In a seminal study, Cameron-Faulkner et al. made two important observations about utterance-level constructions in English child-directed speech (CDS). First, they observed that canonical in/transitive sentences are surprisingly infrequent in child-direct speech (given that SVO word order is often thought…
Lexical models diverge on the question of how to represent complex words. Under the morpheme‐based approach, each morpheme is treated as a separate unit, while under the word‐based approach, morphological structure is derived from complex words. In this paper, we propose a new computational model of…
Multi-morphemic or morphologically complex words are most simply defined as lexical items composed of more than one morpheme. However, this simplicity is deceptive because, in order for this definition to work, one must endorse the notion of morphemes as independent meaningful units. This is problematic…
Betrachtet man gesprochene Sprache als eine multimodale, situativ verankerte Praxis (Clark, 1996; Kendon, 2014; Vigliocco et al., 2014; Perniss, 2018; Murgiano et al., 2020), so wird die Bedeutung von koverbalen Signalen, der physischen Umwelt und des umfassenderen kommunikativen Kontexts im Sprachgebrauch…
In construction grammar, the term multiple inheritance has been used to talk about constructions that inherit features that can be traced back to more than one construction. The constructions involved are organized hierarchically, in that the more specific construction inherits features from multiple…
This paper offers a review of research on demonstratives from an interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, we consider the role of demonstratives in current research on language universals, language evolution, language acquisition, multimodal communication, signed language, language and perception,…
Lausanne: Frontiers Research Foundation, 2020-11-25
Usage-based linguists and psychologists have produced a large body of empirical results suggesting that linguistic structure is derived from language use. However, while researchers agree that these results characterize grammar as an emergent phenomenon, there is no consensus among usage-based scholars…
Lausanne: Frontiers Research Foundation, 2020-11-23
Ergebnissen gebrauchsbasierter Forschung zufolge entsteht sprachliches Wissen aus dem Gebrauch einer bestimmten Sprache. Als eine Form assoziativen Lernens beruht Sprachelernen hiernach auf den domänenübergreifenden Fähigkeiten der Lerner, wiederkehrende Erfahrungsmuster zu erkennen, sich einzuprägen…
The present contribution examines object complement clauses from the perspective of constituent-order typology. In particular, it provides the first principled empirical investigation of the position of object clauses relative to the matrix verb. Based on a stratified sample of 100 languages, we establish…
Die vorliegende Arbeit präsentiert einen korpusbasierten Ansatz an die kognitive Verarbeitung komplexer linguistische Konstruktionen am Beispiel englischer Relativsatzkonstruktionen (RCC). Im theoretischen Teil wird für eine konstruktionsgrammatische Perspektive auf sprachliches Wissen argumentiert,…
Recent work in functional and cognitive linguistics has argued and presented evidence that the positioning of adverbial clauses is motivated by competing pressures from syntactic parsing, discourse pragmatics, and semantics. Continuing this line of research, the current paper investigates the effect…
Drawing on recent work in developmental and comparative psychology, this paper argues that demonstratives function to coordinate the interlocutors' joint focus of attention, which is one of the most basic functions of human communication. The communicative importance of demonstratives is reflected…
This article examines the ordering distribution of main and adverbial clauses. Using corpus data from spoken and written English, it is shown that the positioning of finite adverbial clauses vis-à-vis the main clause varies with their meaning or function: conditional clauses tend to precede the main…