Starting out from a critical questioning of Construction Grammar’s basic tenets I am advocating a version of Construction Grammar that should be primarily understood as based on the patterns evinced ...by grammatical operations. This approach aims for a theory of rule-governed operations over constructions and not for a theory of idiomaticity and non-(or restricted) compositionality.
Decomposing 'As If' Rett, Jessica; Starr, W.
Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory,
01/2023, Letnik:
1, Številka:
32
Journal Article
Recenzirano
‘As if’ constructions have been analyzed as only verbal (Bücking 2017) or idiomatic (Bledin & Srinivas 2019, 2020). We argue that ‘as if’ constructions have the same distribution as any clausal ...similative (i.e. any ‘as’ construction): they can associate with verbal arguments or propositions. And we argue that ‘as if’ constructions are a common and productive cross-linguistic phenomenon, reliably formed with a relativizer; a question subordinator; and X-marking. We thus present a compositional analysis of the constructions based on extant analyses of as (and its cross-linguistic counterparts) as a relativizer (Rett 2013, among others); if as a question subordinator (Starr 2014b, among others); and X-marking as encoding a similarity relation across possible worlds (Schulz 2014; von Fintel & Iatridou 2020). In addition to being compositional, this approach can better account for the wide distribution of ‘as if’ constructions both within a language and across languages.
Research on speech processing is often focused on a phenomenon termed "entrainment", whereby the cortex shadows rhythmic acoustic information with oscillatory activity. Entrainment has been observed ...to a range of rhythms present in speech; in addition, synchronicity with abstract information (e.g. syntactic structures) has been observed. Entrainment accounts face two challenges: First, speech is not exactly rhythmic; second, synchronicity with representations that lack a clear acoustic counterpart has been described. We propose that apparent entrainment does not always result from acoustic information. Rather, internal rhythms may have functionalities in the generation of abstract representations and predictions. While acoustics may often provide punctate opportunities for entrainment, internal rhythms may also live a life of their own to infer and predict information, leading to intrinsic synchronicity - not to be counted as entrainment. This possibility may open up new research avenues in the psycho- and neurolinguistic study of language processing and language development.
À volta das crónicas Nunes Correia, Clara; Coutinho, Antónia
Linguistica (Ljubljana),
12/2022, Letnik:
62, Številka:
1-2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Na vasta bibliografia de Jasmina Markič encontramos uma preocupação constante em apresentar trabalhos sobre formas e construções, presentes em diferentes línguas, que se caracterizam por basearem a ...sua análise em suportes textuais.
Neste artigo, a partir do estudo do sequenciamento de formas e construções gramaticais presentes em crónicas, procuramos demonstrar de que forma as diferentes construções gramaticais são responsáveis pelas características que permitem a individualização dos textos que se inscrevem sob esta etiqueta. Nesta análise, focamo-nos, assim, nas relações que se definem entre os diferentes tópicos gramaticais no estudo de diferentes textos, ativando nesta discussão os conceitos de género textual, de plano de texto e de tipos discursivos.
To understand what you are reading now, your mind retrieves the meanings of words and constructions from a linguistic knowledge store (lexico-semantic processing) and identifies the relationships ...among them to construct a complex meaning (syntactic or combinatorial processing). Do these two sets of processes rely on distinct, specialized mechanisms or, rather, share a common pool of resources? Linguistic theorizing, empirical evidence from language acquisition and processing, and computational modeling have jointly painted a picture whereby lexico-semantic and syntactic processing are deeply inter-connected and perhaps not separable. In contrast, many current proposals of the neural architecture of language continue to endorse a view whereby certain brain regions selectively support syntactic/combinatorial processing, although the locus of such “syntactic hub”, and its nature, vary across proposals. Here, we searched for selectivity for syntactic over lexico-semantic processing using a powerful individual-subjects fMRI approach across three sentence comprehension paradigms that have been used in prior work to argue for such selectivity: responses to lexico-semantic vs. morpho-syntactic violations (Experiment 1); recovery from neural suppression across pairs of sentences differing in only lexical items vs. only syntactic structure (Experiment 2); and same/different meaning judgments on such sentence pairs (Experiment 3). Across experiments, both lexico-semantic and syntactic conditions elicited robust responses throughout the left fronto-temporal language network. Critically, however, no regions were more strongly engaged by syntactic than lexico-semantic processing, although some regions showed the opposite pattern. Thus, contra many current proposals of the neural architecture of language, syntactic/combinatorial processing is not separable from lexico-semantic processing at the level of brain regions—or even voxel subsets—within the language network, in line with strong integration between these two processes that has been consistently observed in behavioral and computational language research. The results further suggest that the language network may be generally more strongly concerned with meaning than syntactic form, in line with the primary function of language—to share meanings across minds.
Cette étude porte sur une série de périphrases verbales (PV) de la forme « avoir le Npc de Vinf », où Npc désigne un « nom de partie du corps humain ». Après une recension des Npc compatibles avec ...cette construction, nous observons qu'elle peut effectivement être considérée comme une PV et que l'emploi du Npc - envisagé comme un emploi « qualité » - permet l'expression d'un concept modal. Nous précisons alors le concept modal associé à l'emploi de chaque Npc dans « avoir le Npc de Vinf » selon l'approche des modalités de Gosselin (2010).
Tässä artikkelissa tarkastellaan hämärärajaisuutta ja epäkonventionaalisuutta osana joitakin kaikista viittomakielistä löydettyjä yksiköitä ja rakenteita ja niiden käyttöä. Täsmällisemmin artikkelin ...fokuksessa ovat tietyt muodoltaan ja merkitykseltään tilanteisesti muuntuvat viittomat (erityisesti niin kutsutut osittain leksikaaliset viittomat) sekä eräänlainen vaihteleva-asteinen näytteleminen (niin kutsuttu konstruoitu toiminta), jota viittojat käyttävät tuottamiensa syntaktisten rakenteiden osana ja niiden sijaan. Käytännössä artikkeli esittelee näkemyksen, jonka mukaan molemmissa tarkastelun kohteena olevissa ilmiöissä on kyse samasta asiasta eli kielen diskreettien ja konventionaalisten ominaisuuksien sekoittumisesta hybridiluonteisesti kieleenkuuluvien hämärärajaisten ja epäkonventionaalisten ominaisuuksien kanssa. Artikkeli pohtii lyhyesti myös puhuttujen kielten luonnetta hybridisysteemeinä.
Going back to Ross (1967) and Chomsky (1973), researchers have sought to understand what conditions permit long-distance dependencies in language, such as between the wh-word what and the verb bought ...in the sentence ‘What did John think that Mary bought?’. In the present work, we attempt to understand why changing the main verb in wh-questions affects the acceptability of long-distance dependencies out of embedded clauses. In particular, it has been claimed that factive and manner-of-speaking verbs block such dependencies (e.g., ‘What did John know/whisper that Mary bought?’), whereas verbs like think and believe allow them. Here we provide 3 acceptability judgment experiments of filler-gap constructions across embedded clauses to evaluate four types of accounts based on (1) discourse; (2) syntax; (3) semantics; and (4) our proposal related to verb-frame frequency. The patterns of acceptability are most simply explained by two factors: verb-frame frequency, such that dependencies with verbs that rarely take embedded clauses are less acceptable; and construction type, such that wh-questions and clefts are less acceptable than declaratives. We conclude that the low acceptability of filler-gap constructions formed by certain sentence complement verbs is due to infrequent linguistic exposure.
We present novel methods for analyzing the activation patterns of recurrent neural networks from a linguistic point of view and explore the types of linguistic structure they learn. As a case study, ...we use a standard standalone language model, and a multi-task gated recurrent network architecture consisting of two parallel pathways with shared word embeddings: The V
pathway is trained on predicting the representations of the visual scene corresponding to an input sentence, and the T
pathway is trained to predict the next word in the same sentence. We propose a method for estimating the amount of contribution of individual tokens in the input to the final prediction of the networks. Using this method, we show that the V
pathway pays selective attention to lexical categories and grammatical functions that carry semantic information, and learns to treat word types differently depending on their grammatical function and their position in the sequential structure of the sentence. In contrast, the language models are comparatively more sensitive to words with a syntactic function. Further analysis of the most informative n-gram contexts for each model shows that in comparison with the V
pathway, the language models react more strongly to abstract contexts that represent syntactic constructions.
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