Support from language processing for a constructional approach to grammar

A key tenet of Construction Grammar (CxG) (e.g., Goldberg 1995; Kay and Fillmore 1999; Michaelis and Lambrecht 1996) is that the basic units of language are learned pairings of form and function: constructions. CxG strives to characterize the knowledge that underlies a native speaker's capacity to understand and produce an indefinite number of sentences and discriminate between the acceptable and unacceptable sentences in his or her native language. It departs from classical generative approaches in the Chomskian tradition in several crucial ways, however.¹.