Belgian Journal of Linguistics - Volume 30, Issue 1, 2016

Word order, argument structure and unbounded dependencies are among the most important topics in linguistics because they touch upon the core of the syntax-semantics interface. One question is whether “marked” word order patterns, such as The man I talked to vs. I talked to the man, require special treatment by the grammar or not. Mainstream linguistics answers this question affirmatively: in the marked order, some mechanism is necessary for “extracting” the man from its original argument position, and a special placement rule (e.g. topicalization) is needed for putting the constituent in clause-preceding position. This paper takes an opposing view and argues that such formal complexity is only required for analyses that are based on syntactic trees. A tree is a rigid data structure that only allows information to be shared between local nodes, hence it is inadequate for non-local dependencies and can only allow restricted word order variations. A construction, on the other hand, offers a more powerful representation device that allows word order variations – even unbounded dependencies – to be analyzed as the side-effect of how language users combine the same rules in different ways in order to satisfy their communicative needs. This claim is substantiated through a computational implementation of English argument structure constructions in Fluid Construction Grammar that can handle both comprehension and formulation.

This squib first sketches the state-of-the-art in diachronic construction grammar by tracing it back to two strands of research which it distinguishes as historical construction grammar and constructionist grammaticalization theory. It then differentiates between usage-based work in diachronic construction grammar that focuses on (frequency of) use and work that centres on knowledge. It is posited that, to arrive at truly (radically) usage-based models of change, one should separate individual knowledge, or internal systems/constructicons, from assumed-to-be-shared knowledge, or external systems/constructicons. Two us-age-based models of constructional change, “Traugott/Trousdale” and “Fischer”, are assessed against this criterion. While the former explicitly distinguishes between individual and “community” knowledge, it is judged to confuse these by assigning a central role to reanalysis/neoanalysis. The latter model revolves around the role of analogy and is less confined to a semasiological account of the linear developments dictated by an external outlook.

This paper explores diachronic shifts in the literal and intensifying uses of dood ‘dead’ in the Dutch fake reflexive resultative construction. Without sufficient context, a clause like Hij werkte zich dood (lit. ‘He worked himself dead’) is ambiguous in that it is unclear whether dood expresses an actual result of the activity denoted by the verb or whether it intensifies that verbal activity. We will investigate shifts in the (relative) type and token frequencies of both subtypes over the last two centuries and show that the intensifying use has become predominant. Particular attention is paid to the notion of productivity, which may help us to elucidate the possible pathways along which dood – in its function as an intensifier – is moving. By taking into account the variety of verbs that dood has occurred with since the early 19th Century, we aim to assess whether the dramatic increase in relative frequency of intensifying dood is paralleled by a concomitant extension of its collocational range or, conversely, whether this increase in frequency is mainly due to the rise of some highly frequent collocations.

While recent years have seen an increased interest for the potential effects of language contact on the formal and/or semantic properties of constructions, existing case studies of (potentially) contact-induced change in individual constructions (e.g. Pietsch 2010 ; Höder 2012 , 2014 ; Van de Velde and Zenner 2010 ; Colleman and Noël 2014 , etc.) have so far made little impact on the booming field of diachronic construction grammar at large, i.e. they have stayed largely under the radar of constructionist theorizing about language change. The present paper reflects on the theoretical significance of a recent innovation in Dutch, viz. the emergence of an argument structure construction that mirrors the form and semantics of the English ‘time’-away construction first described in Jacken-doff (1997) . While it is fairly uncontroversial that English influence has something to do with this innovation, it is by no means easy to determine exactly what has happened. Even though an alternative scenario, in which the new Dutch pattern developed out of pre-existing Dutch pattern featuring weg ‘away’, cannot be ruled out, I will argue that one plausible way of accounting for the observed facts is to assume that a ready-made English form-meaning unit was copied into Dutch. On this view, the observed change would count as an instance of instantaneous grammatical constructionalization.

The present study combines recent interest on the impact of unconventional individual language use on grammar change ( Petré and Van de Velde 2014 , De Smet 2016 ) with research on how conventional grammar impacts on language users. To better understand their interplay, I will zoom in on the interaction of unconventional and conventional behaviour of individuals in the developments of [be Ving] and [be going to|go to INF]. Apart from enhancing our understanding of the long-term effects of the urge to be expressive, an important outcome of the analysis will be that it is precisely the way in which the spiral of the conventional leads to the unconventional to the conventional again, which may help explain the phenomenon of unidirectionality in language change.

One major lesson learned in the cognitive sciences is that even basic human cognitive capacities are extraordinarily complicated and elusive to mechanistic explanations. This is definitely the case for naming and identity. Nothing seems simpler than using a proper name to refer to a unique individual object in the world. But psychological research has shown that the criteria and mechanisms by which humans establish and use names are unclear and seemingly contradictory. Children only develop the necessary knowledge and skills after years of development and naming degenerates in unusual selective ways with strokes, schizophrenia, or Alzheimer disease. Here we present an operational model of social interaction patterns and cognitive functions to explain how naming can be achieved and acquired. We study the Grounded Naming Game as a particular example of a symbolic interaction that requires naming and present mechanisms that build up and use the semiotic networks necessary for performance in the game. We demonstrate in experiments with autonomous physical robots that the proposed dynamical systems indeed lead to the formation of an effective naming system and that the model hence explains how naming and identity can get socially constructed and shared by a population of embodied agents.

Social conventions govern countless behaviors all of us engage in every day, from how we greet each other to the languages we speak. But how can shared conventions emerge spontaneously in the absence of a central coordinating authority? The Naming Game model shows that networks of locally interacting individuals can spontaneously self-organize to produce global coordination. Here, we provide a gentle introduction to the main features of the model, from the dynamics observed in homogeneously mixing populations to the role played by more complex social networks, and to how slight modifications of the basic interaction rules give origin to a richer phenomenology in which more conventions can co-exist indefinitely.

This paper investigates how network structure influences the outcomes of reinforcement learning in a series of multi-agent simulations. Its basic results are the following: (i) contact between agents in networks creates similarity in the usage patterns of the signals these agents use; (ii) in case of complete networks, the bigger the network, the smaller the lexical differentiation; and (iii) in networks consisting of linked cliques, the distance between usage patterns reflects on average the structure of the network.

In the context of cultural evolution, we propose a multi-agent model that allows, through pair-wise interactions between homogeneous individuals of a population, to simulate the shift from a syntactic towards a semantic pronominal agreement system. We explore various gender mapping and learning mechanisms that can allow the agents to form a new agreement system using their semantic knowledge about the world. We investigate whether our strategies can yield cohesive clusterings over the semantic space. We notice that the system reaches full convergence in terms of gender preference at population level and that there are multiple successful ways of dividing the semantic space, including one that reflects the so-called individuation hierarchy, a case attested by a study of a spoken language data.

The present paper proposes an operational semantic model of natural language quantifiers (e.g., many, some, three) and their use in quantified noun phrases. To this end we use embodied artificial agents that communicate in and interact with the physical world. We argue that existing paradigms such as Generalized Quantifiers ( Barwise and Cooper 1981 ; Montague 1973 ) and Fuzzy Quantifiers ( Zadeh 1983 ) do not provide a satisfactory models for our situated-interaction scenarios and propose a more adequate semantic model, based on fuzzy-quantification.

Computational simulation models of cognitive linguistics are relatively scarce (cf Valenzuela, 2010 ). This is due, among other things, to the inherent complexity of the movement’s conception of language. Cognitive linguistics places great emphasis on the integration of language with sensorimotor and conceptual structure, as well as on the embodied nature of cognition and the perspective of language as a social construct. This has made it difficult for cognitive linguistics to take advantage of the benefits of computational simulation (cf McClelland 2009 ).

The robotic paradigm of Luc Steels ( Steels 1998 , 2000 , 2004 , 2005 ) offers one of the most complete implementations of cognitive linguistics to date. In this paradigm, autonomous robotic agents play communication games in which linguistic information is represented by a version of construction grammar called “Fluid Construction Grammar”. The present chapter explains how this simulation is a true implementation of the theoretical proposals made by cognitive linguistics. More specifically, we show how these proposals have been operationalized for their use in the system.

Computational simulations like the one described here should be of great interest to any cognitive linguist. They provide an excellent testing ground for any theoretical proposal, bringing cognitive linguistics even closer to the cognitive-science enterprise.