The chapter opens with a basic structural description of declensional patterns in Slavic languages, concentrating on several pervasive, salient, and typologically important features. The Late Common Slavic (LCS) system is outlined, with samples of key substantival and pronominal paradigms. Next, the survey traces crucial changes from LCS into the modern languages in the organization of nominal inflection into classes, including emergence of patterns specific for adjectives and numerals. Also discussed is the prehistory of the LCS system and its contextualization within the Indo-European family. Finally, the chapter reviews a number of mostly post-LCS innovations involving interesting synchronic or diachronic problems, such as: encoding virility and animacy; encoding innovative case/number categories (‘second locative’, partitive, paucal, etc.); patterns of syncretism and developments towards analyticity; defectivity and indeclinability; recycling of former dual endings; rise of definiteness markers; transfers to and from declensional morphology; role of segmental alternations and prosodic distinctions in declensional systems.

The skeletal structure of a sentence is defined by the propositional acts of reference, predication, and modification. Reference is carried out by a referring phrase. The prototypical head of a referring phrase denotes an object; this is a noun. Modifiers are dependents of a noun that form attributive phrases. The prototypical head of an attributive phrase denotes a property; this is an adjective. A clause predicates something of a referent or referents. The prototypical head of a clause denotes an action; this is a verb. Reference, modification, and predication of nonprototypical concepts is possible, and often expressed by distinct constructions. Three principles govern how combinations of information packaging and semantic content are expressed: any concept can be packaged in any way; some ways are more ‘natural’ than others; and how they are packaged is constrained by conventions of the speech community. Nonprototypical constructions often share properties of ‘neighboring’ prototypical constructions. They often differ by having additional forms coding the nonprototypical function, and/or by a lesser potential for expressing associated grammatical categories (e.g., inflections).

Although adjectives typically denote properties, that’s not definitive. The distinctive properties of prototypical adjectives are gradability inflection for comparative and superlative. Adjective phrases (AdjPs) function as predicative complements and modifiers in nominals, though some specialize in one of these. AdjPs take adverbs, notably ‘very’, as modifiers. These properties generally distinguish them from nouns and verbs which can be useful in fused modifier-heads or with overlap, as in ‘it’s flat’ vs ‘I have a flat’. AdjPs differ from DPs in always being omissible from an NP, while a DP in determiner function is often required. Also DPs, but not AdjP can occur in as a fused head in a partitive construction. AdjPs also occur as supplements, here differing from PPs in that AdjPs typically have a predicand that is the subject of the main clause. Like most other phrases, AdjPs allow complements, usually PPs or subordinate clauses.

The adverb category is the most heterogenous in the properties of its members. Many adverbs are formed from adjectives using the ‘⋅ly’ suffix, but AdvPs don’t function as attributive modifiers in nominals and rarely function as or allow complements.

There is an ongoing debate about the analysis of argument structure in a usage-based construction grammar. Some scholars have argued that argument structure is licensed by fully abstract schemas, but other researchers have claimed that argument structure is primarily determined by particular verbs. Chapter 7 argues that this controversy is easily resolved if we analyze argument structure in the framework of a network model in which verbs and constructions are interconnected by probabilistic links. For instance, the two constructions of the dative alternation occur with an overlapping set of verbs that are statistically biased to be used in one or the other constructions. The statistical biases can be analyzed as filler-slot associations that are shaped by two factors: (1) general conceptual processes of event semantics and (2) speakers’ experience with particular verbs and constructions. The analysis is supported by evidence from research on sentence processing and the extension of argument schemas to novel verbs in L1 acquisition and language change.

Chapter 8 extends the network analysis of argument structure to the analysis of parts of speech. Traditionally, parts of speech are analyzed as classes of lexical items with the same or similar structural properties, but the structural criteria that are used to define the major parts of speech (e.g., the occurrence of certain function words or inflectional affixes) can also be seen as properties of particular slots of constructional schemas. Crucially, while the slots of word class schemas are commonly defined by distributional criteria, they are not merely structural concepts but evoke particular conceptualizations. Combining research from cognitive linguistics with research from typology, the chapter argues that the major parts of speech are best analyzed in the framework of a network model in which particular lexical items are linked to particular word class schemas. The bulk of the analysis is concerned with the three major parts of speech (i.e., nouns, verbs, adjectives), but the chapter also includes a section on grammaticalization that explains how grammatical function words are derived from content words (and demonstratives) in a dynamic network model.