In December 2018, I will join the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures of the University of Genoa, Italy, as a research fellow. I will be working on a research project entitled ‘English construction grammar(s): Between description and cognition.’
The project consists of a critical appraisal of the family of theoretical approaches collectively known as ‘Construction Grammar,’ a popular but not uncontroversial framework. Indeed, it is often less than clear if the studies carried out within the Construction Grammar framework should be considered, cautiously, as structural descriptions of linguistic facts or, more ambitiously, as psycholinguistic analyses. The goal of this project is to study the notion of construction in English and evaluate the distinct constructional models proposed in the literature, based on a sample of empirical data drawn from corpora such as COCA. If necessary, the project also aims to develop an alternative model at least descriptively accurate.
Stay tuned!
Enrico Torre 