Mapping the constructicon with SYMPAThy. Italian word combinations between fixedness and productivity

This work introduces SYMPAThy, a data representation model in which the combinatorial properties of a lexical item are described by merging surface and deeper linguistic information. The proposed approach is then evaluated by comparing, for a sample list of verbal idioms, a set of SYMPAThy-based fixedness indexes against the relevant speaker-elicited indexes available in the descriptive norms collected by Tabossi et al. (2011

Word knowledge and word usage - Representations and processes in the mental lexicon

The final NetWordS Conference, held on the 30th and 31st of March, and 1st of April 2015 in Pisa, was convened by Prof. Pier Marco Bertinetto, Dr. Vito Pirrelli and Dr. Claudia Marzi, and brought together 91 participants (scholars, Post-Docs, PhD students) from numerous European, and some non-European, countries. A 3-day schedule involved all participants in a focused, cross-disciplinary discussion on representations and processes in the mental lexicon. People are known to understand, memorise and parse words in a context-sensitive, opportunistic way, by caching their most habitual and productive processing patterns into routinized behavioural schemes, similarly to what we observe for sequences of coordinated motor acts. Speakers, however, do not only take advantage of token-based information such as frequency of individual, holistically stored words, or episodic memories of word usage, but they are also able to organise stored word forms through abstract paradigmatic structures (or word families) whose overall size and distribution are important determinants of lexical categorisation, inference and productivity. Lexical organisation is, in fact, not necessarily functional to descriptive economy and minimisation of storage, but appears to be influenced by more dynamic, communicationoriented functions such as memorisation, prediction-based recognition and production. Lending support to this view, usage-based approaches to word processing have recently offered novel explanatory frameworks that capitalise on the stable correlation patterns between lexical representations on the one hand and process-based operations that make representations functional to communicative exchanges on the other hand. By focusing on the battery of cognitive functions supporting verbal communication (ranging from input recoding to rehearsal, access, recall and coactivation) and by exploring their psycholinguistic correlates and neuroanatomical substrates, these approaches promote a new view of language architecture as an emergent property of the interaction between language-specific input conditions and low-level, domain-specific cognitive predispositions

Pos-Patterns or Syntax? Comparing Methods for Extracting Word Combinations

This paper reports on work carried out in the framework of an ongoing project aimed at building an online, corpus - based lexicographic resource for Italian Word Combinations. Our aim is to compare two of the most commonly used methods for the automatic extraction of word combinations from corpora, with a view to evaluate their performance – and ultimately their efficacy – with respect to the task of acquiring word combinations for inclusion in the lexi cographi c combinatory resource

Multiword expressions

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a challenge for both the natural language applications and the linguistic theory because they often defy the application of the machinery developed for free combinations where the default is that the meaning of an utterance can be predicted from its structure. There is a rich body of primarily descriptive work on MWEs for many European languages but comparative work is little. The volume brings together MWE experts to explore the benefits of a multilingual perspective on MWEs. The ten contributions in this volume look at MWEs in Bulgarian, English, French, German, Maori, Modern Greek, Romanian, Serbian, and Spanish. They discuss prominent issues in MWE research such as classification of MWEs, their formal grammatical modeling, and the description of individual MWE types from the point of view of different theoretical frameworks, such as Dependency Grammar, Generative Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Lexicon Grammar

Insights from a multi-lingual perspective

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a challenge for both the natural language applications and the linguistic theory because they often defy the application of the machinery developed for free combinations where the default is that the meaning of an utterance can be predicted from its structure. There is a rich body of primarily descriptive work on MWEs for many European languages but comparative work is little. The volume brings together MWE experts to explore the benefits of a multilingual perspective on MWEs. The ten contributions in this volume look at MWEs in Bulgarian, English, French, German, Maori, Modern Greek, Romanian, Serbian, and Spanish. They discuss prominent issues in MWE research such as classification of MWEs, their formal grammatical modeling, and the description of individual MWE types from the point of view of different theoretical frameworks, such as Dependency Grammar, Generative Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Lexicon Grammar

Mapping the Constructicon with SYMPAThy: Italian Word Combinations between fixedness and productivity

This work introduces SYMPAThy, a data representation model in which the combinatorial properties of a lexical item are described by merging surface and deeper linguistic information. The proposed approach is then evaluated by comparing, for a sample list of verbal idioms, a set of SYMPAThy-based fixedness indexes against the relevant speaker-elicited indexes available in the descriptive norms collected by Tabossi et al. (2011).This work introduces SYMPAThy, a data representation model in which the combinatorial properties of a lexical item are described by merging surface and deeper linguistic information. The proposed approach is then evaluated by comparing, for a sample list of verbal idioms, a set of SYMPAThy-based fixedness indexes against the relevant speaker-elicited indexes available in the descriptive norms collected by Tabossi et al. (2011)

Mapping the constructicon with SYMPAThy. Italian word combinations between fixedness and productivity

This work introduces SYMPAThy, a data representation model in which the combinatorial properties of a lexical item are described by merging surface and deeper linguistic information. The proposed approach is then evaluated by comparing, for a sample list of verbal idioms, a set of SYMPAThy-based fixedness indexes against the relevant speaker-elicited indexes available in the descriptive norms collected by Tabossi et al. (2011)This work introduces SYMPAThy, a data representation model in which the combinatorial properties of a lexical item are described by merging surface and deeper linguistic information. The proposed approach is then evaluated by comparing, for a sample list of verbal idioms, a set of SYMPAThy-based fixedness indexes against the relevant speaker-elicited indexes available in the descriptive norms collected by Tabossi et al. (2011)