excluded from CxG as they are not constructions, leaving the theory to be a model merely of idioms or infrequently used, minor patterns. As the pairing of the syntactic construction and its prototypical meaning are learned in early childhood, children should initially learn the basic constructions with their prototypical semantics, that is, 'agent of action' for the subject in the SV relation, 'effected object of agent's action' for the direct object term in VO, and 'recipient in transfer of possession of object' for the indirect-object in VI. Anat Ninio examined the speech of a large sample of young English-speaking children and found that they do not in fact learn the syntactic patterns with the prototypical semantics claimed to be associated with them, or with any single semantics. The major reason is that such pairings are not consistently modelled for them in parental speech. Examining the maternal speech addressed to the children, Ninio also found that the pattern of subjects, direct objects and indirect objects in mothers’ speech does not provide the required prototypical semantics for the construction to be established. Adele Goldberg and her associates had previously reported similar negative results concerning the pattern of direct objects in parental speech. These findings are a blow to the CxG theory that relies on a learned association of form and prototypical meaning in order to set up the constructions said to form the basic units of syntax. See also Anankastic conditional Construction Morphology Snowclone References Further reading Bergen, Benjamin and Nancy Chang. Embodied Construction Grammar in Simulation-Based Language Understanding. In press. J.-O. Östman and M. Fried (eds.). Construction Grammar(s): Cognitive and Cross-Language Dimensions. Johns Benjamins. Croft, William A. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Croft, William A. and D. Alan Cruse (2004). Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feldman, Jerome A. (2006). From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language . Cambridge : MIT Press. Fillmore, Charles, Paul Kay and Catherine O'Connor (1988). Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of let alone. Language 64: 501–38. Goldberg, Adele. (1995) Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, Adele (2006). Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hilpert, Martin (2014). Construction Grammar and its Application to English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lakoff, George (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal