Research into the evolution of grammar requires that we employ formalisms and processing mechanisms that are powerful enough to handle features found in human natural languages. But the formalism needs to have some additional properties compared to those used in other linguistics research that are specifically relevant for handling the emergence and progressive co-ordination of grammars in a po...

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 this paper, we propose a concrete operationalization which incorporates data from the FrameNet database into Fluid Construction Grammar, currently the only computational implementation of construction grammar that can achieve both production and parsing using the same set of constructions. As a proof of concept, we selected an annotated sentence from the FrameNet database and transcribed its...

Abstract This chapter introduces very briefly the framework and tools for lexical and grammatical processing that have been used in the evolutionary language game experiments reported in this book. This framework is called Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) because it rests on a constructional approach to language and emphasizes flexible grammar application. Construction grammar organizes the kno...

This paper describes a systematic approach to grammar re-engineering by transforming conventional restricted YACC grammars from legacy code into the purely declarative syntax definition formalism SDF. The declarative nature of SDF and its ability to handle the full class of context-free grammars allows grammar definitions that are more readable and maintainable compared to the original YACC gra...

Writing the grammar of a language is one of the most significant outputs of linguistic studies. In Iran, it is Avicenna (Ibn-e Sina) who is credited with the first such compilation of the Persian language. Understanding the weaknesses associated with the traditional trends of grammar writing in Iran, contemporary Iranian linguists adopted the modern Western approach following the Chomskyan Turn...

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...

1. Introduction The " return of constructions " to linguistic theory has introduced a new approach for analyzing argument structure and its acquisition (Tomasello, 1998). In this approach (Goldberg, 1995), argument structure is conceptualized as involving clause-level semantic-syntactic templates: A construction accommodates verbs of a particular semantic type taking arguments that bear certain...

In computational modeling of natural language phenomena, there are at least three modes of research. The currently dominant statistical paradigm typically prioritizes instance coverage: Data-driven methods seek to use as much information observed in data as possible in order to generalize linguistic analyses to unseen instances. A second approach prioritizes detailed description of grammatical ...