The paper examines in how far Construction Grammar is a useful foundation by which artificial agents can self-organise communication systems that are grounded in the real world through a sensori-motor embodiment and use grammar to express certain aspects of meaning. It proposes a particular computational formalism, Fluid Construction Grammar, and mechanisms by which constructions can be progres...

In Construction Grammar, the ultimate grammatical unit is the construction, a conventionalized form-meaning pairing. We present interrelated evidence from three different methods, all of which speak in favor of attributing an ontological status to constructions for non-native speakers of English. Firstly, in a sentencefragment completion study with German learners of English, we obtained a sign...

Recent work on grammatical constructions in English (Lakoff 1987, Goldberg 1995, Kay & Fillmore 1999, Fillmore, Kay & O’Connor 1988) has provided strong evidence that the meaning of an utterance is not always derivable from its lexical parts and that the semantics of a sentence is partly comprised of meaning ascribed to syntactic constructions. Lacking in most of these accounts, however, is a d...

This paper introduces a proposal aimed at enriching the framework of translation process research with a systemic-functional linguistics perspective for investigating instances of effortful translated text production. Drawing on the concept of grammatical metaphor and its potential for modeling both monolingual and multilingual text production, it examines ongoing meaning construction in transl...

In the proof-theoretic semantics approach to meaning, harmony, requiring a balance between introduction-rules (I-rules) and elimination rules (E-rules) within a meaning conferring natural-deduction proof-system, is a central notion. In this paper, we consider two notions of harmony that were proposed in the literature: 1. GE-harmony, requiring a certain form of the E-rules, given the form of th...

A conversational English text parsing and generation system is described in which its lexicon and construction grammar rules are revised, augmented, and improved via dialog with mentors. Both the parser and generator operate in a cognitively plausible, incremental manner. Construction Grammar is well suited for a precise and robust dialog system due to its emphasis on pairing utterance form wit...

There are various interesting semantics’ (extensions) designed for argumentation frameworks. They enable to assign a meaning, e.g., to odd-length cycles. Our main motivation is to transfer semantics’ proposed by Baroni, Giacomin and Guida for argumentation frameworks with odd-length cycles to logic programs with odd-length cycles through default negation. The developed construction is even stro...

Personally important autobiographical memories are the smallest unit of the life story, which begins to emerge in adolescence. This study examined 2 features of self-defining memories in late adolescence, the meaning made of the memories to garner an understanding of the narrative construction of identity as a life story and how those memories were told with an emphasis on the functions for tel...

Nine experiments examined whether individuals treat the meaning of basic conditional assertions as deterministic or probabilistic. In Experiments 1-4, participants were presented with either probabilistic or deterministic relations, which they had to describe with a conditional. These experiments consistently showed that people tend only to use the basic if p then q construction to describe det...