This article is a contribution to a theory of lexical semantics and situated sense-making which aims at explaining how meaning is constituted in and across contexts, in a dialogical interplay between lexical resources and aspects of situations. We propose that the semantics of words or grammatical constructions are not just abstract schemas, to be filled in by pragmatic enrichment in situated u...

In this paper we propose a new composition algorithm for weighted finite-states transducers that are more and more used for speech and pattern recognition applications. Composition joins multiple transducers into one. We have implemented an embedded speech based dialog system for steering applications. Therefore regular grammars are very useful, but they may enlarge strongly by determinization....

The last few decades have seen the growth of a community of linguists who, though diverse in their beliefs and assumptions about other aspects of linguistics, nevertheless share a commitment to the construction as the basic unit of linguistic analysis. In construction grammar (henceforth CxG), as this family of approaches is known, ‘construction’ is understood – beyond its pretheoretical sense ...

This paper describes how language is grounded by a comprehension system called Lucia within a robotic agent called Rosie that can manipulate objects and navigate indoors. The whole system is built within the Soar cognitive architecture and uses Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG) as a formalism for describing linguistic knowledge. Grounding is performed using knowledge from the grammar itself, ...

In traditional analysis, the constructions of Chinese V-V compounds are generally categorized, according to the grammatical relation between the component V’s, into three major types: coordination (並列式), modifier-head (偏正式) and verb-complement (述補式). Though the widely accepted categorization criteria seem to be simple and straightforward, linguists could often come to completely different judgm...

In recent years, several computational models (Alishahi & Stevenson 2008, Chang 2008, Bannard, Lieven & Tomasello 2009) have begun fulfilling the promise of usage-based construction grammar (Tomasello 2003, Goldberg 2006) as a computationally testable account of the acquisition of grammar.1 In simulating specific developmental patterns, such as the generalization of argument structure construct...

This book offers a new and in-depth analysis of English conditional sentences. In a wide-ranging discussion, Dancygier classifies conditional constructions according to time-reference and modality. She shows how the basic meaning parameters of conditionality, such as causation and logical sequence, correlate to formal parameters of the linguistic constructions which are used to express them. Da...

In this work, we discuss the benefits of using automatically parsed corpora to study language variation. The study of language variation is an area of linguistics in which quantitative methods have been particularly successful. We argue that the large datasets that can be obtained using automatic annotation can help drive further research in this direction, providing sufficient data for the inc...

This paper presents a new management method for morphological variation of keywords. The method is called FCG, Frequent Case Generation. It is based on the skewed distributions of word forms in natural languages and is suitable for languages that have either fair amount of morphological variation or are morphologically very rich. The proposed method has been evaluated so far with four languages...

Linguistic borrowing is the phenomenon of transferring linguistic constructions (lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntactic) from a “donor” language to a “recipient” language as a result of contacts between communities speaking different languages. Borrowed words are found in all languages, and—in contrast to cognate relationships—borrowing relationships may exist across unrelated lang...