A room with a view : the monostratal view with some room for derivations

Abstract

This chapter revisits the issue of the status of transformations and underlying levels of representation in the description of grammar. Derivational accounts have been rejected in recent cognitive models, which replaced them with monostratal constructions, as is the case in Construction Grammar (CxG) addressed in most detail here. This study reviews three groups of grammatical constructions (argument alternations, question structures, and the active-passive pair in a number of Slavic languages) and concludes that they conceal properties that are not captured by the notion of “construction” alone as effectively as they are in derivational analyses that accommodate transformational relationships between constructions. Further, I will show that the cognitive arguments against transformations do not justify the recent denial of deep structure representations. Finally, I will point out that the Construction Grammar approach (at least to the structures reviewed here) is non-derivational in name only. In reality, the CxG explanatory framework employed by authors like Goldberg makes implicit use of derivational logic, inevitably involving some operations.