Implicational Constructions in English

Constructionist approaches have highlighted that language is a structured inventory of constructions which are operational at all levels of grammatical analysis. In contrast with other kinds of constructions such as argument structure constructions, implicational constructions have received little scholarly attention. The aim of this paper is to examine the morphosyntactic and pragmatic properties of a range of implicational constructions within the framework of the Lexical Constructional Model. Implicational constructions arise from the conventionalization of inferences derived from the metonymic activation of low-level situational cognitive models. The similarities on the pragmatic level between some of these constructions lead us to postulate families of constructions.