Construction After Construction and its Theoretical Challenges

The English NPN construction, exemplified by construction after construction, is productive with five prepositions—by, for, to, after, and upon—with a variety of meanings, including succession, juxtaposition, and comparison; it also has numerous idiomatic cases. This mixture of regularity and idiosyncrasy lends itself to an account in the spirit of construction grammar, in which the lexicon includes specified syntactic structures matched with meanings. The internal syntactic structure of NPN violates standard principles of phrase structure, and the required identity of the two nouns (in most cases) presents descriptive difficulties. Furthermore, when NPN appears in NP positions, it can take normal NP complements and modifiers, and it has quantificational semantics despite the absence of a lexical quantifier. These peculiarities collectively present interesting challenges to linguistic theory. The best hope lies in a theory of grammar that (i) recognizes meaningful constructions as theoretical entities; (ii) recognizes a continuum of regularity between words and rules; and (iii) recognizes the autonomy of syntax from semantics and vice versa.