Computational Cognitive Morphosemantics: Modeling Morphological Compositionality in Hebrew Verbs with Embodied Construction Grammar

This paper brings together the theoretical framework of construction grammar and studies of verbs in Modern Hebrew to furnish an analysis integrating the form and meaning components of morphological structure. In doing so, this work employs and extends Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG; Bergen and Chang 2005), a computational formalism developed to study grammar from a cognitive linguistic perspective. In developing a formal analysis of Hebrew verbs (section 3), I adapt ECG—until now a lexical/syntactic/semantic formalism—to account for the compositionality of morphological constructions, accommodating idiosyncrasy while encoding generalizations at multiple levels. Similar to syntactic constructions, morpheme constructions are related in an inheritance network, and can be productively composed to form words. With the expanded version of ECG, constructions can readily encode nonconcatenative root-and-pattern morphology and associated (compositional or noncompositional) semantics, cleanly integrated with syntactic constructions. This formal, cognitive study should pave the way for computational models of morphological learning and processing in Hebrew and other languages.