Frequency issues in multimodal Construction Grammar revisited

Abstract After more than a decade of constructionist research on multimodal phenomena, it is still not clear if and how para- and non-verbal layers should be integrated in Construction Grammar. One major issue is the frequency of co-occurrence of the different modes of expression: even though it is increasingly accepted in Construction Grammar that frequency is hard to operationalize as a criterion for construction status, especially opponents of multimodal approaches use low co-occurrence rates as an argument against the idea of a multimodal construction. But proponents of multimodal Construction Grammar who do not see frequency as decisive also tend to reduce frequency to mere numbers, without paying sufficient attention to all the factors that may influence frequency values. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the problem and to show that it is even more important in multimodal than in unimodal Construction Grammar to interpret frequency rates in the context of the data that are used for the analysis, focusing especially on external factors that influence gesturing and on the issue of the appropriate degree of abstraction.