Moving Past Slot-Fillers: Balancing English Argument Structure with Fluid Construction Grammar

Constructional approaches view argument structure constructions as grammatical templates with open slots to be filled by verbs and their arguments, organized in an inheritance network. This paper argues that this view is no longer in tune with the field’s move towards dynamic usage-based models and proposes two frame shifts. First, rather than a rigid hierarchy of templates and fillers, linguistic structure is best modeled as a network of interdependent constraints that hold each other in balance. Second, rather than organizing the grammar network taxonomically, according to what constructions are , we can organize it according to their interactions – what they do . The approach is illustrated for English argument structure and related constructions in Fluid Construction Grammar, a computational platform for developing and testing construction grammars. The result is a constructional framework that preserves the insights of earlier models while generalizing them to all forms of constructional interaction.