The Department of Linguistics is pleased to announce the following talk by聽, who is visiting us from Sony Computer Science Laboratories in聽Paris.聽
"What Are Constructions and What Can They Do?"
Wednesday, February 20
4:00-5:30pm
Clare Small 209鈥嬧�嬧�嬧�嬧�嬧�嬧��
Abstract:
Construction grammar grew out of the need to model the whole of language聽instead of distinguishing core linguistic expressions from peripheral ones (Fillmore聽et al., 1988; Kay and Fillmore, 1999), and has since then established itself聽as the grammatical embodiment of cognitive-functional linguistics (Croft and聽Cruse, 2004). Its central claim that all linguistic knowledge can be represented聽as form-meaning mappings 鈥� called constructions 鈥� has been embraced in both聽data-oriented and experiment-driven subdisciplines such as language acquisition聽(Dabrowska et al., 2009; Diessel, 2004; Tomasello, 2003), corpus linguistics (Hilpert,聽2015; Stefanowitsch and Gries, 2003; Zeschel, 2012), historical linguistics (Bardalet al., 2015; Colleman, 2016; Couss茅 et al., 2018; Fried, 2009; Van de Velde et al.,聽2013; Van Goethem, 2017), sociolinguistics (H枚der, 2014; Hollmann and Siewierska,聽2007), psycho- and neurolinguistics (Barr猫s, 2017; Dominey et al., 2006; Perek聽and Goldberg, 2017), computational and formal linguistics (Bergen and Chang,聽2005; Boas and Sag, 2012; Michaelis, 2004; Steels, 2011) and artificial intelligence聽(Beuls and Steels, 2013; Steels, 2004; Van Eecke and Beuls, 2017).聽
As is often the case, however, it takes time before the potential of an innovation聽is fully explored and understood. Early movies, for example, strongly mimicked聽theater and used long and static shots before film makers developed their own聽cinematic 鈥済rammar鈥�. A similar process happens in science, and while construction聽grammar is already too mature to be directly compared to early cinema, the formal聽and computational properties of its most important data structure are not yet聽completely worked out. As a result, construction grammar has become an umbrella聽term for all linguistic studies that roughly agree on what Bill Croft (2005) dubbed聽vanilla construction grammar, but more precision is needed in order to prevent聽a babelesque confusion from installing itself in the field and thereby impeding聽much-needed breakthroughs.
In this presentation, I will try to offer a more precise perspective on what constructions聽are and what they can do. More specifically, I will look at the representational聽and algorithmic properties of constructions. The goal of the presentation is therefore not to favor one or the other analysis, but simply to elicit more clarity聽about which analyses are possible and which criticisms on constructional analyses聽are valid concerns and which are not. In order to substantiate my claims, all聽analyses are accompanied by a concrete computational implementation in Fluid聽Construction Grammar (FCG; Steels, 2011), an open-source computational platform聽for exploring issues in constructional language processing and learning.