Linguistic knowledge includes, in addition to that of lexical items and syntactic rules as narrowly defined, knowledge of grammatical constructions. This idea amounts to the claim that an optimal theory of form-meaning pairing must take into account those procedures of interpretation that are attached to constructional templates. This study focuses on clauses linkage constructions and examines parameters to define them. The major claims are as follows: 1) the traditional coordination-subordination dichotomy is untenable and finer distinctions, based on the level of linkage (juncture) and the type of dependency (nexus) should be introduced; 2) the relative position (=preposing vs. postposing) of a dependent clause has its own meaning, which can only be captured by positing some constructional template; 3) when a dependent clause is suspended and is not followed by a main clause, a framing effect arises, inducing an inference-intensive reading. All these facts point to the conclusion that a full description of linguistic knowledge requires reference to grammatical constructions, and that some sort of construction lexicon should be built in the future.
