this paper is to introduce, by means of the detailed analysis of a single grammatical problem, the rudiments of a grammatical theory which assigns a central role to the notion of grammatical construction. To adopt a constructional approach is to undertake a commitment in principle to account for the entirety of each language. 2 This means that the relatively general patterns of the language, such as the one licensing the ordering of a finite auxiliary verb before its subject in English as illustrated in (1), and the more idiomatic patterns, such as those exemplified in (2), stand on an equal footing as data for which the grammar must provide an account. (1) a What have you done? b Never will I leave you. c So will she. d Long may you prosper! e Had I known, . . . f Am I tired! g . . . as were the others h Thus did the hen reward Beecher. (2) a by and large b [to] have a field day c [to] have to hand it to [someone] d (*A/*The) Fool that I was, . . . e in x's own right Given such a commitment, the construction grammarian is required to develop an explicit system of representation, capable of encoding economically and without loss of generalization, all the constructions (or patterns) of the language, from the most idiomatic to the most general. This goal was advanced in the form of a promissory note in an earlier paper that dealt with the English let alone construction: "It appears to us that the machinery needed for describing the so-called minor or peripheral constructions of the sort which has occupied us here will have 1 The authors gratefully acknowledge much fruitful discussion regarding the content of this paper with Mary Catherine O'Connor. We are indebted to Yunsook Chung, Ron Kaplan, Ray Jackendoff, Susanne Riehemann and Ivan Sag for comments on earlier dr...

We report a new phenomenon associated with language comprehension: the action–sentence compatibility effect (ACE). Participants judged whether sentences were sensible by making a response that required moving toward or away from their bodies. When a sentence implied action in one direction (e.g., “Close the drawer ” implies action away from the body), the participants had difficulty making a sensibility judgment requiring a response in the opposite direction. The ACE was demonstrated for three sentences types: imperative sentences, sentences describing the transfer of concrete objects, and sentences describing the transfer of abstract entities, such as “Liz told you the story. ” These data are inconsistent with theories of language comprehension in which meaning is represented as a set of relations among nodes. Instead, the data support an embodied theory of meaning that relates the meaning of sentences to human action. How language conveys meaning remains an open question. The dominant approach is to treat language as a symbol manipulation system: Language conveys meaning by using abstract, amodal, and arbitrary symbols (i.e., words) combined by syntactic rules (e.g., Burgess & Lund, 1997; Chomsky, 1980; Fodor, 2000; Kintsch, 1988; Pinker, 1994). Words are abstract in that the same word, such as “chair, ” is used for big chairs and little chairs, words are amodal in that the same word is used when chairs are spoken about or written about, and words are arbitrarily related to their referents in that the phonemic and orthographic characteristics of a word bear no relationship to the physical or functional characteristics of the word’s referent. An alternative view is that linguistic meaning is

The problems of access -- retrieving linguistic structure from some mental grammar -- and disambiguation -- choosing among these structures to correctly parse ambiguous linguistic input -- are fundamental to language understanding. The literature abounds with psychological results on lexical access, the access of idioms, syntactic rule access, parsing preferences, syntactic disambiguation, and the processing of garden-path sentences. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to combine models which account for these results to build a general, uniform model of access and disambiguation at the lexical, idiomatic, and syntactic levels. For example psycholinguistic theories of lexical access and idiom access and parsing theories of syntactic rule access have almost no commonality in methodology or coverage of psycholinguistic data. This paper presents a single probabilistic algorithm which models both the access and disambiguation of linguistic knowledge. The algorithm is based on a parallel parser which ranks constructions for access, and interpretations for disambiguation, by their conditional probability. Low-ranked constructions and interpretations are pruned through beam-search; this pruning accounts, among other things, for the garden-path effect. I show that this motivated probabilistic treatment accounts for a wide variety of psycholinguistic results, arguing for a more uniform representation of linguistic knowledge and for the use of probabilisticallyenriched grammars and interpreters as models of human knowledge of and processing of language.

This thesis investigates the impact of the pragmatic situation on surface generation. It presents new surface generation techniques that improve on both aspects of surface generation: (1) lexical choice, which consists of choosing words and their associated syntactic structures and (2) syntactic realization, which consists of combining these partial structures into grammatical sentences. Because surface generation depends directly on aspects of the pragmatic situation, these new techniques allow a purely conceptual input to be expressed by a greater variety of linguistic forms and with more sensitivity to pragmatic factors than was previously possible. Specifically, this research focuses on the impact on lexical choice of one part of the pragmatic situation: the speaker’s argumentative intent, i.e., the goal of the speaker to convince the hearer of a certain conclusion. The argumentative intent can be realized by a variety of evaluative expressions appearing at various ranks in the syntactic structure. This thesis describes the selection of four classes of evaluative expressions: judgment

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Language, Journal of Semantics, Linguistics and Philosophy and Studies in Language. 2 In Construction Grammar, grammatical patterns are conventional pairings of form and meaning that are analogous to words. This article contrasts Construction Grammar with competing syntactic theories that are based on universal constraints and the projection properties of words. It reviews arguments for construction-based syntax derived from the following linguistic phenomena: semantic and syntactic variability of verbs, coercion, idiomatic patterns and ‘family resemblances ’ among idioms, paradigm-based constraints on form and meaning, exceptions to cross-construction generalizations, and the inadequacy of derivational rules. Verbal and nominal syntax are used to exemplify the formal mechanism that combines constructions and words, unification grammar. A concluding section outlines connections between Construction Grammar and use-based models of grammar, acquisition and sentence processing. 3 1.

Text generation is a field of artificial intelligence aiming at modelling the process of natural language production. Text generation is best characterized as the process of making choices between alternate linguistic realizations under the constraints specified in the input to a text generator. Depending on the practical application, the input can take different forms- streams of numbers in report generation, traces

This thesis develops a new approach to automatic language generation that focuses on the need to produce a range of different paraphrases from the same input representation. One novelty of the system is its solidly grounding representations of word meaning in a background knowledge base, which enables the production of paraphrases stemming from certain inferences, rather than from purely lexical relationships alone. The system is designed in such a way that the paraphrasing mechanism extends naturally to a multilingual generator; specifically, we will be concerned with producing English and German sentences. The focus of the system is on lexical paraphrases, and one of the contributions of the thesis is in identifying, analyzing and extending relevant linguistic research so that it can be used to handle...

Recent developments in connectionist architectures for symbolic computation have made it possible to investigate parsing in a connectionist network while still taking advantage of the large body of work on parsing in symbolic frameworks. The work discussed here investigates syntactic parsing in the temporal synchrony variable binding model of symbolic computation in a connectionist network. This computational architecture solves the basic problem with previous connectionist architectures, while keeping their advantages. However, the architecture does have some limitations, which impose constraints on parsing in this architecture. Despite these constraints, the architecture is computationally adequate for syntactic parsing. In addition, the constraints make some significant linguistic predictions. These arguments are made using a specific parsing model. The extensive use of partial descriptions of phrase structure trees is crucial to the ability of this model to recover the syntactic st...

We define an order independent version of default unification on typed feature structures. The operation is