A Design Pattern For Phrasal Constructions Luc Steels This paper is the authors’ draft and has now been officially published as: Luc Steels (2011). A Design Pattern for Phrasal Constructions. In Luc Steels (Ed.), Design Patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar, 71–114. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Abstract This chapter has two objectives. It discusses a design pattern for phrasal constructions and introduces the templates that can be used to instantiate this pattern in Fluid Construction Grammar, using as illustration nominal phrases such as “the green mouse” or “this mouse of mine”. Phrasal constructions not only build phrases but also combine the meanings contributed by their con- stituents and possibly add meaning of their own. Phrasal constructions are interesting because they involve hierarchy, compositionality, recursion, agree- ment and percolation. The paper also illustrates how FCG uses templates to organise the grammar design process and to simplify the definition of the con- structions relevant for a particular language. 1. Introduction Human natural language grammars are extraordinarily complicated because as- pects of meaning and form are tightly packaged to maximise the amount of informa- tion that can be transmitted with a minimal amount of signals. In this sense, human languages are like natural living systems in which the same components serve multi- ple purposes. The components have not been designed and put together in a strictly modular hierarchical fashion, the way one would design a machine, but evolved in a step-wise fashion, exploiting and building further on whatever was already there. The challenge for grammar designers (and for language learners) is to unpack this complexity without losing sight of the full richness of real grammar. Studying how grammars have historically evolved is often instructive because it shows how an additional layer of complexity (for example determiners) can be absent in one stage of the language and then gradually appear and become more complicated. 1