Book excerpt: The book Constructions in French is the first collected volume to focus on French syntax from a constructionist perspective. It has been written with two kinds of readers in mind: for readers interested in the relationship between the French linguistic tradition and cognitive linguistics, and for readers who would like to examine how constructional analysis can be applied to a variety of French language phenomena. The eleven papers illustrate the insights generated by combining lexicalist and constructionist approaches, focusing on syntax as a dynamic system and using corpus data from a variety of speech genres. The contributions provide new findings about French usage trends (in linguistics and in psycholinguistics), including insights into new, nonstandard and poorly studied constructions.