2. A radically data-driven Construction Grammar: Experiments with Dutch causative constructions

Levshina, Natalia; Heylen, Kris

doi:10.1515/9783110366273.17

Cited by 49 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…one in which so-called 'mini-constructions' or specific lexical constructions are associated with individual verbs or even individual verb senses). See also Levshina and Heylen (2014) for related findings about the optimality of medium-level granularity in the context of semantic classes of predicates governing the choice between competing constructions. Apart from, or as a corollary of, being somewhat below the maximum level of generality, our POS n-grams are also somewhat hybrid in nature, that is, they are partially rather 'syntactic' and partially rather 'lexical'.…”

Section: The Methods In Detailmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards an n-grammar of English

Cappelle¹,

Grabar²

2016

Applied Construction Grammar

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In this chapter, it is shown how we can develop a new type of learner's or student's grammar based on n-grams (sequences of 2 or 3, 4, etc. items) automatically extracted from a large corpus, such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The notion of n-gram and its primary role in statistical language modelling is first discussed. The part-of-speech (POS) tagging provided for lexical n-grams in COCA is then demonstrated to be useful for the identification of frequent structural strings in the corpus. We propose using the hundred most frequent POS-based 5-grams as the content around which an 'n-grammar' of English can be constructed. We counter some obvious objections to this approach (e.g. that these patterns only scratch the surface, or that they display much overlap among them) and describe extra features for this grammar, relating to the patterns' productivity, corpus dispersion, functional description and practice potential.

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Section: The Methods In Detailmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards an n-grammar of English

Cappelle¹,

Grabar²

2016

Applied Construction Grammar

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“…For instance, in (16), the theme lemma is aanlegplaats 'landing place ', and in (17), it is formule 'formula'. 14 In particular, we take over a technique first proposed by Levshina and Heylen (2014) and elaborated upon by Speelman, Heylen, and Grondelaers (forthc. ), which involves adding [13] In fact, a semantic distinction has also been proposed for the English that-alternation (Elsness, 1984, p. 526;Thompson & Mulac, 1991), which is nonetheless used in much of the research on the Complexity Principle (see above).…”

Section: A Na Ly S I Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing explanations for the Complexity Principle: evidence from argument realization

et al. 2018

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The likelihood with which language users insert optional words or morphemes that explicitly mark syntactic structure tends to increase in complex grammatical environments. This positive correlation between explicitness and complexity, best known as the Complexity Principle, has been observed for a multitude of case studies in both naturally occurring language and experimental settings. Researchers have sought the explanation for this Complexity Principle in three different domains: cognitive comprehension processing, the language channel, and cognitive production processing. Based on these accounts, we formulate predictions regarding the action radius of the Complexity Principle in the alternation between a direct and prepositional object of the Dutch verb zoeken ‘search’. These predictions are tested against corpus observations. Our results confirm accounts according to which optional elements indicate production difficulties, as well as those that explain the Principle as a result of restrictions on the language channel. In addition, our results indicate that the Principle is sensitive to context-determined restrictions that are the result of its underlying cause. This may present a possible caveat for alternation studies.

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“…For example, Levin's (1993) verb classes are based on the syntactic alternations in which the verbs can participate. Alternatively, Levshina and Heylen (2014) use syntactic information, e.g. subcategorization frames and syntactic relationships, as well as information about the lexical neighbours, to identify relevant semantic classes of nouns and verbs for modelling near synonymy in Dutch.…”

Section: Distributional Analysis Based On Constructional Patternsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbs of letting in Germanic and Romance languages

Levshina

2016

LiC

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This study compares eleven verbs of letting in six Germanic and five Romance languages. The aim of this paper is to pinpoint the differences and similarities in the semasiological variation of these verbs, both across and within the two language groups they represent. The results of a Multidimensional Scaling analysis based on a parallel corpus of film subtitles show that the verbs differ along several semantic dimensions, such as letting versus leaving, factitive versus permissive causation, as well as modality and discourse function. Although the main differences between the verbs lend themselves to a genealogical interpretation (Germanic vs. Romance), a distributional analysis of constructional patterns in which the verbs occur reveals that these differences are in fact distributed areally, with a centre and a periphery.

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2. A radically data-driven Construction Grammar: Experiments with Dutch causative constructions

Cited by 49 publications

References 25 publications

Towards an n-grammar of English

Towards an n-grammar of English

Comparing explanations for the Complexity Principle: evidence from argument realization

Verbs of letting in Germanic and Romance languages

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