Constructions with Lexical Integrity

Construction Grammar holds that unpredictable form-meaning combinations are not restricted in size. In particular, there may be phrases that have particular meanings that are not predictable from the words that they contain, but which are nonetheless not purely idiosyn-cratic. In addressing this observation, some construction grammar-ians have not only weakened the word/phrase distinction, but also denied the lexicon/grammar distinction. In this paper, we consider the word/phrase and lexicon/grammar distinction in light of Lexical-Functional Grammar and its Lexical Integrity Principle. We show that it is not necessary to remove the words/phrases distinction or the lex-icon/grammar distinction to capture constructional effects, although we agree that there are important generalisations involving constructions of all sizes that must be captured at both syntactic and semantic levels. We use LFG's templates, bundles of grammatical descriptions, to factor out grammatical information in such a way that it can be invoked either by words or by construction-specific phrase structure rules. Phrase structure rules that invoke specific templates are thus the equivalent of phrasal constructions in our approach, but Lexical Integrity and the separation of word and phrase are preserved. Con-structional effects are captured by systematically allowing words and * The authors contributed equally and are listed in purely alphabetical order. This paper is a revised and expanded version of Asudeh et al. remaining errors are our own. Lastly, we thank the editors and reviewers at JLM. phrases to contribute comparable information to LFG's level of functional structure; this is just a generalization of LFG's usual assumption that " morphology competes with syntax " (Bresnan, 2001). The observation that unpredictable form-meaning combinations are not restricted in size forms the basis for A meaning that is associated with a word or a part of a word may also be associated with a phrasal structure in the same language, or in another language. Construction Grammar takes the structure and organisation of the collection of listemes/constructions as crucially important, and a central concern is the study of the relations among constructions: this contrasts with Di Sciullo and Williams (1987), who consider the collection of listemes to be unstructured and the study of the relations among lis-temes uninteresting. Examples such as (1-3) involve correspondences between phrasal structures and idiosyncratic meanings; the syntactic frame of the multi-word expression itself, perhaps along with some specifications on what words are permitted, evokes some interpretation. (2) What's that koala doing sleeping in the corner? (Kay and …