-deictic so in German?
- Multimodal existential constructions in German: Manual actions of giving as experiential substrate for grammatical and gestural patterns
- On the multimodality of [all the way from X PREP Y]
- Timelines and multimodal constructions: Facing new challenges
- Multimodal form-meaning pairs for blended classic joint attention
- Multimodal rhetoric: Fictive interaction strategies in political discourse
- The “Negative-Assessment-Construction” – A multimodal pattern based on a recurrent gesture?
- The shrug as marker of obviousness
- Multimodal Construction Grammar issues are Construction Grammar issues
- Do we really need a Multimodal Construction Grammar?