Introducing Sign-Based Construction Grammar

1 Background Modern grammatical research,1 at least in the realms of morphosyntax, includes a number of largely nonoverlapping communities that have surprisingly little to do with one another. One – the Universal Grammar (UG) camp – is mainly concerned with a particular view of human languages as instantiations of a single grammar that is fixed in its general shape. UG researchers put forth highly abstract hypotheses making use of a complex system of representations, operations, and constraints that are offered as a theory of the rich biological capacity that humans have for language. 2 This community eschews writing explicit grammars of individual languages in favor of offering conjectures about the ‘parameters of variation’ that modulate the general grammatical scheme. These proposals are motivated by small data sets from a variety of languages. A second community, which we will refer to as the Typological (TYP) camp, is concerned with descriptive observations of individual languages, with particular concern for idiosyncrasies and complexities. Many TYP researchers eschew formal models (or leave their development to others), while others in this community refer to the theory they embrace as ‘Construction Grammar’ (CxG).