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The article aims to show how it is possible to use the idea of constructions in Construction Grammar for the purpose of capturing discourse phenomena within communication in sciences. First, 1 present an analysis of three grammatical examples in order to account for them as constructions. This attempt is based on their specific features relating to the role they play in scientific articles. It is then argued that the pragmatic properties described in connection with specific grammatical phenomena can be embedded in a general framework to account for text units as discourse-level constructions.

This paper investigates two verbal constructions containing the German verb verdienen (‘to earn / deserve’), e.g. er verdient sich sein Brot ‘he earns his living’ (lit. he earns himself his bread) und er verdient gewürdigt zu werden ‘he deserves to be appreciated". It is shown that the notion of analogy allows for motivating some important features of particular constructions with verdienen. Two interpretations of analogy are employed: analogy in the sense of non-hierarchical family resemblance on the one hand, and analogy leading to changes by mapping a structure from one domain to another on the other hand. It is suggested that both verdienen in combination with sich and verdienen in combination with a verbal complement can be accounted for by focusing on their formal and semantic similarities connecting them to other constructions coming from the same construction family. Moreover, it is shown that versprechen and vermögen could be regarded as analogical models for verdienen.

In German linguistics, a traditional distinction is made between (i) prepositional objects (POs) and prepositional adverbials, and (ii), among the latter, between adverbial complements and adjuncts. As a contribution to the debate on points of contact and possible syntheses between valency-based and construction-based approaches to verb argument structure, a corpus-based constructionist account of German PO and PP adverbial verb argument structures involving the preposition vor ‘in front of’ is developed. It is argued that ‘desemanticised’ PO-uses of vor are markers of inherently meaningful verb argument structure constructions that form a transparently motivated network comprising both PO and PP adverbial patterns. Analyses are presented for five interrelated families of vor constructions within the overall network thus defined. Their meanings are shown to reflect an interplay of more concrete spatial meanings of the preposition and the lexical semantics of verbal fillers of these constructions. Once conventionalised, they are subject to regular processes of metaphorical and metonymic semantic extension that are tentatively unravelled to create an integrated semantic map of verbal vor-constructions in present day German.

The following article shows how several verbal argument structure patterns can build clusters or families. Argument structure patterns are conceptualised as form-meaning pairings related by family relationships. These are based on formal and / or semantic characteristics of the individual patterns making up the family. The small family of German argument structure patterns containing vor sich her and vor sich hin is selected to illustrate the process whereby pattern meaning combines with the syntactic and semantic properties of the patterns’ individual components to constitute a higher-level family or cluster of argument structure patterns. The study shows that the patterns making up the family are similar with regard to some of their formal characteristics, but differ quite clearly with respect to their meaning. The article also discusses the conditions of usage of the individual patterns of the family, the contribution of verb meaning and prepositional meaning to the overall meaning of the patterns, coercion effects, and productivity issues.