International audience ; Google hits for “sneezed the napkin off the table” run into the thousands. The sequence of words has become common good, to the extent that we see it quoted with a range of different subjects (Adele(!), Alex, Bob, Donna, Frank, Fred, Jack, Joan, Joe, John, Mary, Paul, Pat, Rachel, Sally, Sue, Tom, I, He, She, The baby…) and often without reference to Goldberg’s (1995) original sneeze example. The example is captivating to anyone who first hears or reads it, because in its simplicity it manages to capture the essence of the constructionist movement, in which argument structure constructions still adopt a central place. In true constructionist spirit, one might even consider [X sneezed the napkin off the table] a construction all by itself, with (i) an open slot preferentially filled by a mono- or bisyllabic, somewhat old-fashioned, all-American proper name, (ii) a specific genre restriction (viz. academic writing related to linguistics or cognitive science) and (iii) a conventionalized interpretation (‘a verb may be plugged in larger syntactic frames which provide arguments not directly associated with the verb itself’). On a more serious note, however, this key example in present-day linguistics may have given rise to the idea that, provided there are no semantic clashes between word-level lexical constructions and the more schematic phrasal constructions which provide slots to them, ‘anything goes’ in grammar. And Goldberg (2003: 221) does little to nuance such a conception when she writes that “[c]onstructions can be combined freely to form actual expressions as long as they are not in conflict”.This paper argues against this view, extending some of the corrective perspectives advanced by Boas (2003), Iwata (2008) and Kay (2012) and drawing on corpus-based and web-collected data about English and Dutch intensifying argument structure constructions. My argumentation is rather complicated, which is why I give a preview of the different steps here. In Section 2, I will discuss the ...