Construction Grammar holds that unpredictable form-meaning combinations are not restricted in size. In particular, there may be phrases that have particular meanings that are not predictable from the words that they contain, but which are nonetheless not purely idiosyn-cratic. In addressing this observation, some construction grammar-ians have not only weakened the word/phrase distinction, but ...

The reverse Polish notation properties are used in the construction of the algorithms for the polygon triangulation. The formal grammar method is “translated” to the arithmetic expression field enabling application of the reverse Polish notation method. The result of this approach is a relatively simple algorithm for polygon triangulation.

The question of how symbol systems can be instantiated in neural network-like computation is still open. Many technical challenges remain and most proposals do not scale up to realistic examples of symbol processing, for example, language understanding or language production. Here we use a top-down approach. We start from Fluid Construction Grammar, a wellworked out framework for language proce...

We explore the implications of Zipf’s law for the understanding of linguistic productivity. Focusing on language acquisition, we show that the item/usage based approach has not been supported by adequate statistical evidence. By contrast, the quantitative properties of a productive grammar can be precisely formulated, and are consistent with even very young children’s language. Moreover, drawin...

Service oriented chatbot systems are used to inform users in a conversational manner about a particular service or product on a website. Our research shows that current systems are time consuming to build and not very accurate or satisfying to users. We find that natural language understanding and natural language generation methods are central to creating an efficient and useful system. In thi...

The construction grammar framework provides a rich formalism for the characterization of development in language acquisition, in part because it allows for a graceful transition from idiom-like holophrases, to fully abstract argument constructions. From the perspective of learning complexity, this means that rather than mastering the grammar used by an adult to generate or understand an utteran...

Abstract Task-based language teaching has received increased attention in second language research. However, the combination of structured input-based approach and task-based language teaching has not been examined in relation to L2 grammar learning. To address this gap, the present study investigated how the structured input-based tasks with and without explicit information impacted learners’ ...

Abstract Linguists have debated whether complex prepositions deserve a constituent status, but none proposed dynamic model that can both predict what construal given pattern imposes and account for the emergence of non-spatial readings. This paper reframes debate on constituency as justification constructional status prepositional patterns from historical perspective. It focuses Prep NP IL lm c...

Abstract Task-based language teaching has received increased attention in second language research. However, the combination of structured input-based approach and task-based language teaching has not been examined in relation to L2 grammar learning. To address this gap, the present study investigated how the structured input-based tasks with and without explicit information impacted learners’ ...