Construction grammar (often abbreviated CxG) is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human language. Constructions include words (aardvark, avocado), morphemes (anti-, -ing), fixed expressions and idioms (by and large, jog X's memory), and abstract grammatical rules such as the passive voice (The cat was hit by a car) or the ditransitive (Mary gave Alex the ball). Any linguistic pattern is considered to be a construction as long as some aspect of its form or its meaning cannot be predicted from its component parts, or from other constructions that are recognized to exist. In construction grammar, every utterance is understood to be a combination of multiple different constructions, which together specify its precise meaning and form. Advocates of construction grammar argue that language and culture are not designed by people, but are 'emergent' or automatically constructed in a process which is comparable to natural selection in species or the formation of natural constructions such as nests made by social insects. Constructions correspond to replicators or memes in memetics and other cultural replicator theories. It is argued that construction grammar is not an original model of cultural evolution, but for essential part the same as memetics. Construction grammar is associated with concepts from cognitive linguistics that aim to show in various ways how human rational and creative behaviour is automatic and not planned. History Construction grammar was first developed in the 1980s by linguists such as Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay, and George Lakoff, in order to analyze idioms and fixed expressions. Lakoff's 1977 paper "Linguistic Gestalts" put forward an early version of CxG, arguing that the meaning of an expression was not simply a function of the meanings of its parts. Instead, he suggested, constructions themselves must have meanings. Another early study was "There-Constructions," which appeared as Case Study 3 in George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. It argued that the meaning of the whole was not a function of the meanings of the parts, that odd grammatical properties of Deictic There-constructions followed from the pragmatic meaning of the construction, and that variations on the central construction could be seen as simple extensions using form-meaning pairs of the central construction. Fillmore et al.'s (1988) paper on the English let alone construction was a second classic. These two papers propelled