Abstract The term grammaticalization originally denoted a particular outcome of language change (lexis > morphology), then got expanded to practically all studies involving change, the processes that create such changes, and theory modeling these. These expansions have been challenged in literature as conceptually flawed. A usage-based analysis evolution concept culminates use “flag” approac...

In this paper, I offer a Radical Constructon Grammar analysis of some aspects of countability in English. Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 1999, 2000, 2001, MS) shares with other construction grammars the assumption that all grammatical knowledge can be represented uniformly as a network of constructions, where ‘construction’ is taken to describe form-meaning pairings of grammatical structur...

We employ transformations for the adaptation of grammars. Grammars need to be adapted in grammar development, grammar maintenance , grammar reengineering, and grammar recovery. Starting from a few fundamental transformation primitives and combinators, we derive an operator suite for grammar adaptation. Three groups of operators are identiied, namely operators for refactoring, construction and d...

In Construction Grammar, rules of syntactic combination (descriptions of local trees, e.g., a verb phrase and its daughters) have meanings. These meanings are represented by syntactic, semantic and usage features that attach to the mother or daughter nodes in these trees (Sag 2007, 2008). A construction defines the distinctive properties of a mode of combination that is part of the grammar of a...

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 ...

Inducing a grammar from text has proven to be a notoriously challenging learning task despite decades of research. The primary reason for its difficulty is that in order to induce plausible grammars, the underlying model must be capable of representing the intricacies of language while also ensuring that it can be readily learned from data. The majority of existing work on grammar induction has...