Construction grammar enjoys great popularity among empirical linguists, typologists, psycholinguists, and language educators, because it puts meaning and function of language at the forefront of linguistic analysis. This book shows that construction grammar gives us also a powerful new way to… read more
After several decades in scientific purgatory, language evolution has reclaimed its place as one of the most important branches in linguistics. This renewed interest is accompanied by powerful new methods for making empirical observations. At the same time, construction grammar is increasingly… read more
This paper documents and reviews the state of the art concerning computational models of construction grammar learning. It brings together prior work on the computational learning of form-meaning pairings, which has so far been studied in several distinct areas of research. The goal of this… read more
The Spanish verb phrase can take on many forms, depending on the temporal, aspectual and modal interpretation that a speaker wants to convey. At least half a dozen constructions work together to build or analyze even the simplest verb form such as hablo ‘I speak’. This paper documents how the… read more
Russian boasts a highly complex aspectual system which can appear irregular and difficult to learn. It has recently been suggested that motion verbs, which are normally seen as exceptional in their nature, may in fact be at the core of this system, motivating aspectual behavior based on stem… read more
The Spanish verb phrase can take on many forms, depending on the temporal, aspectual and modal interpretation that a speaker wants to convey. At least half a dozen constructions work together to build or analyze even the simplest verb form such as hablo ‘I speak’. This paper documents how the… read more
Russian boasts a highly complex aspectual system which can appear irregular and difficult to learn. It has recently been suggested that motion verbs, which are normally seen as exceptional in their nature, may in fact be at the core of this system, motivating aspectual behavior based on stem… read more
In the context of cultural evolution, we propose a multi-agent model that allows, through pair-wise interactions between homogeneous individuals of a population, to simulate the shift from a syntactic towards a semantic pronominal agreement system. We explore various gender mapping and learning… read more
Although often a painful and prolonged process, conjugating verbs correctly is essential when you try to master a foreign language. Verbs that exhibit an irregular conjugation paradigm, however, are often the verbs that occur most frequently in a language. The nature of inflectional morphemes and… read more
Grammatical agreement means that two linguistic units share certain syntactic or semantic features such as gender, number or person. Agreement has a variety of grammatical functions. One of them, called internal agreement, is to signal which words
are grouped together as part of the same phrase.… read more
This chapter explores a possible language strategy for verbalizing
aspect: the encoding of Aktionsarten by means of morphological markers.
Russian tense-aspect system is used as a model. We first operationalize
this system and reconstruct the learning operators needed for acquiring
it. Then we… read more
Construction application can be made more efficient by organizing constructions into sets and by imposing an ordering on when a construction set should be considered. This technique gives us moreover a way to handle unmarked cases, which are abundant in all the world’s languages. This paper… read more
