This paper reports an on-line production study on how different levels of syntactic flexibility influence the production of locative resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Though previous studies show that having two available syntactic structures (flexible condition) facilitates language production and results in less errors and shorter reaction time than having only one possible synta...

We compare the performance of a transition-based parser in regards to different annotation schemes. We propose to convert some specific syntactic constructions observed in the universal dependency treebanks into a so-called more standard representation and to evaluate parsing performances over all the languages of the project. We show that the “standard” constructions do not lead systematically...

The frequency of words and syntactic constructions has been observed to have a substantial effect on language processing. This begs the question of what causes certain constructions to be more or less frequent. A theory of grounding (Phillips, 2010) would suggest that cognitive limitations might cause languages to develop frequent constructions in such a way as to avoid processing costs. This p...

Syntactic change tends to affect constructions, but treebanks annotate lower-level structure: PCFG rules or dependency arcs. This paper extends prior work in native language identification, using Tree Substitution Grammars to discover constructions which can be tested for historical variability. In a case study comparing Classical and Medieval Latin, the system discovers several constructions c...

In this paper, we describe our methods to detect noun compounds and light verb constructions in running texts. For noun compounds, dictionary-based methods and POStagging seem to contribute most to the performance of the system whereas for light verb constructions, the combination of POStagging, syntactic information and restrictions on the nominal and verbal component yield the best result. Ho...

We discuss two constructions (long scrambling and ECM verbs) which challenge most syntactic theories (including traditional TAG approaches) since they seem to require exceptional mechanisms and postulates. We argue that these constructions should in fact be analyzed in a similar manner, namely as involving a verb which selects for a " defective " complement. These complements are defective in t...

The paper deals with interpretative verbs as established by (Apresjan 2004) and interpretative converb constructions as established by (Boguslavskij 1977) and afterwards discussed in a cross-linguistic typological perspective in (Haspelmath & König 1995). It is shown that Apresjan’s approach offers a key to the semantics of converb (DEEPR) constructions. Special attention is paid to converb con...

In this paper, we propose an approach for studying the semantic representations of comparison words and comparative constructions based on the framework of E-HowNet. Our objective is to determine how the semantic composition mechanism works. The proposed method establishes a mapping between grammatical structures and fine-grained event structures for comparative constructions. We encode the eve...

Clause Union Laws require causee nominals to assume the relation of direct object or indirect object depending on the transitivity of corresponding non-causative constructions (Perlmutter & Postal 1974) or in accordance with the language specific rules (Gibson & Raposo 1986) in forming causative constructions. However, the causee nominals in Korean syntactic causatives are nominatively, accusat...

The ability of children to generalize over the linguistic input they receive is key to acquiring productive knowledge of verbs. Such generalizations help children extend their learned knowledge of constructions to a novel verb, and use it appropriately in syntactic patterns previously unobserved for that verb—a key factor in language productivity. Computational models can help shed light on the...