We are pleased to invite you to a new seminar in the summer term:

KONSTRUKČNÍ GRAMATIKA - CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR

(AAA400119, AAA300119, AAA500119)

The seminar is tutored by doc. Mirjam Fried, PhD

It´s primarily intended for the students in the MA courses.

Introduction to Construction Grammar

This course is a primer in Construction Grammar, a cognitively and functionally oriented framework in which syntactic representations are understood as conventionalized associations between form and function. Focus will be on the framework’s analytic methods and on articulating generalizations about speakers’ linguistic knowledge. We will also examine the ways in which variation in grammatical form can be systematically captured and explained. Using material from English, Czech, and from various less familiar languages, we will explore what typologically different grammars share and in what sense the constructional approach can serve as a universal model of language.

Seminar objectives:
- placing Construction Grammar among other linguistic theories
- mastery of the constructional analytic method
- basics of the formalism
- analysis of fundamental syntactic relations (modification, agreement, predication, valence, etc.)
- independent formulation of constructional generalizations and representations

Syllabus:
Functional-cognitive vs. formal theories of grammar
Arguments for Construction Grammar
Basic concepts and terminology
Nominal constructions
Valence constructions
Phrasal syntax (phrases, clauses, sentences)
Constructional maps
Diachronic analysis in Construction Grammar

Reading list (tentative/partial):
Fried, Mirjam & Jan-Ola Östman (2004), Construction Grammar: a thumbnail sketch. In M. Fried & J-O. Östman (eds.), Construction Grammar in a cross-language perspective, 11-86. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Michael Tomasello (1998), Introduction: a cognitive-functional perspective on language structure. In M. Tomasello (ed.), The new psychology of language, vii-xxiii. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Fillmore, Charles J. (1982), Frame semantics. In the Linguistic Society of Korea (ed.), Linguistics in the morning calm, 111-137. Seoul: Hanshin.

More literature (shorter articles) will be given during the academic year, mostly in electronic form.

For more information consult the following pages.

http://www.constructiongrammar.org/
http://www.constructiongrammar.org/MFried/