Abstract
one of the major motivations for constructional approaches to grammar is that a given rule of syntactic formation can sometimes, in fact often, be associated with more than one semantic specification. For example, a pair of expressions like purple plum and alleged thief call on different rules of semantic combination. The first involves something closely related to intersection of sets: a purple plum is a member of the set of purple things and a member of the set of plums. But an alleged thief is not a member of the intersection of the set of thieves and the set of alleged things. Indeed, that intersection is empty, since only a proposition can be alleged and a thief, whether by deed or attribution, is never a proposition. This chapter describes the various ways meanings may be assembled in a construction-based grammar.
