Coercion effects, including aspectual ones, appear to indicate a modular grammatical architecture, in which the process of composition may add meanings absent in the syntax in order to ensure that certain functors, e.g., the progressive operator, receive suitable arguments (Herweg 1991, Jackendoff 1997, De Swart 1998). In this paper, coercion effects are instead taken as evidence for the existe...

Corpus-based treebank annotation is known to result in incomplete coverage of midand low-frequency linguistic constructions: the linguistic representation and corpus annotation quality are sometimes suboptimal. Large descriptive grammars cover also many midand low-frequency constructions. We argue for use of large descriptive grammars and their sample sentences as a basis for specifying higher-...

We argue that word meanings are not stored in a mental lexicon but are generated in the context of working memory from long-term memory traces that record our experience with words. Current statistical models of semantics, such as latent semantic analysis and the Topic model, describe what is stored in long-term memory. The CI-2 model describes how this information is used to construct sentence...

Construction grammar offers a valuable tool for handling certain tricky cases that provide a challenge to MTT. In this paper, two such cases are examined, viz. ‘hybrid’ uses of nonmotion verbs in motion constructions and omissions of motion verbs resulting in verbless sentences. Finally, the procedure of how to incorporate a construction into the MTT framework is substantiated by means of verbs...

In Construction Morphology (CM), a compound is treated as a construction at the word level with a systematic correlation between its form and meaning, in the sense that any change in the form is accompanied by a change in the meaning. Compound words are coined by compounding templates which are called abstract schemas in CM. These abstract constructional schemas generalize over sets of existing...