Constructing Figures, Figuring Constructions: Patterns of Form and Function
Special Issue of Constructions and Frames
Guest Editors: Randy Allen Harris and Bracha Nir
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 Nxfamily 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@uwaterloo.ca and bnir@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. ZeitschriftFürAnglistikUnd Amerikanistik, 66(3), 277–293. https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2018-0025
Fahnestock, J. (1999). Rhetoricalfiguresinscience. Oxford University Press. https://books.scholarsportal.info/uri/ebooks/ebooks0/oxford/2009-11-30/2/0195117506
Fahnestock, J. (2004). Figures of Argument. InformalLogic, 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.), Logicandalgorithmsincomputational 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 LanguageandThought(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