this paper is an attempt to explore the prepositions used to encode the agent in persian passive constructions. according to givón (1983) the main function of the passive constructions is to defocus the agent. as the general trend in persian is to omit this defocused agent, we will stylistically divide the passive constructions into two main sub branches, namely unmarked and marked passives acc...

This paper describes our ongoing work in and thoughts on developing a grammar learning system based on a construction grammar formalism. Necessary modules are presented and first results and challenges in formalizing the grammar are shown up. Furthermore, we point out the major reasons why we chose construction grammar as the most fitting formalism for our purposes. Then our approach and ideas ...

The English cognate object (CO) construction like laugh a nervous laugh raises intriguing analytic and empirical questions. They include (a) what kind of verb licenses the CO, (b) what is the grammatical status of the CO (including its argumenthood), and (c) what are the semantic/pragmatic contributions of the construction? In answering these questions and to see real usages of the construction...

Language comprehension in humans is very robust. With apparent ease, language users can grasp the meaning of utterances made in very bad acoustic conditions or containing grammatical errors. A key mechanism in achieving this robustness is the ability of the listener to predict what the speaker is likely to say. According to recent work in psycholinguistics, these predictions are made by covertl...

This paper reports further progress into a computational implementation of a new formalism for construction grammar, known as Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). We focus in particular on how hierarchy can be implemented. The paper analyses the requirements for a proper treatment of hierarchy in grammar and then proposes a particular solution based on a new operator, known as the J-operator. The ...

Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) is a formalism for defining the inventory of lexical and grammatical conventions that language processing requires and the operations with which this inventory is used to parse and produce sentences. This chapter introduces some of the key ideas and basic design principles behind the development of Fluid Construction Grammar.

German case syncretism is often assumed to be the accidental by-product of historical development. This paper contradicts this claim and argues that the evolution of German case is driven by the need to optimize the cognitive effort and memory required for processing and interpretation. This hypothesis is supported by a novel kind of computational experiments that reconstruct and compare attest...

Cognitive linguistics has reached a stage of maturity where many researchers are looking for an explicit formal grounding of their work. Unfortunately, most current models of deep language processing incorporate assumptions from generative grammar that are at odds with the cognitive movement in linguistics. This demonstration shows how Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG), a fully operational and b...

This paper presents a semi-automatic approach to acquire a computational construction grammar from the semi-formal Swedish Constructicon. The implementation is based on the resource grammar library provided by Grammatical Framework and can be seen as an extension to the existing Swedish resource grammar. An important consequence of this work is that it generates feedback, explicit and implicit,...