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Research on construction-based grammar in China began in the late 1990s. Since its initial stages of introduction and preliminary exploration, it has entered a stage of productive and innovative development. In the past two decades, Chinese construction grammarians have achieved a number of valuable research results. In terms of theoretical applications, they have described and explained various types of constructions, such as schematic, partly variable, and fully substantive constructions. They have also applied the constructionist approach to the teaching of Chinese as a second language, proposing some new grammar systems or teaching modes such as the construction-chunk approach (构式-语块教学法), the lexicon-construction interaction model (词汇-构式互动体系), and trinitarian grammar (三一语法). In terms of theoretical innovation, Chinese construction grammarians have put forward theories or hypotheses such as the unification of grammar and rhetoric through constructions, the concept of lexical coercion, and interactive construction grammar (互动构式语法). However, some problems have also emerged in the field of construction grammar approaches. These include a narrow understanding of the concept of construction, a limited range of research topics, and a narrow range of disciplinary perspectives and methods. To ensure the long-term development of construction-based research in China, scholars should be encouraged to make the following changes: First, they should adopt a usage-based approach using natural data, and they should keep up with advances in the study of construction networks. Second, they should broaden the scope of construction-based research and integrate it with language typology and historical linguistics. Finally, they should integrate cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research findings and methods. In this way, construction-based research in China can continue to flourish and make significant contributions to the study of grammar and language.

Children do not speak like adults. This observation is not trivial in a framework in which language acquisition is framed as a process of parameter setting on the basis of universal principles and the child’s input. The present chapter summarizes two main views of language acquisition in this framework, maturation and continuity, with special reference to the acquisition of Romance languages. The debate is difficult to settle on the basis of monolingual data. The comparison of different monolingual populations has the inconvenience that factors like age, cognitive abilities, and abilities related to the performance system come into play in studies that are only interested in the linguistic differences. The multilingual child constitutes an individual with different grammars, but with the same prerequisites if the genetic endowment is concerned, with one performance system and one cognitive system, all facts which can help to settle the debate. Acquisitionists have shown that some routes to adult grammars are shorter and simpler than others. Some of the definitions of complexity, as presented in the literature, will be summarized in relation to the acquisition of grammatical domains in monolingual children. Since complexity can lead to cross-linguistic influence in the multilingual child, the study of this population, again, helps to prove the different definitions of complexity. If it is really the case that grammatical systems are not equally complex, this might also be related to the fact that linguistic variation is best described by parameters which differ in nature—some of which are core parameters (‘deep parameters’), others sub-case parameters—as well as by peripheral variation. Again, parameters which have different settings in the adult language are particularly interesting to study in the multilingual child. Language acquisition is embedded into the child’s linguistic experience, or input. Interestingly, a multilingual child’s input is divided by two, three, or more, in comparison to that of the monolingual child. Arguably, the study of children who acquire more than one language from birth is particularly apt to reveal those grammatical domains which are acquired with ease, even with much less input than the monolingual child receives. Very tentatively, the present article addresses the reduction of intralinguistic variation via child-directed speech and thus opens up a discussion of the relevance of the quality of input in the framework of parameter setting.

Idioms, conceived as fixed multi-word expressions that conceptually encode non-compositional meaning, are linguistic units that raise a number of questions relevant in the study of language and mind (e.g., whether they are stored in the lexicon or in memory, whether they have internal or external syntax similar to other expressions of the language, whether their conventional use is parallel to their non-compositional meaning, whether they are processed in similar ways to regular compositional expressions of the language, etc.). Idioms show some similarities and differences with other sorts of formulaic expressions, the main types of idioms that have been characterized in the linguistic literature, and the dimensions on which idiomaticity lies. Syntactically, idioms manifest a set of syntactic properties, as well as a number of constraints that account for their internal and external structure. Semantically, idioms present an interesting behavior with respect to a set of semantic properties that account for their meaning (i.e., conventionality, compositionality, and transparency, as well as aspectuality, referentiality, thematic roles, etc.). The study of idioms has been approached from lexicographic and computational, as well as from psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic perspectives.