This paper provides a construction grammar perspective to identifying the ambiguity of prepositional phrase (PP) attachments (i.e., whether a PP is attached to the closest VP or NP1). Despite the wide discussion of these two structures (VP-attached and NP1-attached), we raise the possibility for a third parsing structure (about 11.3% from all 1845 instances analyzed), a co-attachment to both ve...

In this paper we motivate and report on the implementation of a computer experiment to investigate the syntax and semantics of linguistic constructions about time. It is argued that the way in which a domain like time is conceptualized is not universal and evolves over time. To investigate this we want to simulate a population of agents evolving their proper language and ontology of time in ord...

In Construction Grammar, structurally patterned units called constructions are assigned meaning in the same way that words are – via convention rather than composition. That is, rather than piecing semantics together from individual lexical items, Construction Grammar proposes that semantics can be assigned at the construction level. In this paper, we investigate whether a classifier can be tau...

This paper describes an investigation that compared Context-based Reasoning (CxBR) and Contextual Graphs (CxG), two well-known context-driven approaches used to represent human intelligence and decision making. The specific objective of this investigation was to compare and contrast both approaches to increase the readers’ understanding of each approach. We also identify which, if any, excels i...

Russian FrameBank is a bank of annotated samples from the Russian National Corpus which documents the use of lexical constructions (e.g. argument constructions of verbs and nouns). FrameBank belongs to FrameNetoriented resources, but unlike Berkeley FrameNet it focuses more on the morphosyntactic and semantic features of individual lexemes rather than the generalized frames, following the theor...

Since the publication of Goldberg’s (1995) seminal book Constructions, Construction Grammar (CxG) has become increasingly popular and inspired analyses of a wide range of grammatical constructions in different languages (e.g. Michaelis and Ruppenhofer 2001, Barðdal 2008, Iwata 2008, Boas 2010a). In addition, many of Goldberg’s insights have influenced research in first language acquisition (e.g...

1 Background Modern grammatical research,1 at least in the realms of morphosyntax, includes a number of largely nonoverlapping communities that have surprisingly little to do with one another. One – the Universal Grammar (UG) camp – is mainly concerned with a particular view of human languages as instantiations of a single grammar that is fixed in its general shape. UG researchers put forth hig...