37.3548, Calls: Constructions and Frames - "Special Issue - Constructing Figures, Figuring Constructions: Patterns of Form and Function" (Jrnl)

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Subject: 37.3548, Calls: Constructions and Frames - "Special Issue - Constructing Figures, Figuring Constructions: Patterns of Form and Function" (Jrnl)

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Date: 27-Oct-2026
From: Randy Allen Harris & Bracha Nir [bnir at univ.haifa.ac.il]
Subject: Constructions and Frames - "Special Issue - Constructing Figures, Figuring Constructions: Patterns of Form and Function" (Jrnl)


Publisher: John Benjamins
                        http://www.benjamins.com/
Journal: Constructions and Frames
Issue: Constructing Figures, Figuring Constructions: Patterns of Form
and Function
Call Deadline: 01-Dec-2026

Constructing Figures, Figuring Constructions: Patterns of Form and
Function
Patterns of repetition, position, opposition, and sound — the
rhetorical schemes — are recurrent pairings of form with function.
Rhetoric and stylistics have described and classified them in fine
detail over a long tradition, treating them not as ornament but as
systematic devices with describable forms and effects (Fahnestock,
1999, 2004; Turner, 1998). As such, they fall within the scope of
Construction Grammar, which takes as its object the entire continuum
of form–function pairings, from the fully lexicalised to the highly
schematic, all such pairings being conventional symbolic units
grounded in general cognitive structure. This special issue takes up
these figures of form, and asks what status they have within a
constructional account of the grammar.
Fixed constructions are overwhelmingly figured: easy come, easy go;
what goes up much come down; spare the rod, spoil the child; the long
and the short of it; live by the sword, die by the sword; monkey see,
monkey do; waste not, want not; fake it till you make it; … But
figures also interact with grammar to create families of partially
filled constructions.
The direct literature on figures in construction grammar (excepting
metaphor and metonymy) is limited but rich. Mark Turner made the
earliest connection in his 1998 paper, "Figure," Graham Trousdale
(2018) extracts insights from schemes of repetition, and Randy Allen
Harris has several papers on how combinations of figures produce
constructions (Harris, 2020, 2023, 2026). Pleonastic conditionals such
as if you gotta go, you gotta go have been modelled as a
constructional family with their own network, explicitly called
rhetorical and reduplicative (Sommerer 2023). But a number of
figurative patterns have also been explored in construction grammar
and adjacent approaches without reference to figuration.
Wierzbicka (1987) treated the X be X pseudo-tautologies, for example —
war is war, kids are kids, boys will be boys — as conventional and
language-specific, distinguishing a set of sub-constructions each with
its own semantic explication and its own restrictions on number,
article, and modality. The X after X pattern of day after day and dog
after dog has been analysed, down to its inheritance relations and
quantificational semantics, as an “NPN construction” (Jackendoff
2008). Snowclones — productive templates, many of them built on
rhetorical figures — have been studied as a locus of creativity and
productivity (e.g., Bergs 2018).
This special issue goes beyond the individual case to ask how schemes
— epanalepsis, antithesis, and others, along the lines of the chiastic
construction analysed in Harris (2024) — might function as
generalisations the grammar can capture, ones that connect patterns
currently described apart.
The case for this engagement is compelling, and it operates on
multiple fronts simultaneously. The X be X, X after X, and Nx P Nx
constructions manifest the figure epanalepsis, the recurrence of a
lexeme at the beginning and end of a single phrase or clause. So do
many other constructions: I said what I said, it is what it is, you
know what you know; cheek to cheek, an eye for an eye, inch by inch.
But rhetoric alone will not account for them, because these
constructions differ in function through their interaction with
grammar. The copula of the pseudo-tautologies evokes certainty and
determinism; the S what S constructions signal immutability or
intransigence; and the Nx P Nx family is governed by its preposition —
to yields proximity, by accretion, while the for of an eye for an eye
signals equivalence and, in that locution, additionally evokes
retribution. At the same time, the lexical repetition in the initial
and final positions makes such constructions salient and memorable,
driving the cultural propagation that turns them into clichés,
proverbs, and maxims.
The phenomenon extends well beyond any single family. Figures
collocate: alliteration and rhyme travel together in the fixed similes
fit as a fiddle, cool as a cucumber, snug as a bug in a rug, and a
single expression may realise several figures at once. And figured
expressions seed partially filled constructions, as in snowclones such
as You can take the boy out of the country/ the girl out of the
trailer park but you can’t take the country out of the boy/the trailer
park out of the girl — chiastic in its frame (Harris 2026). Such
patterns can be described at more than one level, and how a
constructional description and a figural one bear on each other,
across the range of schemes, is a question this issue pursues.
The encounter cuts both ways. The rhetorical tradition brings to
Construction Grammar a developed analytic vocabulary for formal
patterning — the schemes of repetition, position, addition, and
omission, among others — together with an account of what such
patterning does: how it secures attention, aids memory, and carries
communicative and aesthetic force. Construction Grammar brings to
rhetoric its own resources: an account of how patterns are represented
in a grammar, learned from usage, related to one another in networks,
and extended to new cases. We believe that together the two traditions
can bring into view what neither reaches alone: the grammatical life
of the schemes — how they are acquired, how they vary across
languages, how they change over time, and how they take their place
among the other constructions of a grammar.
The Questions:
The status of a scheme in a constructional grammar is an open
question. It may be a construction in its own right; it may be a
generalisation over constructions rather than a construction itself;
it may be a property of the form pole that current notation does not
record; or it may lie outside the grammar altogether, a pressure on
entrenchment and transmission rather than a unit of the constructicon.
More specific questions follow: How are figured constructions
acquired, and does the figure play any part in their acquisition? What
is the relation between a scheme and productivity — do figured
patterns license novel expressions differently from unfigured ones?
How do schemes behave diachronically: do they emerge, spread, and
decay as constructions do? Are there constructional families whose
members are related by figure and by nothing else?
Scope:
The issue centres on the figures of form rather than the tropes —
metaphor, metonymy, irony — which cognitive linguistics has developed
in depth (e.g., Turner 1998 on the XYZ Construction). Possible
directions include cross-linguistic and contrastive work: what a
language’s morphology, word order, and prosody allow constrains which
patterns it can realise, and comparison across languages can show
which schemes conventionalise where.
Contributions may be analytical, critical, programmatic, or empirical.
We welcome studies based on corpus, experimental, interactional,
historical, or cross-linguistic data, as well as papers that examine
the conceptual relations between rhetorical scholarship and
Construction Grammar, reassess established categories in either
tradition, or propose new directions for their integration.
Submissions:
Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent to the guest
editors by December 1st 2026 at
raha at uwaterloo.ca and bnir at univ.haifa.ac.il.
Authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit full papers of
8,000–10,000 words by May 2027. Invitation to submit a full paper does
not constitute acceptance: all papers will undergo the journal’s
double-blind peer review.
References:
Bergs, A. (2018). Learn the Rules like a Pro, so you can Break them
like an Artist (Picasso): Linguistic Aberrancy from a Constructional
Perspective. Zeitschrift Für Anglistik Und Amerikanistik, 66(3),
277–293. https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2018-0025
Fahnestock, J. (1999). Rhetorical figures in science. Oxford
University Press.
https://books.scholarsportal.info/uri/ebooks/ebooks0/oxford/2009-11-30/2/0195117506
Fahnestock, J. (2004). Figures of Argument. Informal Logic, 24(2),
115–135. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.22329/il.v24i2.2139
Harris, R. A. (2020). Ploke. Metaphor & Symbol, 35(1), 23–42.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2020.1712781
Harris, R. A. (2023). Rules are rules: Rhetorical figures as
algorithms. In R. Loukanova, P. LeFanu Lumsdaine, & R. Muskens (Eds.),
Logic and algorithms in computational linguistics (pp. 217–260).
Springer.
Harris, R. A. (2026). Rhetorical schemes and Construction Grammar: The
argument from chiasmus. Constructions and Frames, 18(1), 100–138.
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.24004.har
Jackendoff, R. (2008). Construction after Construction and Its
Theoretical Challenges. Language, 84(1), 8–28.
https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2008.0058
Sommerer, L. (2023). If that’s what she said, then that’s what she
said: A usage-based, constructional analysis of pleonastic
conditionals in English. Corpus Pragmatics, 7(4), 345–376.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-023-00148-9
Trousdale, G. (2018). Figurativeness in English grammar: The role of
metonymic tropes and schemes of repetition. In R. Bohm & H. van der
Hulst (Eds.), Substance-based grammar: The ongoing work of John
Anderson (pp. 311–336). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Turner, M. (1998). Figure. In C. Cacciari, R. Gibbs Jr., A. Katz, & M.
Turner (Eds.), Figurative Language and Thought (pp. 44–87). Oxford
University Press.
Wierzbicka, A. (1987). Boys Will Be Boys: “Radical Semantics” vs.
“Radical Pragmatics.” Language, 63(1), 95.
https://doi.org/10.2307/415385

Linguistic Field(s): Discipline of Linguistics
                     General Linguistics
                     Linguistic Theories
                     Pragmatics


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