We propose and assess the novel idea of using automatically induced constructions as a unit of analysis for corpus-based discourse analysis. Automated techniques are needed in order to elucidate important characteristics of corpora for social science research into topics, framing and argument structures. Compared with current techniques (keywords, n-grams, and collocations), constructions captu...

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...

This paper shows how experiments on artificial language evolution can provide highly relevant results for important debates in linguistic theories. It reports on a series of experiments that investigate how semantic roles can emerge in a population of artificial embodied agents and how these agents can build a network of constructions. The experiment also includes a fully operational implementa...

• Di Eugenio and Penstein Ros6 were partially supported by Carnegie Mellon Faculty Development Fund # 1-13709. LIn the appropriate context, (la) could also be interpreted as asking H to bring the ironing board into the basement, where S is (or will be, at the time H executes the action). We currently neglect this possibility. down to the basement is a substep in the plan that achieves bring S t...

The Arabic dialects have a specific linguistic repertoire, cultural singularity and social privacy. dialect is only understood by the people who daily use it. This study aims at shedding light on proverbs dialectical expressions used Bani Hasan tribe (بني حسن) in Jordan. primary were to investigate Illocutionary force of targeted based speech acts theoretical framework. data collected from vari...

The paper emphasizes the inadequacy of formal semantics, the classical paradigm in semantics, in treating contextual dependence. Some phenomena of contextual dependence threaten one central assumption of the classical paradigm, namely the idea that linguistic expressions have a fixed meaning, and utterances have truth conditions well defined. It is possible to individuate three forms of context...

The common view in the literature is that the post-verbal NP of an existential construction cannot be interpreted as the topic of its sentence, where the term “sentence topic” is construed as an expression forming a relation of aboutness between itself and the clause in which it appears. The aim of this paper is to refute this claim. First, we discuss why the discourse functions associated with...