Ricardo Mairal Usón

Levels of description and constraining factors in meaning construction : an introduction to the Lexical Constructional Model

This paper presents an outline of the Lexical Constructional Model, a meaning construction model that integrates insights from functional models of language (especially, Role and Reference Grammar) and Cognitive Linguistics (especially, Goldbergs Construction Grammar and Lakoffs Cognitive Semantics). The initial claim is that a theory of semantic interpretation should be constructed on the basis of two representational mechanisms, lexical and constructional templates, and two basic cognitive operations, subsumption and conceptual cueing, that specify in what ways meaning representations from different levels may interact. It is further shown that both lexical-constructional subsumption and purely constructional subsumption –at any stage of the meaning construction process– is regulated by an inventory of both internal and external constraints. Internal constraints involve the semantic units encoded in a lexical or a constructional template, while external constraints result from the possibility or impossibility of performing high-level metaphoric and/or metonymic operations on the items involved in the subsumption or cueing processes.

New perspectives on argument structure in functional grammar

The present monograph deals with lexical representation and linking within the framework of Functional Grammar. The notion of predicate frame as originally proposed in 1978 and subsequent refinements of the theory are challenged in that a new format of representing argument taking properties is formulated. This new format opens new lines of research towards the design of a new linking algorithm in Functional Grammar.