The Idiomatic Expression "There you are". A Constructional Analysis (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Osnabrück (Amerikanistik), course: Construction Grammar, language: English, abstract: All in all, Generative Grammar assumes that a speaker's grammatical knowledge is organized into components: the phonological component, the morphological component, the syntactic component and the semantic component. Construction Grammar, on the other hand, assumes that idiomatic expressions are everywhere and that all grammatical patterns are riddled with exceptions and idiosyncrasies. This leads to the assumption that the totality of our knowledge of language is captured by a network of constructions, a so-called "construct-i-con".

Furthermore, constructions are symbolic units that are not strictly predictable. As Goldberg puts it, "[a]ny linguistic pattern is recognized as a construction as long as some aspect of its form or function is not strictly predictable from its component parts or from other constructions recognized to exist". Therefore, if the meaning of an idiom cannot be figured out by the literal meaning of its parts, it is a construction.

This assumption does not automatically exclude that even a semantically compositional and regular linguistic form could be a construction, as Goldberg explains: "In addition, patterns are stored as constructions even if they are fully predictable as long as they occur with sufficient frequency". This assumption leads to the fact that predictable linguistic forms such as "I love you" or "How has your day been?" turn out to be entrenched predictable constructions.