37.2092, Reviews: Creative Construction Grammar: Thomas Hoffmann; Mark Turner (2026)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2092. Tue Jun 16 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2092, Reviews: Creative Construction Grammar: Thomas Hoffmann; Mark Turner (2026)

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Date: 16-Jun-2026
From: Elena Gavruseva [elena-gavruseva at uiowa.edu]
Subject: Thomas Hoffmann; Mark Turner (2026)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/37-264

Title: Creative Construction Grammar
Series Title: Elements in Cognitive Linguistics
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
           http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Book URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/ch/universitypress/subjects/languages-linguistics/cognitive-linguistics/creative-construction-grammar?format=PB&isbn=9781009635271

Author(s): Thomas Hoffmann; Mark Turner

Reviewer: Elena Gavruseva

SUMMARY
Thomas Hoffmann and Mark Turner’s Creative Construction Grammar is a
timely and engaging book in the Elements in Cognitive Linguistics
series. It is 88 pages long, including an extensive references
section, and is published by Cambridge University Press. The book is
situated in cognitive linguistics and addresses the relationship
between Construction Grammar (CxG), cognition, and creativity. The
central concern of the book is how constructions are created,
extended, combined, and understood in real communicative practice. In
CxG, constructions are form–meaning pairings. These include not only
words and morphemes, but also idioms, partially fixed expressions,
conventionalized patterns, and lexically centered constructions such
as the way-construction (among many others). Hoffmann and Turner argue
that CxG needs a more comprehensive account of how speakers combine
constructions creatively across a broad range of communicative
contexts.
The book treats creativity not as a rare or exceptional ability, but
as a basic feature of human cognition. Creativity is described as
“omnipresent and constant, central and indispensable to everyday
thought, action, and communication.” To explain how creativity can be
understood within the framework of CxG, the authors draw on blending
theory (e.g., Fauconnier & Turner, 1998, 2002). Blending is
conceptualized as a general cognitive operation through which speakers
combine elements from different ‘mental spaces’ to produce new
meanings. The authors argue that blending provides a stronger account
of creative constructional combination than explanations based on
analogy, metaphor, or conventional linguistic practices.
The book is organized into six short chapters. Chapter 1 introduces
Creative Construction Grammar. Chapter 2 explains why Construction
Grammar needs a theory of creative combination. Chapter 3 reviews
candidate theories of creative combination. Chapter 4 presents
blending theory. Chapter 5 applies blending to examples of
constructional creativity. Chapter 6 concludes the book and summarizes
its broader implications for cognitive linguistics.
The book is an excellent and highly engaging contribution to cognitive
linguistics. It is structured, in many ways, as a polemic in favor of
taking creativity seriously in cognitive linguistics (and beyond). At
the same time, it reads like a dialogue between two major strands of
cognitive linguistic research: CxG and blending theory. The central
strength of the book is that it shows why blending is not an optional
addition to the analysis of language. Rather, blending is presented as
a cognitive process that is central to understanding why human beings
are so skilled with linguistic symbols and symbolic communicative
practices.
In linguistics, it is almost a truism to say that human language is
creative. Speakers routinely produce sentences they have never heard
before, and hearers understand utterances that are novel to them. This
point is familiar from many linguistic traditions. Hoffmann and
Turner, however, open up a more specific and more dynamic view of
creativity. They do not treat creativity simply as the ability to
generate new sentences from known grammatical rules. Instead, they ask
how speakers build new meanings by combining constructions, frames,
mental spaces, and contextual knowledge. In this respect, the book
shifts the discussion from creativity as a property of grammar to
creativity as a basic operation of human cognition.
A small example from my own experience may help illustrate why this
shift matters. Imagine that you are in a library and open a book on
display. It is Tina Fey’s Bossypants. Your hand reaches for it partly
because the cover is unusual: it shows Tina Fey’s face, but with large
masculine-looking hands photoshopped into the image. The image is
funny, but also conceptually strange. Why are those hairy,
disproportionately large hands there? What kind of identity is being
blended? What is being said about femininity, attractiveness, and the
author? Just by looking at the cover, even before reading Bossypants,
you are already trying to construct a conceptual network that makes
sense of the image.
Now, suppose you open the book at a random page and read two
sentences: “As I crawled into my bottom bunk, I thought about how I
had climbed Old Rag. I thought about Gretchen, the girl who could only
accommodate half a piece of gum.” The sentences look ordinary, on the
surface. You know the words crawl, bunk, climb, girl, and gum. You
recognize Gretchen as a female name. But how much have you really
understood? Where is Old Rag? Why did the author climb it? Who is
Gretchen, beyond being ‘the girl’? Why does the detail about half a
piece of gum matter enough to be remembered before sleep? And why did
Gretchen ‘accommodate half a piece of gum’? (Try finding that
combination in COCA.)
The difficulty does not lie in syntax or vocabulary alone. Rather, it
lies in the fact that the conceptual network is incomplete: crucial
elements of the relevant mental spaces are missing. The role–value
relations remain underspecified. You need to know that Old Rag is a
mountain in Virginia. You need to understand why climbing it matters
within the narrative. You also need to know how Gretchen is connected
to the author’s romantic interest—the boy she calls HRW—and that HRW
views her willingness to accept only half a piece of gum as feminine
and charming, to the point that he seems to fall even more in love
with her. Once you flip back a few pages to recover all of these
conceptual pieces, the meaning becomes clearer. Even then, however,
the meaning of the passage may still feel only partially accessible.
Much more background knowledge must be recovered before the full
conceptual structure can be constructed.
This example illustrates one of the main virtues of Creative
Construction Grammar. The book gives us a way to think about why even
apparently simple linguistic structures require complex conceptual
work. Understanding a sentence is not merely a matter of decoding
words and constructions. It involves building connections among
frames, mental spaces, contexts, expectations, and discourse roles.
Hoffmann and Turner argue that this process is grounded in blending,
which they describe as “a basic mental operation” that interacts with
other mental operations such as conceptual mapping, (joint) attention,
and memory. They further argue that blending “plays a pervasive role
in language and communication.” This claim gives the book its force:
creativity is not an exceptional event but a constant feature of
ordinary meaning-making.
The book is especially useful because it brings together a set of
concepts that are central to blending theory and shows how they matter
for CxG. These include conceptual frames, mental spaces, mental webs,
vital relations, projection, emergent structure, compression,
expansion, and human-scale understanding. Some of these terms are
familiar from earlier work by Fillmore (1976), Fauconnier (1985),
Fauconnier & Turner (2002), and Turner (2014). Others are developed
within the specific architecture of blending theory. Together, they
allow Hoffmann and Turner to describe how constructions can be
combined in ways that are not fully predictable from their stored
meanings. A blend is not just a sum of inputs. It is a new mental
space that inherits selected structure from other spaces but develops
meaning of its own. This is precisely why blending matters for CxG: it
offers a theory of how entrenched form-meaning pairings can be used in
novel, flexible, and context-sensitive ways.
What follows is a summary of each chapter.
Chapter 1, What Is ‘Creative Construction Grammar’?, introduces the
central concepts and theoretical orientation of the book. Hoffmann and
Turner begin with the notion of constructions as form–meaning pairings
and adopt the view that knowledge of language consists of a relational
network of constructions and the ability to combine them into
communicative performances, or constructs. The chapter focuses on the
question of how constructions are combined in real-time cognition and
communication. The authors contrast innovative examples, such as
shortbread, the little black dress of cookies, with variations on the
way-construction, such as Stacey clawed her way to the top, arguing
that both rely on the same underlying domain-general
process—conceptual blending. A major claim of the chapter is that
commonly used metaphors, such as merge, combine, or unify, do not
provide a cognitively plausible explanation of how constructions
interact in working memory. Instead, Hoffmann and Turner argue that
conceptual blending offers a more adequate account of both highly
creative and seemingly ordinary language use. At the same time, the
importance of other domain-general cognitive processes, including
analogy, categorization, chunking, and cross-modal association, is
acknowledged, especially in the entrenchment of constructions.
Chapter 2, Why Construction Grammar Needs a Theory of Creative
Combination, introduces the book’s central theoretical argument. The
authors observe that speakers do not simply learn, store, and retrieve
form–meaning pairings; they constantly combine constructions to
produce more complex expressions. To illustrate this point, the
chapter discusses the sentence Firefighters cut the man free. Here,
the ordinary transitive verb cut appears in a resultative construction
that coerces a meaning extending beyond the verb’s basic semantics:
the man himself is not literally cut, but rather freed from the car in
which he is trapped. In other words, the car is cut in order to
release the man. The central question, then, is how hearers are able
to infer the intended interpretation with little difficulty despite
this unconventional use of cut—what CxG would describe as a new
construct. Hoffmann and Turner review two major approaches within
CxG—formalist/computational and cognitive—and argue that neither
identifies a clearly specified domain-general mechanism responsible
for constructional combination. The chapter therefore introduces
conceptual blending as the foundation of what the authors call
Creative Construction Grammar, an approach designed to account for
creative construction combination.
Chapter 3, Candidate Theories of Creative Combination, surveys a wide
range of mechanisms proposed in cognitive linguistic and
constructionist approaches to explain how constructions combine. The
chapter is organized as a critical evaluation of existing models and
argues that none provides a sufficiently comprehensive account of
constructional creativity compared with conceptual blending theory.
Hoffmann and Turner divide these approaches into several broad
traditions and ask, for each, whether the proposed mechanisms are
genuinely domain-general cognitive processes or merely formal
descriptions of linguistic structure.
The chapter begins with formal approaches to CxG, especially
unification-based models associated with Berkeley Construction Grammar
(Fillmore & Kay, 1993, 1995; Fillmore ,2013) and constraint-based
models (e.g., Boas & Sag, 2012; among many others). Hoffmann and
Turner argue that while such approaches successfully model structural
compatibility between constructions, they remain fundamentally
language-specific and algorithmic. In their view, operations such as
unification and constraint satisfaction are essentially additive
procedures that leave little room for selective projection, contextual
interpretation, or emergent meaning. More generally, they argue that
mechanisms such as merge, unification, and constraint satisfaction are
inadequate as accounts of constructional creativity because they
describe formal procedures rather than processes of meaning creation.
The second part of the chapter turns to usage-based approaches within
CxG. Dąbrowska and Lieven (2005), for example, propose that creative
composition can be explained through juxtaposition and
superimposition. Hoffmann and Turner argue, however, that these
mechanisms remain domain-specific and largely additive, lacking an
interpretive component. Goldberg’s (2019) notion of coverage, which
addresses partial productivity and creativity of constructions, is
discussed next. Coverage refers to the degree to which a novel
construct resembles previously entrenched constructions in a speaker’s
repertoire. Hoffmann and Turner acknowledge that this model provides
an important usage-based account of acceptability and productivity,
but argue that it primarily explains grammaticality and licensing
rather than the creative process itself.
The chapter also reviews dynamic network approaches, especially
Schmid’s (2020) Entrenchment and Conventionalization Model, as well as
the constructicon approach developed by Diessel (2019, 2023), which
models language as a network of interconnected constructions. Hoffmann
and Turner regard Diessel’s framework as especially useful for mapping
associations among constructions, but argue that it leaves the
creative process largely implicit. Finally, the chapter discusses
composition and integration in Cognitive Grammar, as developed by
Langacker (2006). The authors suggest that Langacker’s analyses
already presuppose processes very close to blending, even if blending
is not explicitly invoked. The chapter concludes by arguing that
Diessel’s and Langacker’s theories implicitly rely on conceptual
blending, and that Creative Construction Grammar makes this reliance
explicit by treating blending as the central domain-general process
underlying all constructional combination.
Chapter 4, Blending, introduces the main concepts of conceptual
blending theory, originally developed in Fauconnier & Turner (1994,
2002) and expanded in subsequent work. The chapter is divided into two
main parts. The first discusses the requirements that a cognitively
plausible theory of CxG should satisfy; the second introduces the
central components, or ‘elements’, of blending theory itself.
In the first part, the authors argue that any adequate theory of
constructional combination must be grounded in general human cognition
rather than in language-specific mechanisms. One major theme of the
chapter is the relationship between blending and the evolution of
grammar in the human species. It is argued that conceptual blending
represents a domain-general cognitive innovation that made advanced
symbolic thinking possible. Another important topic is the
relationship between creativity and collective action: communicative
practices are inevitably constrained by cultural conventions and by
socially shared networks of form–meaning pairings. The final
requirement discussed is multimodality: human communication is
inherently multimodal and involves not only language per se, but also
gesture, facial expression, posture, prosody, and other communicative
resources.
The second half introduces the core concepts of blending theory. These
include conceptual frames and mental spaces, which form the basic
representational units of conceptual integration. The authors also
discuss notions such as mental webs, vital relations, projection, and
the concept of a blend itself, defined as a new mental space that
emerges from the integration of multiple input spaces. Additional
concepts include emergent structure, human-scale understanding,
compression, and expansion. Together, these notions provide the
theoretical architecture that Hoffmann and Turner later apply to the
analysis of constructional creativity.
Chapter 5, Creative Construction Grammar: Blending in Action, is the
most applied and example-driven chapter of the book. A major strength
of the chapter is the richness and diversity of examples, many of
which illustrate what the authors describe as deeply creative but
largely unnoticed aspects of ordinary communication.
The discussion begins with formal blends and morphological creativity,
including examples such as snaccident (snack + accident), McJobs, and
Barbenheimer. The authors then turn to compounding, with examples such
as land yacht and caffeine headache, illustrating how compounds
recruit different semantic relations depending on context and existing
language patterns. Next, predication is examined, using examples such
as The beach is safe, where safe receives different interpretations
depending on the roles and relational frames activated in a given
social context. Similar issues arise in the discussion of dative
constructions, where blending helps explain how speakers interpret
transferred actions and affected participants. The ‘X is the Y of Z’
construction, such as Geology is the Kardashians of science, and
argument structure constructions, such as She Gandalfed me, are also
analyzed, showing how relational frames and cultural knowledge combine
to produce humorous and evaluative meanings.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of multimodal CxG, one of the
most innovative aspects of the book. Hoffmann and Turner argue that
communication is rarely purely linguistic and that fragmentary verbal
expressions often ‘blossom’ into much richer meanings when combined
with gesture, facial expression, tone of voice, and contextual
information. This discussion broadens the scope of CxG beyond language
narrowly defined and supports the authors’ larger claim that
communication itself should be understood through the lens of blending
theory. In this sense, the chapter strengthens one of the book’s
central arguments: CxG is fundamentally a theory of creativity because
meaning-making always involves active conceptual integration across
multiple domains of experience.
Chapter 6, Conclusion, closes with the proposal that Creative
Construction Grammar treats theories of communication as part of a
broader theory of blending, which operates across linguistic,
cognitive, and social domains.
EVALUATION
Creative Construction Grammar is a well-structured, informative, and
innovative book. It situates blending theory within cognitive
linguistics as the central mechanism underlying Creative Construction
Grammar, while emphasizing that blending is a domain-general cognitive
process rather than a language-specific operation. Hoffmann and Turner
also stress that blending has been used since the early 1990s to
account for human behavior across a remarkably broad range of
higher-order cognitive domains, including art, music, dance, social
cognition, and religion, among many others. One of the major strengths
of the book is the richness and diversity of its empirical examples,
which make the discussion highly engaging and accessible.
At the same time, most of the empirical evidence discussed in the book
comes from English corpora or previously published studies. Many
examples, including Firefighters cut the man free, come from written
genres such as newspaper prose or fiction, often produced by
professional writers. Because of this, it would have been useful to
reflect more explicitly on genre as a variable influencing creative
constructional usage. Some constructions may be especially
characteristic of particular stylistic traditions, and the question of
whether and how they enter ordinary parlance could have been explored
further.
It would also have been interesting to see a more detailed discussion
of how blending theory could be applied to experimental linguistic
research. The book strongly argues for blending as a cognitive
mechanism, but readers may still wonder what specific predictions or
hypotheses the theory generates that could be tested experimentally.
At the same time, the book clearly invites further empirical
exploration and interdisciplinary application.
Overall, the book is thought-provoking and engaging, with a great deal
of material that encourages reflection and further discussion. It
serves as a valuable and condensed introduction both to blending
theory and to the broader research agenda that the authors call
Creative Construction Grammar.
REFERENCES
Boas, H. C., & Sag, I. A. (Eds.). (2012). Sign-based construction
grammar. CSLI Publications/Center for the Study of Language and
Information.
Dąbrowska, E., & Lieven, E. (2005). Towards a lexically specific
grammar of children’s question constructions. Cognitive Linguistics,
16(3), 437–474.
Diessel, H. (2019). The grammar network: How linguistic structure is
shaped by language use. Cambridge University Press.
Diessel, H. (2023). The construction: Taxonomies and networks.
Cambridge University Press.
Fauconnier, G. (1985). Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction
in natural language. MIT Press.
Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (1994). Conceptual projection and middle
spaces. UCSD Department of Cognitive Science Technical Report 9401.
http://ssrn.com/author=1058129
Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (1998). Conceptual integration networks.
Cognitive Science, 22(2), 133–187.
Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think: Conceptual
blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. Basic Books.
Fey, T. (2011). Bossypants. Little, Brown and Company.
Fillmore, C. J. (1976). Frame semantics and the nature of language.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 280, 20–32.
Fillmore, C. J. (2013). Berkeley Construction Grammar. In T. Hoffmann
& G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar
(pp. 111–132). Oxford University Press.
Fillmore, C. J., & Kay, P. (1993). Construction grammar. Department of
Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley. (Ms.)
Fillmore, C. J., & Kay, P. (1995). Construction grammar. Department of
Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley. (Ms.)
Goldberg, A. E. (2019). Explain me this: Creativity, competition, and
the partial productivity of constructions. Princeton University Press.
Langacker, R. W. (2006). Cognitive grammar. In D. Geeraerts (Ed.),
Cognitive linguistics: Basic readings (pp. 29–67). Mouton de Gruyter.
Schmid, H.-J. (2020). The dynamics of the linguistic system: Usage,
conventionalization, and entrenchment. Oxford University Press.
Turner, M. (2014). The origin of ideas: Blending, creativity, and the
human spark. Oxford University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Elena Gavruseva is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Languages, Linguistics, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of
Iowa, USA. Her research focuses on first and second language
acquisition, bilingualism, applied linguistics, and the relationship
between idiomatic language and creative thinking. Recently, she has
focused on the acquisition of English determiners by adult L1-Slavic
L2-English learners, investigating how count/mass distinctions shape
article use patterns. Currently, she is exploring how adult L1-Slavic
learners acquire the semantics/pragmatics of null objects in
L2-English, as well as how idiom acquisition in adult L2 correlates
with proficiency level and associative creativity.



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