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In spite of the obvious importance that is accorded to the notion grammatical construction in any approach that sees itself as a construction grammar (CxG), there is as yet no generally accepted definition of the term across different variants of the framework. In particular, there are different assumptions about which additional requirements a given structure has to meet in order to be recognized as a construction besides being a ‘form-meaning pair’. Since the choice of a particular definition will determine the range of both relevant phenomena and concrete observations to be considered in empirical research within the framework, the issue is not just a mere terminological quibble but has important methodological repercussions especially for quantitative research in areas such as corpus linguistics. The present study illustrates some problems in identifying and delimiting such patterns in naturally occurring text and presents arguments for a usage-based interpretation of the term grammatical construction.
The paper contributes to the raising vs. control debate with respect to modals through (A) novel data; (B) the investigation of a domain in which it has proven particularly problematic: volitional modality. We analyze oblique arguments of experiencer verbs embedded under German wollen ‘want’ and propose that they support both generalized raising and the abandonment of the classical version of the Theta Criterion. Byproducts of the analysis include a syntactic account involved in a class of datives in the language together with the initial characterization of a related modal in German which is expressed through the same item as volition and which we term weak.