Abstract

Goldberg overstates the differences between Cognitive Grammar and Cognitive Construction Grammar. The former does not claim that a clause invariably inherits its profile from the verb; it has merely been suggested that the latter's preference for monosemy may have been pushed too far. The matter can only be addressed given a specific definition of what is meant in saying that a verb “has” a certain sense. Also, the schematic meanings proposed in Cognitive Grammar for basic grammatical notions do not imply a “reductionist” or “essentialist” view based on classical categorization. Instead they complement the characterization of these notions as “metageneralizations over construction-specific categories”, which otherwise begs the question of why the distributional patterns supporting such generalizations should be observed in the first place.