Construction Grammar (henceforth CxG) has been one of the major focus areas of cognitive linguistics for roughly two decades. Yet there has been no textbook or other useful introductory work on CxG available in any language – probably due mainly to the fact that the CxG community has waited faithfully for an anticipated textbook by Charles Fillmore and Paul Kay to appear (though the latest manuscript version of that book circulating in the wild is nearly twenty years old by now). Given this background, Martin Hilpert has taken up a very respectable challenge: writing the textbook which a whole generation of construction grammarians has waited for in vain.

The structure of the book is well thought out, though perhaps somewhat unorthodox. Chapter 1 presents an overview of what it means to know a language, what constructions are, what defines them, and how one can tell if a given expression is (an instance of) a construction. Following Taylor (Reference Taylor2012), the author distinguishes between CxG and the dictionary-and-grammar model, ‘a model of linguistic knowledge in which knowledge of vocabulary is neatly separated from knowledge of grammatical rules’. This distinction is referred to throughout the book, to the extent that the reader is obviously expected to be familiar with the dictionary-and-grammar approach to language (though not by that name) before becoming interested in CxG. While this starting point forces the author to define CxG by contrasting it to other theories, rather than strictly in its own terms, the starting point is certainly a practical and useful one.

A more traditional syntax textbook would proceed from such an overview either to the basics of formalization and the mechanisms of description, or to simple syntactic structures. Hilpert's book, however, assumes a different path, one which is more in line with the CxG top-down, complex structures first ideology. Rather than proceeding to, say, the structure of the noun phrase, he starts the treatment of grammatical phenomena with argument structure constructions. This seems like a very fruitful way to organize the book: not only does it reflect the CxG ideology, but it also begins with what are probably (though arguably) the best-known and most approachable constructions studied within CxG. This, together with the backgrounding in chapter 1, serves as a very good introduction to the construction-based line of thought.

More generally, chapter 2 discusses valency-modifying constructions, not only argument structure constructions. The first part of the chapter presents essentially an overview of Goldberg's (Reference Goldberg1995) work on the English Ditransitive, Caused Motion and Way constructions. Section 2.4, however, concerns valency-decreasing constructions such as the Passive and the Imperative constructions, and different types of Null Instantiation, none of which are normally called argument structure constructions – rather, they unify with argument structure constructions to form such structures as a passive ditransitive (as is shown by the example John was given a large data set for the analysis on page 40) or imperative caused motion (e.g. Throw that in the garbage can).

The reader faces another minor terminological peculiarity in the heading of chapter 3. It seems odd that Hilpert has chosen to use the hyphenated variant construct-i-con rather than the much more conventional form constructicon. He does refer to Goldberg's (Reference Goldberg2003: 219) use of the term on p. 2 of the book, but the unhyphenated form goes all the way back to Jurafsky (Reference Jurafsky1992), as Goldberg herself points out (Reference Goldberg1995: 5). Even if such terminological choices may seem like details of secondary importance, they unfortunately make an entirely unnecessary contribution to terminological incoherence.

Strangely enough, the presentation of the ‘construct-i-con’ in chapter 3 also begins with the least typical set of constructions. After discussing constructions as conventional pairings of form and meaning for two chapters, Hilpert unexpectedly starts his overview of the inventory and interrelations of constructions by discussing meaningless constructions, i.e. conventional patterns of form with no associated meaning. The discussion revolves around Subject–Auxiliary Inversion, and compares the views expressed by Goldberg (Reference Goldberg2006) and Fillmore et al. (Reference Fillmore, Lee-Goldman, Rhodes, Boas and Sag2012). Addressing the possibility, or existence, of meaningless constructions is certainly necessary, but the discussion could have been taken up after presenting the much more thoroughly studied area of meaningful constructions. It also seems like an oversimplification that Goldberg is ‘looking for a common semantic core that is shared by all constructions’ – rather, she speaks of a polysemous radial category, the ‘common core’ of which is the ‘non-prototypical sentence’, hardly a very semantic notion.

Another point where Hilpert seems to either oversimplify or misrepresent Goldberg's ideas is when he discusses the different kinds of interconnections – i.e. links – between constructions. On p. 62, he states that ‘subpart links (Goldberg Reference Goldberg1995: 78) relate constructions that show either formal or semantic overlap, but which do not allow the classification of one construction as an instance of the other’. Yet Goldberg (Reference Goldberg1995: 80) points out that ‘every construction C₁ which is an instance of another construction C₂, and thus is dominated by C₂ via an instance link, simultaneously dominates C₂ by a subpart link’. More generally, in Goldberg's account, instance links entail subpart links, and vice versa.

Overall, however, chapter 3 gives an excellent overview of the internal organization of the constructicon – a rather scarcely studied topic, and certainly a very complex one. The same is true of chapter 4, which discusses morphology from a constructional perspective and expands CxG to word-level phenomena. Treating morphological phenomena in the CxG context is rare, despite very promising works by notably Geert Booij (e.g. Reference Booij2010), and one can only hope that including a synopsis of the existing work in the very first textbook will encourage young scholars to engage in research in this area.

Chapter 5 brings yet another terminological surprise. Despite the fact that the vast majority of existing CxG-oriented literature uses the term information structure to refer to such matters as topic vs focus, given vs new information, activation status, and the like, Hilpert has decided to adopt the much less used term information packaging. While this is, again, only a terminological detail, it may make it more difficult for interested students to find relevant further references. (As an aside, Hilpert avoids the term information structure to the extent that he has replaced the title of my chapter in Hoffman & Trousdale Reference Hoffman and Trousdale2013, ‘Information structure’, with something entirely different in the bibliography. This is obviously accidental but will, again, make it more difficult for the interested student to look for further information.)

This terminological choice aside, chapter 5 gives a solid overview of the central concepts of information packaging/structure, including a number of helpful further references. A lot of what is presented in the chapter relates closely to, or is directly based on, Knud Lambrecht's work, notably his book Information structure and sentence form (Reference Lambrecht1994), which Hilpert calls ‘the cornerstone reference for this topic’. He also cites some earlier work on the topic, but oddly enough does not mention the work of the Prague school upon which essentially all subsequent works are based.

CxG is typically, though perhaps not always, thought of as a branch of the cognitive linguistics movement. Whether or not this implies that constructions – or the construction-based approach to language – should be seen as psychologically real seems to divide opinions. A rather widely accepted covert assumption is that expressed by Lakoff (Reference Lakoff1990: 40) as the cognitive commitment: ‘the commitment to make one's account of human language accord with what is generally known about the mind and the brain, from other disciplines as well as our own’. There is, in fact, a quite respectable body of research which addresses the question of the psychological reality of constructions, but an accessible synopsis of that research is difficult to find (though some of the chapters in Hoffman & Trousdale Reference Hoffman and Trousdale2013 come close). In chapter 6, Hilpert presents a selection of that research in a delightfully comprehensible form.

Language acquisition is closely related to language processing and the representation of language in the human mind. Chapter 7 presents CxG as a theory which opposes the view, propagated by Pinker (Reference Pinker1984) and known as the continuity hypothesis, that the language of children is mentally represented by the same rules and categories as adult language. Proponents of CxG (at least typically) subscribe to what is known as item-based learning: children acquire language by making gradually progressing generalizations of the linguistic input which they receive. Thus the generalizations, and the items or constructions, which children work on are only partially the same as those in adult language. Language acquisition then consists in large part of refining those generalizations to match the cumulating input and eventually results in adult language constructions – leaving, however, room for slight differences in individual speakers’ generalizations and representations.

An inevitable consequence of this usage-based nature of language is that variation and change are inherent properties of language in general and of individual constructions in particular. Chapter 8 addresses these issues by pointing out that constructions are variable in both their formal and semantic properties, and that individual speakers and subgroups of language communities only share the same constructions up to a point. Synchronically, there is always variation between constructions, on the one hand, and between (groups of) speakers, on the other. Diachronically, such variation manifests itself as language change, whether it be change in the meaning associated with a given linguistic form or vice versa, or loss of previously existing constructions, or the emergence of new ones. In a more fine-grained view, linguistic change also involves gradual changes in such matters as relative frequencies of related constructions, distributions (areal, social, or other) of given constructions in the language community, conventionalization of contextual meanings, and the like.

Chapter 9 briefly and neatly concludes the book, but also encourages the reader to go further. Hilpert first lists several main varieties of construction-based language studies which the reader could pursue further, and also presents a well-selected list of seminal publications. Next, he points out that it is also possible to specialize in a topical area, such as child language acquisition, within CxG. Most importantly, he also encourages the reader to effectively become a construction grammarian by engaging with CxG in their own work, and suggests different types of research topics for the reader to choose (or extrapolate) from. It becomes clear that the true aim of the book is not only to introduce the reader to CxG (or CxG to the reader) but to genuinely welcome the reader to the academic community of construction grammarians – a rare treat in an introductory textbook, and a heartwarming message to the eager undergraduate.

The book is the first textbook of CxG, a rapidly growing school of linguistics, and it fulfills a need which has existed for roughly two decades. This cannot be overstated. I am absolutely certain that the whole CxG community joins me in heartily welcoming this long-awaited piece of work. Regardless of the – mainly terminological – criticism expressed above, it is also a very well-written textbook. It does assume that the reader has a basic understanding of linguistic theory, but it does not require very specialized background knowledge, making it perfectly suited for students of English language and linguistics at the stage where this type of content is most relevant to their studies. The book is also a valuable resource for research-oriented students of other languages, as well as more experienced scholars who wish to acquire an understanding of Construction Grammar.