# Discourse-level phenomena in construction grammars

Renata Enghels & María Sol Sansiñena

Until the beginning of this century, the focus of Construction Grammar (CxG) was mainly on morphosyntactic phenomena at a sentence level found in formal registers of written language (Goldberg 1995, 2006; Boas 2003; Booij 2005; Kay 2005; Barðdal 2008, among others). However, Construction Grammar aims at accounting for the grammatical organization of a language at all levels and, more recently, all components -- from morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology to discourse levels -- have been more explicitly integrated into the model. The past decade in particular has seen a surge of interest in applying constructional models and insights to the study of discourse- level phenomena. This development is completely in line with the all-inclusive and integrationist principle of CxG, which declines to distinguish between core, peripheral, or even ungrammatical patterns. It is also in line with some of the basic principles of the early constructionist model, such as the interrelation between form and meaning of grammatical structures and the incorporation of – pragmatic information in the characterization of meaning which have their origins in Case Grammar – (Fillmore 1968) and Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1975, 1982) and the inclusion of discourse-based features in the definition of grammatical patterns (Fillmore 1974/1981, 1982). Since then, promising advances have been made on constructional approaches to discourse, on grammar in interaction, and on discourse patterns as representations of specific linguistic properties (see, among many others, Fried & Östman 2005; Östman 2005; Brinton 2008; Auer 2011; Cappelle 2017). This special issue aims at contributing to a better understanding of how constructional models can be applied to discourse-level phenomena. The present introduction starts with an overview of the recent advances in research on discourse-level phenomena (Section 1). The body of literature allows us to identify a set of discourse contexts and construction types in which conversational form/function pairs tend to occur. This part proposes a first classification of theoretical and methodological research questions that are addressed in the current volume. Section 2 briefly discusses and contextualizes each of the contributions, highlighting their central findings. The introduction closes with a number of questions that need to be tackled in the (near) future (Section 3).

### 1. (Recent) advances in constructional research on discourse-level phenomena

In recent decades, researchers have come to the insight that constructions also include conventional patterns found beyond the sentence level (for a detailed overview, see Östman & Fried 2005). The extension towards discourse-level phenomena is said to result in a mutual benefit: knowledge about pragmatics and discourse can increase by integrating insights from grammar, whereas knowledge about the architecture of grammar can benefit from data on discourse. Östman (2005) advances four claims that frame the change of scope from sentence to discourse level. First, as is to be expected by the general cognitive principle of economy, beyond the sentence-level patterns can be found with a conventional pragmatic or discoursal make up. Second, syntax (at the sentence level) and discourse are two very different but complementary areas of research. Third, a ‘full coverage’ of the data, including ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ constructions is only possible by explicitly taking into account the contexts and settings in which a particular construction is conventional or acceptable (cf. also the notion of ‘text-embedded constructions’ suggesting that the form and meaning of novel combinations