Adele E. Goldberg, Explain me This: Creativity, Competition, and the Partial Productivity of Constructions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 195.

Abstract

Adele E. Goldberg's recent book provides a new constructionist perspective on answering arguably the most fundamental question in linguistics: how do humans come to learn and use language? Goldberga prominent advocate of Construction Grammarposits that the basic building blocks of human language are CONSTRUCTIONS, or learned pairings of forms and functions, which can range from single morphemes to complex grammatical patterns. Constructions are partially productive, allowing speakers to use them in creative but constrained ways. Native speakers appear to be intuitively aware of the numerous, intricate rules and constraints that govern constructions, knowing when to accept certain expressions as valid while avoiding others. How do speakers acquire and navigate the complicated rules/constraints of constructions while remaining creatively expressive? This paradoxical question, which has puzzled linguists for decades, is the focus of Goldberg's book. The book is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1 provides an introductory outline of the book. Goldberg begins with an intriguing phenomenon: native speakers tend to favor certain expressions over their slightly odd-sounding but otherwise perfectly understandable alternatives (e.g. our preference for the expression explain this to me over explain me this). These expressions are part of humans' vast repertoire of grammatical constructions. While constructions allow us to be productive with our language use, they are also limiting its full productivity without imposing obvious constraints (e.g. no obvious rule appears to exist that prevents us from saying 'explain me this'). Goldberg proposes that the usage-based, constructionist perspective proposed in this book can capture the intricacies of the constrained creativity of language. She summarizes the principles underlying the proposed perspective using the abbreviation CENCE ME (a pronounceable anagram of the original abbreviation of EEMCNCE): (i) Speakers balance between Expressiveness and Efficiency while conforming to conventions.