With this book, two of the most prominent figures in current research on Construction Grammar join forces to develop a constructionist approach to syntactic analysis, or CASA for short. While the main title of the book promises A Construction Grammar of the English Language, the subtitle is more accurate as the main focus is clearly on syntax, covering topics such as argument structure constructions, information structure and word order. Nevertheless, the authors also provide a general introduction to constructionist approaches and discuss the potential, but also the limitations of analyzing language in a Construction Grammar framework in general.
As already pointed out in previous work (e.g. Herbst & Hoffmann Reference Herbst and Hoffmann2018), the CASA approach was mainly developed with a didactic outlook, starting with the observation that the curricula in (English) linguistics at universities often tend to teach traditional approaches to linguistic analysis, neglecting usage-based approaches that have become more and more important in the language sciences over the last few decades. In addition to this didactic focus, the book is part of a broader descriptive – or ‘constructicographic’ (see e.g. Lyngfelt et al. Reference Lyngfelt, Borin, Ohara and Torrent2018) – project. The corresponding repository, the CASA constructicon or CASA|Con, is currently available at https://constructicon.de/ (see Herbst Reference Herbst2024 for more details; last accessed in August 2025). Like other constructicographic enterprises such as the FrameNets that exist for various languages, it aims to provide detailed descriptions of linguistic constructions. As such, the didactic goals of the monograph go in tandem with descriptive and constructicographic ones. In the remainder of this review, we will therefore focus on the question of whether the book succeeds in making constructionist approaches accessible for university students, and to what extent the CASA approach offers a heuristically insightful tool for linguistic analysis.
The very first chapter sets the stage by introducing the theory of Construction Grammar and motivating its appropriateness for linguistic description in general and language teaching in particular (pp. 1–21). The authors discuss at length the problem of defining constructions. Although they ultimately avoid giving a concise definition of what a construction is, they provide ample examples of what can be considered a construction, which mechanisms underlie the acquisition of constructions and in what ways constructions can be combined to produce the full range of possible utterances.
Chapter 2, ‘Conventional wisdom: A chapter some readers might want to skip’ (pp. 22–9), continues in this introductory spirit. It is broadly conceptualized as a refresher on linguistic terminology and lays the foundation for all following analyses, by covering a wide variety of important concepts, ranging from word classes to semantic roles. In lieu of concise definitions, however, the linguistic terminology is often explained in terms of what is problematic about the respective concept or missing from standard definitions.
Chapter 3 is the first real analytic chapter and investigates ‘Sentence type constructions’ (pp. 30–42). Here, the authors’ focus on language learning/acquisition becomes apparent, as the different types of sentential constructions are introduced with authentic, spoken corpus data from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney Reference MacWhinney2000). From these child-directed utterances, the authors build up a taxonomy of constructions that children could plausibly arrive at, given this kind of input. However, the authors quickly switch to a broader selection of corpus data, which is understandable given the intended broad coverage of phenomena, but shifts the focus away from developmental considerations rather briskly. The chapter also introduces the visual representation format that is used for constructions across the entire book, as well as in the CASA constructicon. The construction boxes that visualize formal and functional aspects of individual constructions in conjunction with other factors such as intonation patterns, broader usage conditions and examples are a highlight of this chapter, and the book in general. They offer comprehensive, yet compact overviews of the different sentence-type constructions described in this chapter, ranging from simple declaratives and interrogatives over imperatives and exclamatives to fragments. The chapter concludes with a localization of sentence-type constructions as the natural first step for all syntactic analyses in the broader CASA framework.
Chapter 4 is dedicated to ‘The roles of verbs’ (pp. 43–69), starting out with the pivotal role of verbs in first language acquisition and then moving on to problems with the categorization of verbs as well as a more detailed discussion of certain verb (construction) types: the progressive, the perfect and the passive construction, subjunctive mood constructions as well as negation and the do-support construction.
Chapter 5, titled ‘Who does what to whom?’ (pp. 70–131), deals with one of the phenomena that have been scrutinized most thoroughly in constructionist approaches to language: argument structure constructions, i.e. form–meaning pairs expressing ‘basic human scenes’ (p. 71) such as transfer, change-of-state, change of location, etc. The authors first point out that this phenomenon has been treated under many different names in the literature, ranging from ‘complementation’ to ‘theta theory’ and ‘valence’, before focusing on the role of argument structure constructions in first language acquisition and then discussing argument structure constructions at different levels of abstraction.
Chapter 6, entitled ‘Referring to, describing and evaluating things: Nominal constructions’ (pp. 132–61), describes the whole range of nominal constructions in detail. Before elucidating the individual constructions, the authors list their shared features (slot-filling, reference and grounding), which are all motivated from a cognitive viewpoint. Unsurprisingly, this chapter is also the longest, as it then goes on to describe the complete family of nominal and NP constructions, including distinctions such as proper, count and mass nouns, the wide variety of pronominal constructions and modifications of them.
Chapter 7 (pp. 162–75) is dedicated to adjectival constructions, starting with a typology of different uses of adjectives to express evaluations, to provide descriptions, to relate ‘things’ (in the Langackerian sense) to a particular group, area or domain, or to express a degree of certainty. The authors then turn to the adjective construction, which they describe as consisting of two elements: ‘the adjective in the semantic role of an attribute, and a slot for the attributee’ (p. 163). They then zoom in on more specific constructions such as the premodifier-of-noun construction (i.e. attributive uses of adjectives) or the comparative construction.
Chapter 8 covers the most important types of constructions that specify additional aspects of situations beyond argument structure, namely ‘where, when and how’ (‘Where, when and how: Specification of circumstances’, pp 176–91). In line with the book’s general focus on Cognitive Linguistics, the authors also introduce the notions of gradience and prototypicality in this section, through which they show that category labels, such as Beneficiary-Construction and Purpose-Construction, are highly dependent on factors like the usage context or the individual speaker. They then spend a considerable number of pages on the discussion of adjuncts, before emphasizing the irrelevance of the argument–adjunct distinction for the CASA enterprise.
Chapter 9 is concerned with the ways in which either ideas or clauses can be combined, in ‘Joining ideas and clauses’ (pp. 192–202). After motivating this form of linguistic compression with economic aspects, the authors go on to present a plethora of linguistic elements that can be coordinated. Here, the strengths of the CASA analysis become especially apparent; for instance, the construction grids shown on p. 194 nicely illustrate how factors like intonation and punctuation contribute to the notion of constructionhood as much as broader meaning and form. Finally (and somewhat surprisingly), the authors extend their analysis to the discourse level and also show how a CASA analysis compares to similar analytic attempts in other linguistic frameworks.
Chapter 10 deals with a topic that has drawn much attention not only in constructionist approaches: information structure constructions (pp. 203–14). The authors connect the concept of information structure (or information management) to the cognitive-linguistic concept of construal, and especially to the idea of perspective taking, which they in turn link to the concept of theory of mind. In particular, they take up the usage-based idea that language acquisition rests on basic cognitive capacities such as joint attention and intention reading. Before zooming in on the question of how information is structured linguistically, they address the notion of reference once again, and then move on to the distinction between topic and focus that plays a key role in many accounts of information structure. Then they discuss a number of constructions that they argue are mainly used for information management, such as left and right dislocation as well as wh-clefts (e.g. What I wanted was a book about Construction Grammar). The authors stress, however, that ultimately all sentence-type constructions can be seen as information-structure constructions, although some like the ones discussed in this chapter show specific formal properties compared to other, more frequent constructions.
Chapter 11, titled ‘Speaking idiomatically: Prefabricated chunks as low-level constructions’ (pp. 215–30), deals with one of the key topics of Construction Grammar: idiomaticity. Again, the authors start out with examples from language acquisition, briefly summarizing the key insight of usage-based approaches that first language acquisition largely rests on the mastery of fixed and semi-fixed utterances. They link this idea to Sinclair’s (Reference Sinclair1991) ‘idiom principle’, according to which ‘a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into segments’ (Sinclair Reference Sinclair1991: 110). Examples discussed in this chapter include two of the ‘poster children’ of Construction Grammar, the let alone construction and the comparative correlative construction (the x-er the y-er), but also idioms (and variations of idioms) or constructions with particles. Somewhere in-between the discussion of specific examples, there is a subchapter dedicated to the key concept of collocation.
Chapter 12 is entitled ‘Solving problems with Construction Grammar’ (pp. 231–8). It is unclear whether the authors chose this ambiguous chapter title on purpose; if they did, they have missed the opportunity to exploit both readings of the title, as the chapter is only concerned with the question of how constructionist approaches can solve some of the problems that traditional approaches entail. Examples include what the authors call ‘ligature constructions’, i.e. constructions that can be analyzed compositionally or noncompositionally at the same time (e.g. spill the beans), quotative constructions as well as constructions with impersonal it or existential there.
Chapter 13 deals with ‘Words as constructions in a constructional network’ (pp. 239–64). Herbst and Hoffmann make it clear from the outset that they see words as form–meaning pairs in the constructionist sense, although their claim that ‘in Construction Grammar all words are considered to be constructions’ (p. 163) arguably simplifies the research debate a bit too much, as there is quite a controversial discussion in constructionist approaches whether words can be considered constructions (see Dąbrowska Reference Dąbrowska, Evans and Pourcel2009; Ungerer & Hartmann Reference Ungerer and Hartmann2023: 11–14). A large part of the chapter is dedicated to word classes, which are seen as language-specific categories that emerge from language use. While the word-class classification introduced in the chapter mainly follows the traditional categorization, they deviate from the established terminology in that they use the term particle for ‘a word class that comprises traditional subordinating conjunctions and prepositions’ (p. 246).
Chapter 14 (pp. 265–74) deals with word order, which is described as ‘perhaps one of the biggest challenges of Construction Grammar’ (p. 267), because variation in word order can often not be described satisfactorily in terms of form–meaning pairings. The authors show that in noun phrases and finite verb clauses word order often presents strong cues for processing; in addition, they discuss word order in argument structure constructions, the position of adjunct constructions and inversion.
The fifteenth and final chapter (pp. 275–85) introduces an attempt at weaving together all analytic strings presented throughout the book, by showing how constructions can be combined and how individual constructs can be decomposed into the constructions they consist of, all while sticking with the construction grid format established in earlier chapters. Here, the didactic focus of the book becomes apparent again, as the sample analyses provide a concise overview of how actual language data can be described holistically. As the authors themselves note, ‘[i]t is, consequently, impossible to provide a full analysis of a construct that includes all form and meaning properties of the blended constructions’ (p. 277). Despite this preliminary cautious disclaimer, their analyses are highly detailed and comprehensive, and come as close to a full analysis as seems possible.
All in all, the book is a very welcome addition to the literature on Construction Grammar. While there are already a few textbooks and beginner-friendly overviews on CxG as a whole (e.g. Hilpert Reference Hilpert2019; Hoffmann Reference Hoffmann2022; Ungerer & Hartmann Reference Ungerer and Hartmann2023), this is the first book of its kind that explicitly focuses on syntactic analysis. It is well written in an accessible style and, as such, it is also recommended for novice readers who are not yet familiar with the nitty-gritty details of syntactic analysis and/or Construction Grammar. There is, however, still some room for improvement.
While the overall structure of the book is convincing, the structure of the individual chapters is often quite idiosyncratic, and the organization of many of the chapters could be more convincing. For example, the concept of collocation plays a key role throughout the book and is mentioned many times (including in a section of the very first chapter on ‘Collocations as constructions’) before there is a section dedicated to introducing and defining the concept that is placed somewhat oddly in-between the discussion of selected examples in chapter 11. Furthermore, the prominently placed focus on language acquisition and teaching is mostly elaborated at the beginning of the individual chapters, but then quickly neglected in favor of a more descriptive approach. Here, the concluding chapter would have lent itself naturally to offer a comprehensive wrap-up of the developmental pieces and tidbits sprinkled throughout the book. Also, the selection of individual constructions that are discussed often seems a bit eclectic. To some extent, this is of course unavoidable, as it is clear that the authors can only present small snippets of the English ‘construct-i-con’, but the individual sections could be linked a bit better to offer more guidance to the readers. Also, virtually all chapters go directly in medias res and end rather abruptly – brief introduction and conclusion sections might have been helpful for contextualizing the topics and examples discussed in the chapters more thoroughly.
Several chapters conclude with more theoretical discussions of why certain distinctions might be more or less important for the CASA approach. Especially in the light of the didactic goal of the present book, it might have been easier for prospective readers unfamiliar with Construction Grammar and Cognitive Linguistics to first explain the theoretical background and discussion points between different linguistic schools of thought, which might have contextualized the individual analyses a bit better. Similarly, the authors introduce a fair amount of terminology that is specific to their own constructionist approach. These are not always entirely clear, even to readers who broadly identify themselves as Construction Grammarians. In some cases, these additions to the established terminology seem a bit unnecessary in the context of this particular book, as when the rather idiosyncratic term itecx (which stands for ‘item as an element of a construction’) is introduced on p. 54 but mentioned only once more on p. 240.
Generally, there seems to be a slight mismatch between the knowledge level that the authors presuppose and the knowledge level that can be reasonably expected from an (under)graduate-level student. Then again, this perceived disparity might also be caused by the reviewers’ familiarity with linguistic theory, and a fresh set of unbiased eyes (namely, the primary audience of this book) would not be surprised at all by such things.
Although it sometimes remains unclear whether the book was written for (advanced) students or experienced practitioners of Construction Grammar, the book ultimately has much to offer to both target audiences: for students, it provides a good entry point both to syntactic analysis and to constructionist approaches to language; for Construction Grammarians, especially those interested in constructicography, it offers interesting theoretical, methodological and terminological considerations. Despite the small criticisms mentioned above, we remain positive that the CASA book provides a worthwhile and welcome addition to the constructionist literature, especially in conjunction with the CASA website and the broader constructicographic enterprise pursued by the authors, all while situating itself in a didactic niche that has been previously unoccupied.
