Constructions at Work

`Bursting with original ideas - a real testament to the richness and power of the constructionist approach, and required reading for anyone interested in psychologically plausible models of grammar.' Michael Tomasello, Co-Director, Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology `This is an extremely important book that marks a significant advance in language science. Goldberg asks two deep questions: How do learners acquire generalizations that make it possible to produce and comprehend utterances outside their direct experience? and Why are languages the way they are? She brings an impressive array of data to bear on these issues, including language-internal facts, cross-linguistic patterns, and psycholinguistic experiments. In the process, she successfully confronts a number of difficult challenges head on, dealing with a number of long-standing and difficult phenomena. The result is deeply satisfying. Even more, it is convincing.' Jeffrey L. Elman, Chancellors' Associates Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego `In Adele Goldberg's new book, Construction Grammar comes of age. Goldberg combines traditional linguistic argumentation with all the tools of cognitive science: statistical and corpus-based analysis, data from experiments on processing and language acquisition (many carried out by the author herself), and evidence from broader-based phenomena in cognition. The vision of language embodied in Constructions at Work emerges as a robust alternative to mainstream thought in linguistics, one that maintains high aspirations to explanation in psychological as well as crosslinguistic terms.' Ray Jackendoff, Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University