Constructions at Work

Abstract

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-internal generalizations can be explained. Part I argues that broad generalizations involve the surface forms in language, and that much of our knowledge of language consists of a delicate balance of specific items and generalizations over those items. Part II addresses issues surrounding how and why generalizations are learned and how they are constrained. Part III demonstrates how independently needed pragmatic and cognitive processes can account for language-internal and cross-linguistic generalizations, without appeal to stipulations that are specific to language.

Balancing generalization and lexical conservatism: An artificial language study with child learners

“…For example, children are more likely to over-generalize with low frequency than high-frequency verbs, judging ''He came me to school'' to be worse than ''He arrived me to school'' (Ambridge et al, 2007;Brooks, Tomasello, Dodson, & Lewis, 1999;Theakston, 2004). This has been explained in terms of Entrenchment (Braine & Brooks, 1995) or Statistical Pre-emption (Goldberg, 2005) 1 : frequently encountering verbs with alternative constructions leads to reluctance to generalize to a new construction.…”

The emergence of verb-particle constructions in Italian: locative and actional meanings

“…Section 3 first illustrates the results of the analysis and then expands on a specific case, the particle via 'away', which will be seen to have developed an Aktionsart value. Finally, we discuss the theoretical implications of our results and give an account of Italian VPCs in terms of Construction Grammar (Fillmore, Kay, & O'Connor, 1988;Goldberg, 1995Goldberg, , 2003Goldberg, , 2006. In particular, we adopt the constructionist account of Dutch separable complex verbs put forward in Booij (2002a, b) expanding it to cover Italian VPCs.…”

“…As Booij himself recognizes, his proposal is in line with the basic tenets of Construction Grammar (cf. Fillmore, Kay & O'Connor 1988;Goldberg, 1995Goldberg, , 2003Goldberg, , 2006, which claims that language consists of a network of constructions, i.e. form-meaning pairings (hence, signs in the Saussurean sense) differing in size and complexity.…”

Language Development: Emergentist Theories

“…Usage-based and constructivist approaches to language acquisition (e.g., Tomasello, 2003;Goldberg, 2006;MacWhinney, 2010;Ambridge and Lieven, in press) place special emphasis on children's pattern-finding skills. Research on statistical learning (Saffran et al, 1996(Saffran et al, , 2008Thompson and Newport, 2007) focuses on learners' ability to track transitional probabilities (the likelihood that the occurrence of X will result in the appearance of Y), a phenomenon that is also the object of connectionist modeling (Elman, 2002;Chater and Manning, 2006;Chang et al, 2006).…”