Embodied Construction Grammar Research Articles

Maximizing the explanatory power of constructions in Cognitive Construction Grammar(s)

Abstract This paper suggests two possible ways in which cognitively-oriented constructionist approaches (Cognitive Construction Grammar, Radical Construction Grammar, and Embodied Construction Grammar) could enhance the explanatory power of constructions. First, the anatomy of a construction should spell out how the morphosyntactic realizations of arguments are specifically mapped onto their inherent semantico-pragmatic properties, while also including detailed information concerning illocutionary force, information structure, register, politeness, etc. Second, it is argued that coercion should be best understood as a continuum allowing for varying degrees of (in-)compatibility between the verb and the construction taken as a whole. Moreover, parameterization and linguistic cueing prove useful to handle the dynamic interaction of the morphosyntactic, semantico-pragmatic, and discourse-functional hallmarks of constructions, including those which invite metonymic inferencing.

Advances in Embodied Construction Grammar

Abstract This paper describes the continuing goals and present status of the ICSI/UC Berkeley efforts on Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG). ECG is semantics-based formalism grounded in cognitive linguistics. ECG is the most explicitly inter-disciplinary of the construction grammars with deep links to computation, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Work continues on core cognitive, computational, and linguistic issues, including aspects of the mind/body problem. Much of the recent emphasis has been on applications and on tools to facilitate new applications. Extensive documentation plus downloadable systems and grammars can be found at the ECG Homepage.1

희망표현의 사용 교육 연구-문화 간 언어능력 연구의 조건을 구성하기 위하여-

Past, researchers have worked on the use of hope expressions in the Korean language. The study of expressive action is more effective when researchers directly observe people using their native language rather than through linguistics theory. Embodied Construction Grammar(ECG) is provides the theoretical basis for this research, cognitive character into account. The lingual focus of this research is on the use “-go sip-” in the self-introduction discourse between native speakers. The results of this research show it is found that hope expressions are the basic unit in the opening or creating of self-introduction discourse. This research reveals that some examinees construct discourse by inserting a hope expression as the starting point, while others do not. Self-introduction discourse is constructed by the relation of the predicate to agent-actor-action(3A). I argue that the necessity of this methodology1) is proved by the results of this study and this methodology will help research the cultural adaptation of the immigrants in Korea.

Grounding Meaning in Everyday Experience in the World: An Embodied Construction Grammar Analysis of Italian Caused-Motion Constructions

At a very general level, the present thesis may probably be better characterized as a two-folded enterprise: on the one hand, it is concerned with theoretical issues on the nature of language and cognition; on the other hand, its main goal is to carry out an empirical investigation of a circumscribed and clearly defined phenomenon in a specific language. With regard to the former, the starting point of the present study can be found in the conception of language as a cognitive function. Although mainstream paradigms in the fields of language and cognitive science tend to view language as an autonomous, innate faculty governed by domain-specific cognitive principles, we shall follow proponents of Embodied Cognition and Cognitive Linguistics and adopt the opposite starting point, according to which language is an emergent system shaped by the constant interplay of domain-general cognitive principles and embodied experience in the physical as well as sociocultural environment. The more concrete goal of this piece of work is to illustrate an analysis of a class of (rather prototypical) Italian caused-motion constructions: we shall be investigating a small sample of homogeneous utterances to provide a characterization of the various constructions (i.e. form-meaning pairings which can vary in size and level of concreteness) they instantiate and the way these contribute to the overall meaning of the expressions, allowing the language understander to grasp the semantic content of a message correctly. This goal will be pursued adopting the Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG) model, a computational formalism developed within the Neural Theory of Language paradigm, which stands on notions inherited from theories linking language to cognition and, ultimately, the latter to the bodily and experiential nature of the organism continuously interacting with the world. This model, applied to Italian data for the first time, possesses formal structures which allow the analyst to develop computational grammars adequate to investigate linguistic phenomena at different levels, examining both their formal and semantic properties, in order to capture the mechanisms whereby the interaction between the lexical units and the syntactic patterns instantiated in an utterance drives the understander to grasp the correct meaning of the message being conveyed. Overall, the application of the ECG approach to the Italian data analyzed in our case-study proves successful: the formalism can be easily extended to account for Italian data without requiring any substantial change, but just a few minor modifications. More generally, we can reasonably conclude that, due to its interdisciplinary roots which allow the model to include converging information from several different scientific disciplines, ECG proves suitable to exploit (and, possibly, elaborate) a number of notions inherited from the fields of Embodied Cognition and Cognitive Linguistics, endowing them with a rigorous computational dimension by means of its formalism. One of the main reasons of this model's effectiveness rests on its capability to satisfy two requirements which are often difficult to reconcile: flexibility and precision. Being extremely flexible, the formalism adopted in the analysis of our data can be adapted to a number of different situations, favoring the construction of computational grammars adequate to carry out the analysis of a several distinct phenomena in various different languages. At the same time, the level of precision of the ECG formalism allows us to develop rigorous grammars suitable to carry out consistent and plausible analysis of linguistic phenomena, also permitting to test their level of efficiency in real time.

Computational Cognitive Morphosemantics: Modeling Morphological Compositionality in Hebrew Verbs with Embodied Construction Grammar

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:This paper brings together the theoretical framework of construction grammar and studies of verbs in Modern Hebrew to furnish an analysis integrating the form and meaning components of morphological structure. In doing so, this work employs and extends Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG; Bergen and Chang 2005), a computational formalism developed to study grammar from a cognitive linguistic perspective. In developing a formal analysis of Hebrew verbs (section 3), I adapt ECG—until now a lexical/syntactic/semantic formalism—to account for the compositionality of morphological constructions, accommodating idiosyncrasy while encoding generalizations at multiple levels. Similar to syntactic constructions, morpheme constructions are related in an inheritance network, and can be productively composed to form words. With the expanded version of ECG, constructions can readily encode nonconcatenative root-and-pattern morphology and associated (compositional or noncompositional) semantics, cleanly integrated with syntactic constructions. This formal, cognitive study should pave the way for computational models of morphological learning and processing in Hebrew and other languages.

Herds of Wildebeest, Flasks of Vodka, Heaps of Trouble: An Embodied Construction Grammar Approach to English Measure Phrases

In this paper we examine English Measure Phrases (EMPs), for example, herd of zebras, cup of coffee, square of cloth, and miles of beach. Although EMPs internally resemble other phrases of the same form (a noun followed by of followed by a noun phrase), they interact with other elements in the clause in unique ways. On the basis of the phenomena studied in this paper, it will be necessary to distinguish EMPs from other N-of-NP phrases.