Constructions: a new theoretical approach to language

A new theoretical approach to language has emerged in the past 10–15 years that allows linguistic observations about form–meaning pairings, known as ‘constructions’, to be stated directly. Constructionist approaches aim to account for the full range of facts about language, without assuming that a particular subset of the data is part of a privileged ‘core’. Researchers in this field argue that unusual constructions shed light on more general issues, and can illuminate what is required for a complete account of language. Constructions – form and meaning pairings – have been the basis of major advances in the study of grammar since the days of Aristotle. Observations about specific linguistic constructions have shaped our understanding of both particular languages and the nature of language itself. Bu

Input effects on the acquisition of a novel phrasal construction in five year olds

The present experiments demonstrate that children as young as five years old (M = 5;2) generalize beyond their input on the basis of minimal exposure to a novel argument structure construction. The novel construction that was used involved a non-English phrasal pattern: VN1N2, paired with a novel abstract meaning: N2 approaches N1. At the same time, we find that children are keenly sensitive to the input: they show knowledge of the construction after a single day of exposure but this grows stronger after three days; also, children generalize more readily to new verbs when the input contains more than one verb

Structural priming: Purely syntactic?

In a series of experiments. Bock and colleagues have demonstrated that subjects show a reliable increase in the use of particular syntactic constructions after having heard and repeated that construction in an unrelated sentence. Aspects of the data seem to indicate that it is syntactic constituent structure, independent of meaning, that underlies the facilitation in these situations. In this study we investigate whether more semantic factors might also lead to priming, and specifically whether the assignment of a semantic role to a particular participant in a prime sentence can increase the probability of a target sentence whose structure allows a similar assignment. To test this we replicate Bock's study and include a further set of primes (provide-with primes) which have the syntactic constituent structure of the dative, but share semantic role assignment with the ditransitive. If syntactic priming were triggered by constituent structure alone, primes like this would lead to more dative responses, relative to a ditransitive prime. If semantic involvement were crucial, on the other hand, this prime should elicit more ditransitive responses. In this study we find significantly more ditransitive responses following the provide-with sentence than following a dative prime, and no difference between the provide-with and ditransitive primes, suggesting that semantic factors indeed play a role

It Can't Go Down the Chimney Up: Paths and the English Resultative

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure (1991), pp. 368-37

A Unified Account of the Semantics of the English Ditransitive

Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1989), pp. 79-9

Social context modulates the effect of physical warmth on perceived interpersonal kindness:a study of embodied metaphors

Physical contact with hot vs. iced coffee has been shown to affect evaluation of the personal warmth or kindness of a hypothetical person (Williams & Bargh, 2008). In 3 studies, we investigated whether the manipulation of social context can modulate the activation of the metaphorical mapping, KINDNESS as WARMTH. After priming participants with warm vs. cold temperature, we asked them to evaluate a hypothetical ad-hoc ally or adversary on the kindness dimension, as well as on other qualities used as a control. We expected more extreme evaluations of kindness in the adversary than in the ally condition, and no effects on other ratings. We thus replicated the classical effect of physical warmth on kindness ratings and generalized it to a German-speaking population. In addition, when the two German studies were combined, we found evidence suggesting a contextual modulation of the temperature effect: only out-group members, namely adversaries, were judged as more kind when participants had experienced physical warmth; the effect was not evident in the ally (i.e., in-group) condition. These studies suggest that context can modulate metaphorical activation; they therefore represent an initial attempt to add nuance to our understanding of when embodied metaphors affect our decisions

Formulating Update Messages

This paper presents a method with which we can generate update messages for use with Smalltalk's dependency mechanism. The basic idea is that any messages which cause an object to change are forwarded to the object's dependants. The method is perfectly general and future-proofs objects against changes in their dependants. © 1995, ACM. All rights reserved

Conventional metaphors in longer passages evoke affective brain response

Conventional metaphorical sentences such as She’s a sweet child have been found to elicit greater amygdala activation than matched literal sentences (e.g., She’s a kind child). In the present fMRI study, this finding is strengthened and extended with naturalistic stimuli involving longer passages and a range of conventional metaphors. In particular, a greater number of activation peaks (four) were found in the bilateral amygdala when passages containing conventional metaphors were read than when their matched literal versions were read (a single peak); while the direct contrast between metaphorical and literal passages did not show significant amygdala activation, parametric analysis revealed that BOLD signal changes in the left amygdala correlated with an increase in metaphoricity ratings across all stories. Moreover, while a measure of complexity was positively correlated with an increase in activation of a broad bilateral network mainly involving the temporal lobes, complexity was not predictive of amygdala activity. Thus, the results suggest that amygdala activation is not simply a result of stronger overall activity related to language comprehension, but is more specific to the processing of metaphorical language

Causal interventions expose implicit situation models for commonsense language understanding

Accounts of human language processing have long appealed to implicit ``situation models'' that enrich comprehension with relevant but unstated world knowledge. Here, we apply causal intervention techniques to recent transformer models to analyze performance on the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC), where a single context cue shifts interpretation of an ambiguous pronoun. We identify a relatively small circuit of attention heads that are responsible for propagating information from the context word that guides which of the candidate noun phrases the pronoun ultimately attends to. We then compare how this circuit behaves in a closely matched ``syntactic'' control where the situation model is not strictly necessary. These analyses suggest distinct pathways through which implicit situation models are constructed to guide pronoun resolution.Comment: Findings of AC