HPSG and Construction Grammar

This chapter discusses the main tenets of Construction Grammar (CxG) and shows that HPSG adheres to them. The discussion includes surface orientation, language acquisition without UG, and inheritance networks and shows how HPSG (and other frameworks) are positioned along these dimensions. Formal variants of CxG will be briefly discussed and their relation to HPSG will be pointed out. It is argued that lexical representations of valence are more appropriate than phrasal approaches, which are assumed in most variants of CxG. Other areas of grammar seem to require headless phrasal constructions (\eg the NPN construction and certain extraction constructions) and it is shown how HPSG handles these. Derivational morphology is discussed as a further example of an early constructionist analysis in HPSG.