Productivity is a central concept in the study of language and language acquisition. As a test case for exploring the notion of productivity, we focus on the noun slots of verb frames, such as __want__, __see__, and __get__. We develop a novel combination of measures designed to assess both the flexibility and creativity of use in these slots. We do so using a rigorously controlled sample of child speech and child directed speech from three English-speaking children between the ages of (...) 2–3 years and their caregivers. We find different levels of creativity and flexibility between the adult and child samples for some measures, for some slots, and for some developmental periods. We discuss these differences in the context of verb frame semantics, conventionality versus creativity and child errors, and draw some tentative conclusions regarding developmental changes in children's early grammatical representations. (shrink)

The input to phonological reasoning are alternations, that is, variations in the pronunciation of related words, such as in electri[k] ‐ electri[s]‐ity. But phonologists cannot agree what counts as a relevant alternation: the issue is highly contentious despite a research record of over 50 years. We believe that the experimental setup presented may contribute to this debate based on a kind of evidence that was not brought to bear to date. Our experiment was thus designed to distinguish between alternations where (...) phonological computation plays no role, and those where it has contributed to language production. The design manipulates two factors that to date have not been considered in experimental studies of language production: linguistic complexity and alternation specificity. The former is understood as extra processing demands issued by two types of linguistic activity, morphosyntactic and phonological. Our results show that reaction time latencies are longer when participants are burdened with both morphosyntactic and phonological tasks than when they carry out just a morphosyntactic task, and they are still shorter in absence of both types of demands. These results allowed us to address alternation specificity, that is, the fact that different alternations (within a language or across languages) may be driven by different production routines (an idea that is consensual among linguists but underdeveloped in the psycholinguistic literature). Our study shows that four different alternations in French produce alternation‐specific signatures in reaction time latencies. These findings may thus redound to the advantage of psycholinguistic studies by identifying two new factors, as well as produce results that speak to the linguistic quarrels. (shrink)

Framed in psychological terms, the basic question of linguistic theory is what is stored in memory, and in what form. Traditionally, what is stored is divided into grammar and lexicon, where grammar contains the rules and the lexicon is an unstructured list of exceptions. We develop an alternative view in which rules of grammar are simply lexical items that contain variables, and in which rules have two functions. In their generative function, they are used to build novel structures, just as (...) in traditional generative linguistics. In their relational function, they capture generalizations over stored items in the lexicon, a role not seriously explored in traditional linguistic theory. The result is a highly structured lexicon with rich patterns among stored items. We further explore the possibility that this sort of structuring is not specific to language, but appears in other cognitive domains as well, such as the structure of physical objects, of music, and of geographical and social knowledge. The differences among cognitive domains do not lie in this overall texture, but in the materials over which stored relations are defined. The challenge is to develop theories of representation in these other domains comparable to that for language. (shrink)

All human languages are characterised by inherent synchronic variability (Hudson, Cognitive Linguistics 8: 73–108, 1997, English Language and Linguistics 11: 383–405, 2007a) and are subject to change over time. Consequently, due to this central role of variation and change, any explanatorily adequate cognitive theory of language should aim to account for both of these phenomena. The present special issue explores how usage-based Construction Grammars can address issues of linguistic variation and change. In particular, focusing on English, we will show how (...) constructionist approaches provide new insights for the study of variation and change in the English language as well as how data from English can help to refine construction grammar theories. This introduction will give a short overview of aspects of constructionist approaches to language which are of relevance to the modelling of linguistic variation and change. In addition to our discussion of the modelling of synchronic and diachronic variation in construction grammar, we provide an overview of the topics addressed by the seven articles in this special issue. (shrink)

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 as to how the various results can be explained and integrated into an explicit theory or model. Building on network theory, the current paper outlines a structured network approach to the study of grammar in which the core concepts of (...) syntax are analyzed by a set of relations that specify associations between different aspects of a speaker’s linguistic knowledge. These associations are shaped by domain-general processes that can give rise to new structures and meanings in language acquisition and language change. Combining research from linguistics and psychology, the paper proposes specific network analyses for the following phenomena: argument structure, word classes, constituent structure, constructions and construction families, and grammatical categories such as voice, case and number. The article builds on data and analyses presented inDiessel but approaches the topic from a different perspective. (shrink)

A growing body of evidence in cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggests a deep interconnection between sensory-motor and language systems in the brain. Based on recent neurophysiological findings on the anatomo-functional organization of the fronto-parietal network, we present a computational model showing that language processing may have reused or co-developed organizing principles, functionality, and learning mechanisms typical of premotor circuit. The proposed model combines principles of Hebbian topological self-organization and prediction learning. Trained on sequences of either motor or linguistic units, the (...) network develops independent neuronal chains, formed by dedicated nodes encoding only context-specific stimuli. Moreover, neurons responding to the same stimulus or class of stimuli tend to cluster together to form topologically connected areas similar to those observed in the brain cortex. Simulations support a unitary explanatory framework reconciling neurophysiological motor data with established behavioral evidence on lexical acquisition, access, and recall. (shrink)

This paper argues that neurolinguistics has the potential to yield insights that can feed back into corpus-based Cognitive Linguistics. It starts by discussing how far the cognitive realism of probabilistic statements derived from corpus data currently goes. Against this background, it argues that the cognitive realism of usage-based models could be further enhanced through deeper engagement with neurolinguistics, but also highlights a number of common misconceptions about what neurolinguistics can and cannot do for linguistic theorizing.