Since its inception in the early 1980s, Construction Grammar (CxG) has been fundamentally grounded in the Saussurean-inspired tenet that linguistic knowledge consists of ‘constructions all the way down’ (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2006) – i.e., symbolic pairings of form and function. This non-modular architecture, which treats lexicon and syntax as a continuum comprising from words to morphemes, idioms and clausal and phrasal patterns, is arguably the theory’s most distinctive strength. Yet, as Benoît Leclercq and Cameron Morin aptly argue in The Meaning of Constructions, a paradoxical gap lies at the heart of the discipline. While the theory adopts fundamentally a meaning-based approach, there exists no systematic framework delineating exactly what meaning consists of. Current constructionist literature argues that the concept of meaning is maximalist, resulting in what critics have called ‘an undifferentiated bag of functional aspects’ (Gonzálvez-García Reference Gonzálvez-García2020:112) where semantic and pragmatic information are conflated. In this Element, Leclercq and Morin aim to resolve this by offering a comprehensive primer on the modelling of the meaning of constructions, as well as an operational taxonomy of meaning that explicitly distinguishes between semantic, pragmatic and social dimensions.

The book has a bipartite structure. The first half (Sections 1–3) serves as a state-of-the-art overview of how meaning is operationalized in constructionist approaches, suitable for students and newcomers to CxG. The second half (Section 4) presents authors’ original proposal on how meaning should be modelled in CxG. Section 5 concludes with some topics that could be the focus of future research and theoretical research questions that need to be addressed.

Now that the Element has been introduced, let me summarize its content to, subsequently, assess it. In Section 2, the authors unpack the ‘meaning-based assumption’, according to which semantic structure ‘is the true driver of grammar and linguistic knowledge’ (3). In line with usage-based approaches, Leclercq and Morin characterize constructional meaning along three dimensions: it is emergent (arising from ‘lossy’, interconnected memory traces of exemplars), experiential (rooted in experience and encyclopaedic knowledge) and conventional (regulated by interpersonal needs for communication and shared intentionality). They emphasize that meaning in CxG is best accounted for in terms of construals, rejecting traditional truth-conditional approaches in favour of frame semantics. This aligns with the broader cognitive linguistic view that meaning includes ‘all the conventionalized aspects of construction’s function’, as well as ‘properties of the discourse in which the utterance is found […] and of the pragmatic situation of the interlocutors’ (Croft & Cruse Reference Croft and Cruse2004: 258).

Section 3, ‘Meaning in use’, delves into the dynamic process of meaning-making to interpret constructions, leading to the view that constructions are viewed as ‘points of access to an array of encyclopaedic information that constitutes a construction’s meaning potential’ (14; italics in the original). In line with cognitive linguistics approaches, the authors advocate for the view of meaning as conceptualisation, which is also sometimes the focus of blending theory and conceptual metaphor theory. After that, they tackle two open debate topics within constructionist approaches in the context of construction meaning, i.e., constructional combination and compositionality (17–22), arguing that CxG does not reject the latter but rather recontextualizes it as the interaction of constructions within a specific construct. Next, Leclercq and Morin shift to the creative potential of making meaning as an activity in which language users can flexibly reshape or depart from established constructions to achieve various communicative and social aims. Against Sampson’s F(ixed)-creativity and E(nlarging/extending)-creativity dimensions of creativity, they posit a continuum of creativity ‘from playing “by the rules” to playing “with the rules”’ (25), adducing examples of mismatch, coercion, snowclones and aberration. The authors conclude the state-of-the-art overview by expanding on the idea that meaning drives grammar, adopting a diachronic perspective. To do so, they aptly discuss meaning change across the constructicon, with case studies ranging from lexical constructionalization to lexico-grammatical constructionalization and grammatical constructionalization.

The Element’s primary theoretical contribution – and its most provocative argument – arrives in Section 4, ‘A Framework of Constructional Meaning’. Here, Leclercq and Morin confront theoretical ‘grey areas’ in constructionist approaches: the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. While the rejection of a modular distinction is a core tenet of the theory, the authors contend that a distinction based on truth-conditionality remains operationally necessary for a precise description of constructional meaning, given that ‘it is possible to maintain that truth conditions do not exhaust the meaning of constructions while arguing that there is a level at which they still play a role’ (42). In particular, they observe that there is no contradiction in distinguishing between those aspects of meaning that determine truth values versus those that shape interpretation without affecting the truth, thereby accommodating both the language-world relation central to truth-conditional semantics and the language-mind relation that captures speakers’ cognitive and inferential engagement with meaning. At this point, the authors propose a tripartite taxonomy of constructional meaning:

• - Semantic meaning. Defined as truth-conditional. To avoid slipping into a theoretical aporia, the authors reverse the traditional logic: rather than the world determining the truth, ‘[m]eaning comes before truth’ (42). In their proposal, truth conditions constitute cognitive representations, which are fuzzy and fully context-dependent. This allows Leclercq and Morin to retain ‘semantics’ as a different type of constructional meaning while upholding cognitive tenets.

• - Pragmatic meaning. Defined as use-conditional meaning that contributes to the utterance meaning. This type of meaning includes ‘utterance-focused features such as presupposition, implicatures, illocutionary acts, speaker attitudes, and information structure’ (44). This proposal directly answers recent calls on the need to enrich the functional pole by reflecting ‘detailed information concerning illocutionary force, information structure, and any other information impinging on the constructional organization of discourse, including register and politeness issues’ (Gonzálvez-García Reference Gonzálvez-García2020: 118).

• - Social meaning. Defined as use-conditional meaning that contributes to the interpretation of the utterance in the communicative situation in which it is produced. This situational meaning is further subdivided into interactional meaning (register, genre, style and activity type) and sociocultural meaning (region, class, gender, ethnicity, dialect and local culture). This formalization addresses a long-standing need within CxG, while avoiding any criticism of cognitive theories ignoring social and discoursal properties (see Langacker Reference Langacker2008). Leclercq and Morin elevate social meaning to a primary dimension of constructional meaning.

This taxonomic-based description of constructional meaning allows the authors to re-evaluate The Principle of No Synonymy. They rebrand it as The Principle of No Equivalence, i.e., ‘[i]f two competing constructions differ in form […], they must be semantically, pragmatically and/or socially distinct’ (50). This reformulation is theoretically significant, since this accommodates sociolinguistic variation (e.g., going to and gonna, and color and colour), without abandoning the isomorphism hypothesis. The difference between these pairs lies in register (formal vs informal) and regional variety (American English vs British English), respectively. At this point, Leclercq and Morin suggest ‘that there might be what we would call an “expendable cline” that is at play when determining the speaker’s intended message’ (54), where they hypothesize that in processing speakers might sacrifice social meaning before pragmatic, and pragmatic before semantic meaning. This suggests a hierarchy of cognitive priority where the fundamental ‘what’ of the message (semantics) is preserved at the expense of the context-dependent ‘why’ (pragmatics) or the identity-signalling ‘who’ (social meaning). While this is a fascinating proposal to explain ‘good-enough production’, it is important to note that it remains speculative; as the authors aptly acknowledge, this requires experimental verification.

This section concludes with addressing ‘one specific type of linguistic knowledge that is typically overlooked in constructional analysis, and that is phonemes and phonotactics’ (55). Here the authors argue that phonological elements can be linked to specific meanings, by adducing examples of phonemes and phonotactic patterns that convey social meaning. Section 5 wraps up the Element by indicating some topics that exceed the aims of the book (including the lexicon-syntax continuum, among others), and pointing out future research avenues.

The Meaning of Constructions is a concise yet dense contribution that successfully bridges the gap between cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics. The authors’ ‘social turn’ (49) – inspired by third-wave variationist sociolinguistic theory – is particularly timely. By formalizing ‘social meaning’ as a distinct layer, they provide a roadmap for constructional analysis, and more particularly constructicography, since ‘many social and contextual usage constraints […] are essential properties of […] constructional templates’ (Hoffmann Reference Hoffmann2015: 286).

However, the book is not without its limitations.

The integration of discourse context. The authors’ taxonomy focuses heavily on the type of meaning (semantic/pragmatic/social) but is perhaps less explicit about the properties of genre and text type that some recent work on ‘discourse patterns’ (see Fried Reference Fried2010: 126, among others). For example, while they acknowledge that meaning includes ‘aspects that […] contribute to interpreting the communicative situation in which the utterance is produced’ (44), their model could be enriched by more explicitly incorporating the notion of ‘genre-sensitive constructions’ (Nikiforidou Reference Nikiforidou2021: 196). Specifically, how does their social meaning account for the probabilistic relationship between a construction and a text type (e.g., headlines or recipes)? While they successfully categorize register and dialect, the dynamic interplay of co-textual constraints – where a construction is licensed only by a specific narrative mode (e.g., Past + Now in fiction, or post-posed subject construction in stage directions) still remains a fertile ground for further expansion in their model.

Despite these critiques, the utility of Leclercq and Morin’s framework is very well exemplified when applied to the study of phraseology, most precisely to multi-lexical syntactic phraseological structures with a unitary meaning. To appreciate this contribution, one must recognize that while CxG successfully resolved one of the field’s ontological crises (i.e., legitimizing multi-word expressions as form-function pairs), it has historically struggled with a descriptive deficit regarding their meaning (see Mellado Blanco & Ivorra Ordines Reference Wen and Sinhain press). In this sense, the authors’ proposal offers the necessary corrective to this formal bias. By operationalizing meaning into a tripartite and well-defined taxonomy, they equip phraseologists with the tools to deconstruct the unitary meaning of idioms with the same rigor applied to their syntax.

The Meaning of Constructions does not merely summarize existing knowledge; it pushes the theory forward by tackling a thorny issue: meaning. By offering a tripartite structure of constructional meaning (i.e., semantic, pragmatic and social meaning), Leclercq and Morin provide a systematic framework that CxG has long needed to fully account for the ‘entirety of language’. While some of their proposals regarding the semantics-pragmatics interface may spark debate among cognitive linguists, the operational clarity that they offer is undeniable. This book will likely serve as a starting point for future descriptions of the constructicon, thereby providing a descriptive apparatus aiming to attain every nook and cranny of linguistic knowledge.