A case for Construction Grammar: Wh-XVPY constructions

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of implicational constructions. Following Construction Grammar, which argues that constructions are operational at all levels of linguistic description, we advocate the existence of implicational constructions. In contrast with the traditional view of implicature, which differentiates between grammatically guided and contextually guided implicature (conventional vs. conversational implicature), we claim that implicature is grammatically encoded and captured by the construction itself, which has specific morphosyntactic, semantic, pragmatic and prosodic features. Our claim is supported by the analysis of the formal and semantic properties of a group of implicational constructions used in spoken discourse which can be said to constitute a constructional family: the Wh-XVPY interrogative family.