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.

Constituent structure is commonly represented in phrase structure trees, which one might analyze as some kind of network. However, while phrase structure graphs are useful to explain certain aspects of syntactic structure, they are not fully compatible with the dynamic network approach, as these graphs are built from primitive concepts. Challenging the traditional approach, Chapter 9 outlines a dynamic network analysis of constituency in which the hierarchical organization of linguistic structure is emergent from the interaction of several domain-general processes, including conceptualization, automatization, analogy and abstraction, which together account for both the syntactic generalizations that have been in the focus of formal syntax and the many idiosyncracies that reflect the influence of speakers’ experience with particular constructions. The proposed analysis casts a fresh light on syntactic constituency and has far-reaching implications for the theory of phrase structure and the analysis of word order correlations.