Construction Grammar - Science topic

Yes, many thanks for your answer, Svetlana Medvedeva!

In my opinion, it will depend on to what extent the language learner would like to view how the language works. I would say that if we opt to view language from the perspective of medium/tool in conveying messages or communication; incorporating structural grammar and IC analysis are beneficial to use the grammar correctly within the exact communication function to deliver the correct message by the encoder to the decoder.

Dear Hasan Abu-Krooz this sounds interesting. would you share your work with us?

Applied Cognitive Construction Grammar (ACCxG) describes an approach to pedagogical grammar that stresses the pivotal role of speaker-meaning rather than the definition of an exhaustive inventory of constructions available to speakers in the linguistic system.

Hi Benoît,

Yes, it's true that (2), SUBJ V OBJ OBJ2, looks less formal and more functional than (1), NP V NP NP. However, just because 'Subject', 'Direct Object', etc. are often referred to as grammatical 'functions', this doesn't mean that we can truly see them as (purely) 'functional' or semantic. Rather, as I know you know, the semantic aspect of the ditransitive construction is formulated in terms of, in the prototypical case, thematic roles such as 'agent', 'recipient' and 'patient'/'theme', and Jackendovian primitives such as CAUSE and RECEIVE. 

Besides, 'SUBJ' etc. may capture more cases than just 'NP', the latter being only a typical but not the exclusive way in which subjects can be instantiated. The subject in the ditransitive construction could also be a clause: 

(3) [That Trump is now the President of the US] gives [many people] [a headache].

Likewise, OBJ2 could also be a clause:

(4) [The teacher] told [the pupils] [that they would go on a picnic].

That is why it's preferable, perhaps, to formulate the syntactic side of argument structure constructions in terms of grammatical functions rather than phrase-structure categories (maximal projections). Another advantage is the one you mention, namely that there might be semantically different constructions, notably the one instantiated by e.g.They elected him president, share the same (preferential) phrase structure categories as the ditransitive.

Finally, and related to this, by labelling the elements as 'SUBJ', '(Indirect) OBJ', etc., we have a more precise of how these constituents behave syntactically. For instance, we know that the element labelled as a (Direct) Object (i.e. OBJ2) might quite likely be used as the SUBJ in a corresponding passive sentence, something which is not the case for the second post-verbal NP in the construction we find in They elected him president:

(5) That they would go on a picnic was told to the pupils.

(6) *President was elected to him.

So, labels such as 'SUBJ', 'OBJ', etc. are quite formal things after all. They just name different aspects of 'form' or 'syntax' than labels such as 'NP' do.

Hi all,

I think most CxG approaches would like to have one 'form' and one 'meaning', if we're to stick to the form-meaning pairing type of definition for constructions. But I would definitely agree that both orders of the particle verb construction instantiate the same discontinuous particle verb on some level. I think we need to keep in mind that multiple constructions are being instantiated simultaneously in the "heat the room up" case.

I would say: 'heat up' is a complex verb, instantiating its own construction (the lexical, 'heat up' construction) and a more abstract partially filled 'phrasal verb with up (V+up)' construction, as well as a completely abstract phrasal verb construction. On top of that, the verb is transitive, which allows for the object NP. For all phrasal verbs, the transitive construction generalizes to allow combinations with NPs before or after the particle. The rules governing the distribution of the variants generalize well across verbs (e.g. pronoun object precedes particle). A very detailed study is Gries (2003), which shows that the constraints and meaning are shared, though different features favor different positions.

If we don't allow intervening material in constructions, we won't be able to accept the identity of a split infinitive (to quickly go) and a regular one (to go quickly). More generally, very many constructions, especially in the Germanic languages and their linguistic traditions, as mentioned by Hans, allow rather many orders, but the meaning is retained. This is discussed in some length by Stefan Müller (2013), who gives the example of 'noisy motion' constructions in German. In German you can say the equivalent of:

1. The tram squeaked around the corner

2. The around-the-corner-squeaking of the tram

Both forms instantiate the form meaning pairing of the noise verb + location PP to mean 'make noise of V by moving at location PP'. But 1. also instantiates a normal present declarative, and 2. instantiates a nomen actionis construction. You don't necessarily need deep structures to express these facts: constructions can be described in terms of the cues that trigger our recognition of them (in this case the form is 'noise verb' + location PP), whereas complete sentences can be formed by combining multiple constructions at multiple levels of abstraction. 

References:

Gries, S. T. (2003). Multifactorial Analysis In Corpus Linguistics: A Study of Particle Placement. London and New York: Continuum.

Müller, S. (2013). Unifying everything: Some remarks on simpler syntax, construction grammar, minimalism, and HPSG. Language 89(4), 920–950.

The problem is that it isn't really just an issue of a problem between source and target language. It is quite literally a problem of fundamental error/information loss for every item for every participant, because there is no way of approximating the quantification of measurement error when one forces a conceptual response to be utterly devoid of semantic content. I've quite literally scrolled through the scans from an fMRI study in progress (before the fancy statistical image processing produces what is supposed to indicate significant activation is added in) and seen participants neural responses differ when it comes to the same question within half hour and hour blocks.

So, again, what is the theoretical justification for pretending that a theory of measurement (which we have largely abandoned in terms of the original justification; hence "Likert-type" and the general lack of research justifying Likert over Thurstone, let alone any general theoretical bases for treating conceptual responses as purely formal) actually measures what it is claimed to? All measurements are imperfect. That's a given. What's important is the capacity to quantify error. We don't have the capacity to approach the nature of "error" in this case, so instead we simply pretend our "measurement" is infinitely precise and all statistical analyses performed are essentially summations of unknown quantities of error for every item from every participant. Unless, of course, we have some theoretical justification. Hence my question. But referring to the potential to vaguely map source constructions to target constructions in translation isn't, so far as I can tell, anything remotely resembling theoretical justification. 

Dear Ahmed

the problem with left recursion, from a computational linguistics point of view, is that it leads to infinite recursion, as mentioned in other posts. And, sadly, linguists do tend to write an awful lot of such rules, as the example below shows (a very naive DCG grammar for English relative clauses). If you 'consult' this grammar with swi-prolog, all will apparently run smooth because swi-prolog can deal with such recursive rules appropriately. If you submit the following  goal "s([the,man,that,he,knows,sleeps],[]).", you'll get "true" as an answer. But, if you ask swi-prolog to search for more results (";"), then you'll get an "Out of local stack" error because of the left-recursion. 

The general strategy is "transform your left-recursive rules into right-recursive ones". It means you must tweak your grammar to eliminate such left-recursive rules and transform them into right-recursive ones, with the help of an intermediate non-terminal (cf. for eg. http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~kal/PLT/PLT4.1.2.html). 

From an algorithmic point of view, different approaches have been published, in order to deal with such left-recursive rules (as said earlier, this is how linguists spontaneously write formal grammars). If you're looking for algorithms, you can have a look at Bob Moore's paper http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/68869/naacl2k-proc-rev.pdf.

s --> np, vp.

np --> det, n.

np --> np, relc.%this is a left-recursive rule

relc --> pror, pro, vt.

vp --> vi.

vp --> vt, np.

det --> [the].

n --> [man].

pro --> [he].

pror --> [that].

vt --> [knows].

vi --> [sleeps].

Dear Muhammad ,

please find  the file in the attachment.

hope it helps .

Hello Jeroen,

I have a friend in the Central University of Venezuela who studied that very subject in Caraca's spoken Spanish. Here's the link to one of his articles, maybe you will find it useful: http://saber.ucv.ve/ojs/index.php/rev_n/article/view/6901/6641

Here you can also find his entire Master's thesis: http://saber.ucv.ve/jspui/bitstream/123456789/5032/1/Mart%C3%ADnez_Lara_Sujeto_3persona_Caracas_2012.pdf

Don't hesitate to reach out, should you need any help,

Good luck!

Natalia

Perhaps my tutorial on compiling theory might help you:

In particular, take a look at the syntax section.

If you want to do experiments yourself, our jaccie tool plus additional documentation can be found at:

Happy experimenting!

Hi David, 

This is an interesting paper on the topic by Freek Van de Velde: Degeneracy: the maintenance of constructional networks (publ. in 2012). I also recommend the upcoming paper by Holger DIessel: "The network metaphor of usage-based construction grammar".