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Construction-based language models assume that grammar is meaningful and learnable from experience. Focusing on five of the most elementary argument structure constructions of English, a large-scale corpus study of child-directed speech (CDS) investigates exactly which meanings/functions are associated with these patterns in CDS, and whether they are indeed specially indicated to children by their caretakers (as suggested by previous research, cf. Goldberg, Casenhiser and Sethuraman 2004). Collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003) is employed to uncover significantly attracted verb-construction combinations, and attracted pairs are classified semantically in order to systematise the attested usage patterns of the target constructions. The results indicate that the structure of the input may aid learners in making the right generalisations about constructional usage patterns, but such scaffolding is not strictly necessary for construction learning: not all argument structure constructions are coherently semanticised to the same extent (in the sense that they designate a single schematic event type of the kind envisioned in Goldberg’s [1995] ‘scene encoding hypothesis’), and they also differ in the extent to which individual semantic subtypes predominate in learners’ input
An experiment on the English caused motion construction in adult- and child-directed speech was conducted to assess in how far (i) verbal frequency biases and (ii) a register-specific preference for explicit and redundant coding influence speakers' selection of argument structure constructions during speaking. Subjects retold the contents of short cartoon video clips to adult and child interaction partners. The stimuli showed events of caused motion which suggested designations with verbs for which caused motion-complementation was either (i) uncommon/unattested, (ii) conventional or (iii) the dominant usage in a sample extracted from the BNC. The results show a significant tendency to avoid more compacted coding (using the caused motion construction instead of a possible two-clause paraphrase) in child-directed speech. At the same time, they also point to an interaction between the register-specific preference for explicitness and verbs' relative conventionality in the construction that neutralizes the effect for verbs that are highly frequent in the target environment.
Research on syntactic ambiguity resolution in language comprehension has shown that subjects' processing decisions are influenced by a variety of heterogeneous factors such as e.g., syntactic complexity, semantic fit and the discourse frequency of the competing structures. The present paper investigates a further potentially relevant factor in such processes: effects of syntagmatic lexical chunking (or matching to a complex memorized prefab) whose occurrence would be predicted from usage-based assumptions about linguistic categorisation. Focusing on the widely studied so-called DO/SC-ambiguity in which a post-verbal NP is syntactically ambiguous between a direct object and the subject of an embedded clause, potentially biasing collocational chunks of the relevant type are identified in a number of corpus-linguistic pretests and then investigated in a self-paced reading experiment. The results show a significant increase in processing difficulty from a collocationally neutral over a lexically biasing to a strongly biasing condition. This suggests that syntagmatically complex and partially schematic templates of the kind envisioned in usage-based Construction Grammar may impinge on speakers' online processing decisions during sentence comprehension.