is motivated by their function in discourse, Nir & Berman 2010). Finally, it is crucial to develop holistic discourse-level frames or ‘discourse patterns’ (Östman 1999; Östman 2005: 130) (e.g. the Recipe pattern) which act as ‘genres’ that guide the interpretation and acceptability judgements of particular patterns. They imply knowledge by members of a particular speech community of how cognitive, interactive and sociocultural values (e.g. related to politeness strategies) associated with text types and discourse genres interact with the grammatical ‘system’. These discourse patterns stand in different kinds of relationships with each other, including (dis)similarity and inheritance relations at different levels of abstractness (e.g. the more abstract Instruction patterns vs. the more concrete Recipe pattern), and could be added as an extra ‘box’ in the representation of a particular construction. The need to integrate interactional patterns in the grammatical description of a language has even become more urgent due to the expansion of interactional spoken language research. The idea is that speakers and hearers identify and abstract away from recurring contextual features of spoken discourse patterns (Hopper 2011). Their understanding of contextual meaning is systematic and conventionalized and should thus be considered as an inherent part of grammatical constructions (Fried 2010). In addition, interactional dialogical practices of conversational language and spoken language expressions with analogous functions and similar formal characteristics are defined as instances of an overarching construction. Such constructions function as templates that construct and allow for the interpretation of new expressions. In such a view, speakers are explicitly recognized as active participants that shape grammar. As a consequence, also non-propositional material typically found in spoken discourse – such as particles (Fried & Östman 2005; Fischer & Alm 2013), pragmatic markers (Traugott 2018), parentheticals (Hilpert 2013), and comment clauses (Kaltenböck 2013; Van Bogaert 2009, 2010) – has been argued to be part of grammar and of a speaker’s constructional knowledge. To summarize, in such a view constructions can be defined as “semantically and pragmatically enriched representations of speakers’ linguistic competence” and interactional frames as “experientially grounded schematizations of communicative and discourse-structure conventions” (Fried 2010: 131). Thus, one of the main advantages of a constructional approach is that it reveals generalizations across particular items. There are at least two other aspects of Construction Grammar which make it a highly appropriate framework for the study of discourse-level phenomena. First, as is the case of Cognitive Linguistics in general, it is usage-based and dedicates significant attention to distributional variants of patterns, including their frequencies, as they appear in real life interaction. Second, the framework views pragmatic meaning as an important part of grammar, “conventionally associated with a particular linguistic form” (Kay 1997: 123) (see also Goldberg 1995), and on a par with semantic meaning. It goes without saying that both aspects are necessary requirements for any study that aims to define the form and function of conversational constructions, where pragmatics plays a major role. This special issue aims at contributing to a better understanding of how constructional models can be applied to discourse-level phenomena. It is based on a set of theoretical and discourse-oriented papers that were presented at a theme session held at the 2018 CogLing Days in Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium. It contains 5 original papers, in addition to the present introduction by the guest editors, who convened the theme session. The general aim of this issue is to present what we believe to be the first volume dedicated solely to the application of constructional models and insights to the study of discourse-level phenomena. It adds new descriptions of a range of linguistic phenomena – including dative-marked expressions (Fried), sentence fragments (Cappelle) and patterns of insubordination (Pérez Fernández, Gras & Brisard) and semi-insubordination (Kaltenböck) – and clarifies terminological