The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 52. In the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has developed into one of the most dynamic and attractive frameworks within theoretical and descriptive linguistics The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is a major new reference that presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. | 480 WILLIAM CROFT The Verb Phrase construction may be represented by brackets around the features and feature structures as in 15 or by an equivalent box notation as in 16 we will use the box notation in the remainder of this chapter 15 - cat v - role head lex role filler loc . gf subj . - 16 We may read the equivalent diagrams in 15 and 16 as follows. The boxes in 16 correspond to the two lower feature structures in 15 . The two inner boxes feature structures indicate the features of the verb and its complements if any . The first box specifies that the first constituent of the VP construction is its head and that it must be lexical. For example in found her bracelet the first constituent is the head of the VP and it is a word not a larger constituent. The feature-value pair cat v above it is actually a simplification of a more complex feature structure Kay and Fillmore 1999 9 note 13 which specifies that the syntactic category of the head of the VP in this case found must be Verb. The second box specifies the complements if any of the Verb. The Kleene plus following the second box indicates that there may be one or more complements or zero in the VP. In the VP found her bracelet her bracelet is the one and only complement. In the VP construction the complements are given the role value filler. The feature loc al indicates that the complement is not extracted out of the VP. An example of an extracted loc complement of find would be the question word what in the question What did he find Construction Grammar uses a number of features to indicate meronomic relations. The Construction Grammar model can be most easily understood by working from the parts to the whole. Minimal units are words or more precisely morphemes we will ignore this distinction for now . Each unit has syntactic features grouped under the feature syn and semantic features grouped under the feature sem . Construction Grammar separates the phonological features under a feature phon if the .
