and methodological questions. At the same time, the combination of different case studies clearly shows what is to be gained from the model when studying higher-level discourse phenomena, and establishes clear connections with related research domains such as interactional linguistics and phraseological research. As a result, this special issue can be read as a far-reaching, state-of-the-art volume on constructional approaches to discourse-level phenomena. This general aim also leads to some methodological challenges, as the terminology, conceptual categories and representational strategies in constructional research have originated mostly on data collected from texts written in formal registers. At least three central questions are addressed in the collected contributions. To begin with, the constructional status of spoken language phenomena needs to be put to a test. Constructions emerge as entrenched cognitive routines because of their recurrence in different contexts, they are accessed holistically, and tend to be productive as to their token frequency (cf. e.g. De Smet & Cuyckens 2007: 188; Nikiforidou & Torres Cacoullos 2010). As to their internal make-up, discourse-level constructions range from non-compositional to more compositional patterns, from frozen chunks to relatively productive ones. The interactional datives studied by Fried in this volume constitute a rather restricted set of stable form-meaning pairings as they convey particular discourse functions and appear in well-defined discourse settings. In his paper on not-fragments, Cappelle tries to get a better grip on recurrent but relatively frozen sentence fragments including negative expansion. Vandelanotte’s study applies Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics to internet memes and tweets so as to capture the emergence, spreading and entrenchment of multimodal discourse patterns, and proposes that some of these patterns of online discourse usage qualify as constructions. Fernández et al. explore the type of pragmatic information encoded in the linguistic form of insubordinate subjunctive complement constructions and model the relation between different constructions by integrating horizontal relations and multimodal links in an inheritance network. Finally, Kaltenböck’s study on semi-insubordination argues for an account in terms of a separate construction (rather than in terms of ellipsis), claiming that it has its own mental representation or node in the constructional network of a speaker’s grammar. Second, it has been argued that at least some part of a speaker’s understanding of context is conventional (see Lindström & Londen 2008; Linell 2009; Fischer 2010, among others). The functional side of the definition of discourse-related constructions includes a cluster of potential meanings that get actualized in concrete contexts. Meaning is defined on the basis of both codified meaning and contextual clues, including the participants’ cognitive construals of the communicative situation, both the speaker’s perspective and the effect the construction has on the addressee (Fried & Östman 2005: 1760; Fischer 2015). It also includes other pragmatic information related to speech act, presupposition, discourse and information structure. All this information might be considered as the ‘conceptual space’ in which the construction operates (Fischer & Alm 2013). It is thus important not only to take into account the meaning of the discourse constructions, but also to include recurrent features of their interactional purposes. In the same line of ideas, it has been put forward that dialogic exchanges can be understood as multi-sentential constructions with conventional makeup (see Brône & Zima 2014; Du Bois 2014; Nikiforidou et al. 2014; Nikiforidou & Fischer 2015, amongst others). As such, knowledge of grammar implies knowledge of recurrent conversational patterns, and special attention needs to be paid to the contextual specifications that are built into linguistic forms. Besides collocational patterns, aspects that have been recurrently studied are the availability, distribution, and organization of the discourse-level phenomenon within a conversation, or with respect to another host-construction (e.g.