Usage, Blends, and Grammar MICHAEL BARLOW Rice University 1. Introduction The extract in (1) 1 contains a short sample of language in use, an orthographic representation of part of an exchange between two American speakers set in an academic environment. (1) a. Why is it chapter 3? b. Well, that's the thing to talk about. While the representation in (1) clearly omits a considerable amount of information, extending from the phonetic realisation of the utterances to their discourse context, it does nevertheless provide empirical data relating to an actual speech event, and as an illustration of language usage it will serve as a useful starting point for the discussion of usage-based grammar presented here. We can take some comfort from the fact that example (1) represents an actual exchange, if small one, between two speakers. However, if we look to the example for insights into usage-based grammar, we see the difficulty of bridging the gap between the particular, the utterance itself, and the general, the grammatical representation that ultimately underpins the 315