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Within cognitive linguistics, there is an increasing awareness that the study of linguistic phenomena needs to be grounded in usage. Ideally, research in cognitive linguistics should be based on authentic language use, its results should be replicable, and its claims falsifiable. Consequently, more and more studies now turn to corpora as a source of data. While corpus-based methodologies have increased in sophistication, the use of corpus data is also associated with a number of unresolved problems. The study of cognition through off-line linguistic data is, arguably, indirect, even if such data fulfils desirable qualities such as being natural, representative and plentiful. Several topics in this context stand out as particularly pressing issues. This discussion note addresses (1) converging evidence from corpora and experimentation, (2) whether corpora mirror psychological reality, (3) the theoretical value of corpus linguistic studies of ‘alternations’, (4) the relation of corpus linguistics and grammaticality judgments, and, lastly, (5) the nature of explanations in cognitive corpus linguistics. We do not claim to resolve these issues nor to cover all possible angles; instead, we strongly encourage reactions and further discussion.
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
Den Wald vor lauter Bäumen sehen - und andersherum: zum Verhältnis von 'Mustern' und 'Regeln'
(2011)
Die Konstruktionsgrammatik setzt dem Begriff der konstruktiven Regel den des komplexen Musters entgegen, das in syntaktischen Generalisierungsprozessen analogisch erweitert wird. Der vorliegende Beitrag präsentiert eine solche musterbasierte Analyse von deutschen Konstruktionen mit lokativem Subjekt (Wiesen und Wälder wuchern vor Blumen und Kräutern) als Extension einer Reihe verwandter Konstruktionen mit kausaler und intensivierender Funktion, aus denen die lokative Variante mutmaßlich hervorgegangen ist. Die Analyse argumentiert, dass der umgebenden ,Ökologie‘ der Zielkonstruktion im sprachlichen Wissen der Sprecher eine zentrale Rolle für die Erklärung der attestierten Varianten zukommt, die in regelbasierten Zugängen als unmotivierte ,Ausnahmen‘ von allgemeinen Linkingprinzipien gelten müssen.
Co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction mutually scaffold and support each other within a virtuous feedback cycle in the development of human language in children. Within this framework, the purpose of this article is to bring together diverse but complementary accounts of research methods that jointly contribute to our understanding of cognitive development and in particular, language acquisition in robots. Thus, we include research pertaining to developmental robotics, cognitive science, psychology, linguistics and neuroscience, as well as practical computer science and engineering. The different studies are not at this stage all connected into a cohesive whole; rather, they are presented to illuminate the need for multiple different approaches that complement each other in the pursuit of understanding cognitive development in robots. Extensive experiments involving the humanoid robot iCub are reported, while human learning relevant to developmental robotics has also contributed useful results.
Disparate approaches are brought together via common underlying design principles. Without claiming to model human language acquisition directly, we are nonetheless inspired by analogous development in humans and consequently, our investigations include the parallel co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction. Though these different approaches need to ultimately be integrated into a coherent, unified body of knowledge, progress is currently also being made by pursuing individual methods.
How (and when) do speakers generalise from memorised exemplars of a construction to a productive schema? The present paper presents a novel take on this issue by offering a corpus-based approach to semantic extension processes. Focusing on clusters of German ADJ N expressions involving the heavily polysemous adjective tief ‚deep’, it is shown that type frequency (a commonly used measure of productivity) needs to be relativised to distinct semantic classes within the overall usage spectrum of a given construction in order to predict the occurrence of novel types within a particular region of this spectrum. Some methodological and theoretical implications for usage-based linguistic model building are considered.
Much language-related research in cognitive robotics appeals to usage-based models of language as proposed in cognitive linguistics and developmental psychology [1, 2] that emphasise the significance of learning, embodiment and general cognitive development for human language acquisition. Over and above these issues, however, what takes centre stage in these theories are social-cognitive skills of “intention-reading” that are seen as “primary in the language acquisition process” [1] – and also as difficult to incorporate into computational models of language acquisition. The present paper addresses these concerns: we describe work in progress on a series of experiments that take steps towards closing the gap between ‘solipsistic’ symbol grounding in individual robotic agents and socially framed embodied language acquisition in learners that attend to common ground [3] with changing interlocutors.
In usage-based Construction Grammar, grammatical structure is assumed to ‘sedimenl’ from concrete linguistic experience as an automatic by-product o f repeated similar categorisation judgments (a process known as schematisation). At the same time, there is functional pressure on prospective inputs to such schematisations to retain or develop specialised properties that differentiate them from their near neighbours, i.e. other stored units in the constructicon (Goldberg: 1995). Moreover, Speakers are not assumed to necessarily extract all possible generalisations from their input. Using the example o f a group of German support verb constructions, the present study outlines a corpus-linguistic approach to identifying those Schemas that really seem to be formed by Speakers, and how they can be kept apart from mere potential generalisations.
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.
We taught a humanoid robot a number of different actions involving a number of different objects (e.g., touching a green object, moving a red object etc.) alongside a number of simplified linguistic labels for these behaviours (e.g., ‘touch-green’, ‘move-red’ etc.). The robot managed to learn the associations between the behaviours and their linguistic labels, and it succeeded in recognising the compositional structure of the behaviours and their associated linguistic descriptions (ACTION/VERB+OBJECT/NOUN). Moreover, it was able to generalise the learned instructions to novel, previously untrained action+object-combinations (e.g., touch-red). This corresponds to the task of learning and decomposing so-called ‘holophrases’ in early child language acquisition.
Introduction
(2008)