Adele E. Goldberg

• Professor at Princeton University

Conventional metaphors (e.g., a firm grasp on an idea) are extremely common. A possible explanation for their ubiquity is that they are more engaging, evoking more focused attention, than their literal paraphrases (e.g., a good understanding of an idea). To evaluate whether, when, and why this may be true, we created a new database of 180 English s...

The present study aims to investigate the neural correlates of processing conventional figurative language in non-native speakers in a comparison with native speakers. Italian proficient L2 learners of German and German native speakers read conventional metaphorical statements as well as literal paraphrases that were comparable on a range of psycho...

This chapter emphasizes the shared communicative motivation of ellipsis constructions that leads to cross-linguistic similarities and certain predictable functional constraints. More specifically, ellipsis is licensed by a system of motivated constructions, i.e. learned pairings of form and function. Constructions capture a range of restrictions on...

How do people learn to use language in creative but constrained ways? Experiment 1 investigates linguistic creativity by exposing adult participants to two novel word order constructions that differ in terms of their semantics: One construction exclusively describes actions that have a strong effect; the other construction describes actions with a...

It is important to recognize that The language myth (TLM) is not a research monograph, but is instead aimed at a popular audience, and therefore it should be judged in this light. Popular books necessarily oversimplify certain issues, on pain of not being very popular, yet TLM does satisfy its intended purpose: it demonstrates, in a clear and engag...

Much has been written about the unlikelihood of innate, syntax-specific, universal knowledge of language (Universal Grammar) on the grounds that it is biologically implausible, unresponsive to cross-linguistic facts, theoretically inelegant, and implausible and unnecessary from the perspective of language acquisition. While relevant, much of this d...

A certain class of English adjectives known as a-adjectives resist appearing attributively as prenominal modifiers (e.g. ??the afraid boy, ??the asleep man). Boyd & Goldberg 2011 had offered experimental evidence suggesting that the dispreference is learnable on the basis of categorization and statistical preemption : repeatedly witnessing predicat...

When native speakers judge the acceptability of novel sentences, they appear to implicitly take competing formulations into account, judging novel sentences with a readily available alternative formulation to be less acceptable than novel sentences with no competing alternative. Moreover, novel sentences with a competing alternative are more strong...

In language, abstract phrasal patterns provide an important source of meaning, but little is known about whether or how such constructions are used to predict upcoming visual scenes. Findings from two functional magnetic resonance imaging studies indicate that initial exposure to a novel construction allows its semantics to be used for such predict...

One anaphora (e.g., this is a good one) has been used as a key diagnostic in syntactic analyses of the English noun phrase, and ‘one-replacement’ has also figured prominently in debates about the learnability of language. However, much of this work has been based on faulty premises, as a few perceptive researchers, including Ray Jackendoff, have ma...

How do speakers know when they can use language creatively and when they cannot? Prior research indicates that higher frequency verbs are more resistant to overgeneralization than lower frequency verbs with similar meaning and argument structure constraints. This result has been interpreted as evidence for conservatism via entrenchment, which propo...

The present paper emphasizes the claims that are shared between the verb template approach, espoused in the target article, and the argument structure constructionist (ASC) approach, that I and others have argued for. One phenomenon that does distinguish the two approaches is the treatment of idioms; given that many argument structure expressions a...

Why do people so often use metaphorical expressions when literal paraphrases are readily available? This study focuses on a comparison of metaphorical statements involving the source domain of taste (e.g., “She looked at him sweetly”) and their literal paraphrases (e.g., “She looked at him kindly”). Metaphorical and literal sentences differed only...

Physical contact with hot vs. iced coffee has been shown to affect evaluation of the personal warmth or kindness of a hypothetical person (Williams & Bargh, 2008). In 3 studies, we investigated whether the manipulation of social context can modulate the activation of the metaphorical mapping, KINDNESS as WARMTH. After priming participants with warm...

A central question within psycholinguistics is where sentences get their meaning. While it has been shown that phrasal constructions are readily associated with specific meanings, it remains unclear whether this meaning is accessed automatically, in the sense of being accessed quickly, and without reflection or explicit instruction. In this study,...

The idea that correspondences relating grammatical relations and semantics (argument structure constructions) are needed to account for simple sentence types is reviewed, clarified, updated and compared with two lexicalist alternatives. Traditional lexical rules take one verb as ‘input’ and create (or relate) a different verb as ‘output’. More rece...

Although the target article emphasizes the important role of prediction in language use , prediction may well also play a key role in the initial formation of linguistic representations, that is, in language development . We outline the role of prediction in three relevant language-learning domains: transitional probabilities, statistical preemptio...

Typologists have long observed that there are certain distributional patterns that are not evenly distributed among the world’s languages. This discussion note revisits a recent experimental investigation of one such intriguing case, so-called “universal 18”, by Culbertson, Smolensky, and Legendre (2012). The authors find that adult learners are le...

All linguistic and psycholinguistic theories aim to provide psychologically valid analyses of particular grammatical patterns and the relationships that hold among them. Until recently, no tools were available to distinguish neural correlates of particular grammatical constructions that shared the same content words, propositional meaning, and degr...

This paper investigates the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of utterances such as This is to count as a construction. It is argued that a construction is required to capture certain semi-idiosyncratic syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of the pattern. We call this construction the is-to construction. At the same time, its prop...

Whether words can be coerced by constructions into new uses is determined in part by semantic sensicality and statistical preemption. But other factors are also at play. Experimental results reported here suggest that speakers are more confident that a target coinage is acceptable to the degree that attested instances cover the semantic space that...

The present study exposed five-year-olds (M=5 ; 2), seven-year-olds (M=7 ; 6) and adults (M=22 ; 4) to instances of a novel phrasal construction, then used a forced choice comprehension task to evaluate their learning of the construction. The abstractness of participants' acquired representations of the novel construction was evaluated by varying t...

A persistent mystery in language acquisition is how speakers are able to learn seemingly arbitrary distributional restrictions. This article investigates one such case: the fact that speakers resist using certain adjectives prenominally (e.g. ??the asleep man). Experiment 1 indicates that speakers tentatively generalize or categorize the distributi...

The present paper argues that there is ample corpus evidence of statistical preemption for learners to make use of. In the case of argument structure constructions, a verb i is preempted from appearing in a construction A, CxA, if and only if the following probability is high: P(CxB|context that would be suitable for CxA and verb i). For example, t...

There have been a myriad of attempts to account for constraints on long-distance dependencies (LDDs), particularly so-called “island constraints,” such as those illustrated in Table 10. 1. The present paper provides evidence that the functions of the constructions involved play a key role in LDD constraints. Traditional accounts of constraints such...

Construction grammar, or constructionist approaches more generally, emphasize the function of particular constructions as well as their formal properties. Constructions vary in their degree of generality, from words to idioms to more abstract patterns such as argument structure constructions, topicalization, and passive. There is also no division d...

It is widely believed that explicit verbatim memory for language is virtually nonexistent except in certain circumstances, for example if participants are warned they are to receive a memory test, if the language is ‘interactive’ (emotion-laden), or if the texts are exceedingly short and memory is tested immediately. The present experiments revisit...

In what ways can events combine to form a single predication? This chapter argues that the only constraint on the combination of events designated by a single verb is that the events must constitute a coherent semantic frame. A verb can designate subevents that are not causally related, and a verb can specify both manner and result. On the other ha...

All natural languages rely on sentence-level form-meaning associations (i.e., linking rules) to encode propositional content about who did what to whom. Although these associations are recognized as foundational in many different theoretical frameworks (Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Lidz, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 2003; Pinker, 1984, 1989) and are—at least in...

The recognition that contentful universals are rare and often “banal” does not undermine the fact that most non-universal but recurring patterns of language are amenable to explanation. These patterns are sensical or motivated solutions to interacting and often conflicting factors. As implied by the Evans & Levinson's (E&L's) article, linguistics w...

Constructionist approaches to language hypothesize that grammar can be learned from the input using domain-general mechanisms. This emphasis has engendered a great deal of research—exemplified in the present issue—that seeks to illuminate the ways in which input-related factors can both drive and constrain constructional acquisition. In this commen...

This paper provides a concise overview of Constructions at Work (Goldberg 2006). The book aims to investigate the relevant levels of generalization in adult language, how and why generalizations are learned by children, and how to account for cross-linguistic generalizations.

This paper provides responses to the points raised in this volume in an effort to evaluate, clarify and extend some of the arguments in Constructions at Work. It is gratifying to me for Constructions at Work (CW) to receive as much attention as it does in the present volume, and from such a wide range of respondents. I thank the respondents for the...

Where does language come from? Why don’t other primates have it? Drawing on decades of experimental work with children and chimps, Origins of human communication offers nuanced and rich answers to these questions. Ch. 1, ‘A focus on infrastructure’, provides a brief overview of what is to come. The main thesis of the book is that pointing and gestu...

This commentary aims to highlight what exactly is controversial about the traditional Universal Grammar (UG) hypothesis and what is not. There is widespread agreement that we are not born "blank slates," that language universals exist, that grammar exists, and that adults have domain-specific representations of language. The point of contention is...

The present paper provides evidence that suggests that speakers determine which constructions can be combined, at least in part, on the basis of the compatibility of the information structure properties of the constructions in-volved. The relative ''island'' status of the following sentence complement constructions are investigated: ''bridge'' verb...

IntroductionA Brief History of ‘Constructions’Approaches to ConstructionsConstructionist Approaches to SyntaxWhy Constructions?What Counts as a Construction?Constructions in Generative GrammarConclusion

What is Argument Structure?What is Pragmatics?Information Structure and Argument StructurePreferred Argument StructureSentence Focus ConstructionsInformation Structure and the DitransitiveDiscourse-conditioned Argument OmissionDiscourse-conditioned Obligatory AdjunctsConclusion

What causes children to categorize distinct utterances they hear into a constructional generalization? That is, what makes subjects create a constructional category instead of treating each utterance as a distinct unrelated idiom? One simple factor that encourages the learning of abstract categories is shared concrete similarity. When instances sha...

This chapter discusses how simple sentence patterns of a language can be learned by children on the basis of general processes of categorization. In learning a language, children must generalize over the utterances they hear so that they can creatively produce and understand utterances they have never heard before. One factor that enables language...

Construction Grammar is a linguistic theory concerned with the nature of speakers' knowledge of language. Like traditional grammars, Construction Grammar takes the basic units of language to be form–meaning pairings, or constructions.Keywords:construction;grammar;psycholinguistics;argument structure;unification;semantics

This book investigates the nature of generalizations in language, drawing parallels between our linguistic knowledge and more general conceptual knowledge. The book combines theoretical, corpus, and experimental methodology to provide a constructionist account of how linguistic generalizations are learned, and how cross-linguistic and language-inte...

This is the first study to investigate experimentally how children come to learn mappings between novel phrasal forms and novel meanings: a central task in learning a language. Two experiments are reported. In both studies 5- to 7-year-old children watched a short set of video clips depicting objects appearing in various ways. Each scene was descri...

The end result(ative) ADELE E. GOLDBERG RAY JACKENDOFF Princeton University Tufts University and Brandeis University This volume?s discussion notes include comments byHans Boas and byStephen Wechsler on our article, ?The English resultative as a familyof constructions? (Goldberg & Jackendoff 2004), which we hope will raise further discussion about...

It is well-established that (non-linguistic) categorization is driven by a functional demand of prediction. We suggest that prediction likewise may well play a role in motivating the learning of semantic generalizations about argument structure constructions. We report corpora statistics that indicate that the argument frame or construction has rou...

Whether particular arguments are overtly realized in languages like English is not random. A number of researchers have put forward sweeping generalizations in order to capture certain general tendencies. In this paper, however, it is argued that these analyses underestimate the role of constructions, detailed lexical semantics and discourse factor...

This article argues that subject auxiliary inversion in English (SAI) provides an example of a syntactic generalization that is strongly motivated by a family of closely related functions. Recognition of the functional properties of each subconstruction associated with SAI allows us to predict many seemingly arbi- trary properties of SAI: e.g., its...

The notion ‘construction’ has become indispensable in present-day linguistics and in language studies in general. This volume extends the traditional domain of Construction Grammar (CxG) in several directions, all with a cognitive basis. Addressing a number of issues (such as coercion, discourse patterning, language change), the contributions show...

English resultative expressions have been a major focus of research on the syntax-semantics interface. The present paper argues that a family of related constructions is required to account for their distribution. We demonstrate that a number of generalizations follow from the semantics of the constructions we posit: the syntactic argument structur...

General correlations between form and meaning at the level of argument structure patterns have often been assumed to be innate. Claims of in- nateness typically rest on the idea that the input is not rich enough for gen- eral learning strategies to yield the required representations. The present work demonstrates that the semantics associated with...

An important question in the study of language production is the nature of the semantic information that speakers use to create syntactic structures. A common answer to this question assumes that thematic roles help to mediate the mapping from messages to syntax. However, research using structural priming has suggested that the construction of synt...

A new theoretical approach to language has emerged in the past 10-15 years that allows linguistic observations about form-meaning pairings, known as 'constructions', to be stated directly. Constructionist approaches aim to account for the full range of facts about language, without assuming that a particular subset of the data is part of a privileg...

Since the earliest days of generative grammar, there has existed a strong tendency to consider one argument structure construction in relation to a particular rough paraphrase. Initially this was a result of the emphasis on transformations that derived one pattern from another. While today there exist many non-derivational theories for which this m...

The existence of OBLIGATORY ADJUNCTS in both predication and modification constructions is best understood as following from general conversational pragmatics, rather than from grammatical factors. In the case of clausal predication, adjuncts are used to satisfy the often-cited requirement that every utterance have a focus that serves to convey new...

This paper offers an examination of the distributional range of causative verbs. Contra many claims in the literature that these verbs have highly circumscribed distributions, we demonstrate that they readily appear in a wide variety of argument structure frames. The appearance of causative verbs with omitted patient arguments is analyzed in partic...

This paper offers an examination of the distributional range of causative verbs. Contra many claims in the literature that these verbs have highly circumscribed distributions, we demonstrate that they readily appear in a wide variety of argument structure frames. The appearance of causative verbs with omitted patient arguments is analyzed in partic...

What types of linguistic information do people use to construct the meaning of a sentence? Most linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension assume that the main determinant of sentence meaning is the verb. This idea was argued explicitly in Healy and Miller (1970). When asked to sort sentences according to their meanin...

This paper offers an account in which the Persian CP is treated as a construction represented in the lexicon. It is argued that its expression as a simple word or as a phrasal entity is determined by the interaction of a set typologically natural ranked constraints. An outcome of this analysis is that the categorial status of the CP can be viewed a...

this paper, we examine certain distributions of deverbal adjectives based on past participles and used attributively, (hereafter, APPs). These distributions, although widely recognized, have not been sufficiently explained in the rather substantial literature on the subject of APPs (e.g., Lakoff 1965, Hirtle 1971, Wasow 1977, Bresnan 1982, Levin &...

The basic tenet of cognitive linguistics is that every linguistic expression is a construal relation. The first section of this volume focuses on issues of such construal and presentation of information, including figure-ground relations, image-schematic structures, and the role of syntactic constructions in information structure. In sections two a...

In this paper it is observed that much of Jackendoff's research program can be seen to be quite parallel to that done by cognitive linguists. One of the main differences is the view of autonomous syntax that Jackendoff adopts: that syntactic generalizations can make no reference to semantic generalizations except at an Interface. However, Jackendof...

Drawing on work in linguistics, language acquisition, and computer science, Adele E. Goldberg proposes that grammatical constructions play a central role in the relation between the form and meaning of simple sentences. She demonstrates that the syntactic patterns associated with simple sentences are imbued with meaning—that the constructions the...

This paper argues that highly specific semantic constraints should be associated directly with the ditransitive argument structure, and not directly to the specific verbs involved. The proposal is contrasted with a recent proposal by Gropen et al. (1989), who argue that the constraints are the result of a semantic rule altering the verbs' inherent...

Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1989), pp. 79-90

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