Corpora, Grammar and Discourse

Modelling verb selection within argument structure constructions

“…Using a network for a particular construction, they compute a measure called betweenness centrality, which indicates the centrality of each verb's meaning in this construction. This way, the most general verbs in the construction (in this case, go and move) tend to obtain higher prototypicality values (see Gries & Ellis, 2015;Römer et al, 2015, for more detail). In this sense, "semantic generality" would be a more suitable term; however, we follow EOR and other studies mentioned next in using the word "prototypicality".…”

“…Note that EOR's stimuli have a very weak semantic component: they are, in fact, form-based patterns, and participants are free in their interpretations of the arguments' thematic roles. Römer, O'Donnell, and Ellis (2015) motivate such an approach by the fact that they analyse semantic associations between verbs and constructions, and therefore it is "important to initially define the forms that will be analysed in a semantics-free, bottom-up manner" (p. 45). Although this is a controversial point (and we return to it in the discussion), in this study we follow their approach.…”