Putting connections centre stage in diachronic Construction Grammar

Abstract

Construction Grammar conceptualizes language as a hierarchically organized network of constructions, defined as conventional pairings of form and meaning. Importantly, constructions are interlinked: vertical links connect lower-level constructions with their higher-level parents; horizontal links connect sister constructions on the same level. While the importance of vertical connections is well-established, horizontal connections have received only little attention in the theoretical literature so far. The power of horizontal connections stems from their ability to express syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. By means of two classic case studies, we will show how shifts in similarity relations that derive from shared horizontal connections down to the utterance level, enable changes in paradigmatic affiliations to constructions higher-up in the network. Our first case study relates the emergence of a new construction, [BE going to INF], to the co-occurrence of its three constituent constructions in specific contexts that were favourable to a holistic interpretation. The second case study describes how a shared set of strong syntagmatic connections strengthened the paradigmatic ties between periphrastic DO and the modal auxiliaries, ultimately causing periphrastic DO to break free from its lexical origins and fully adopt its new role as auxiliary. Generally, while constructional nodes cannot be reduced to horizontal connections between forms and/or meanings, knowing the nature of such connections is essential to a full understanding of both the emergence of new constructions as well as the consolidation of existing ones.1 First authorship is shared for this paper. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. The research for the first case study is part of the Mind-Bending Grammars project, which is funded by the ERC Horizon 2020 programme (Project ID 639008; www.uantwerpen.be/mind-bending-grammars/), that of the second case study of the project To do or not to do? funded by the Flemish Special Research Fund (BOF; Project ID FFB160227). Both projects are hosted at the University of Antwerp. All partners are hereby gratefully acknowledged.

Constructionist approaches: Past, present, future

“…Cognitive CxG, meanwhile, has developed a broad inventory of empirical methods to study the synchronic and diachronic use of constructions and draw inferences about their representation in speakers' minds. In particular, proponents of the framework draw on an ever expanding set of corpus-based methods, including measures of frequency, dispersion and association (Gries 2008), distributional semantic methods (Hilpert & Perek 2015) and (most recently) artificial neural networks (Budts & Petré 2020). These corpus approaches have been increasingly complemented by experimental paradigms, such as acceptability judgments (Gries & Wulff 2009), sorting tasks (Perek 2012), artificial language learning (Casenhiser & Goldberg 2005) and priming (Ungerer 2021).…”

“…But nevertheless, ANNs may still constrain the way in which symbolic networks are constructed, for example by providing estimates of the connection strength between patterns that can then be represented with a symbolic architecture. This is illustrated by Budts and Petré's (2020) study, who provide one of the yet rare applications of ANNs in (Diachronic) Construction Grammar. Training their model on corpus data between 1580 and 1700, the authors simulate how the distributional profile of periphrastic do became increasingly similar to those of modal auxiliaries like will, can and may.…”

Cognitive Linguistics and a Usage‐Based Approach to the Study of Semantics and Pragmatics

“…For this reason, predictive DSMs yield better-quality vectors (Baroni et al 2014) and are gradually replacing count-based DSMs (whose vectors are both long and sparse) in the detection of shifts in constructional meaning. The efficiency of neural language models in cognitive/constructional semantics have been exemplified by Budts (2020), Budts & Peter Petré (2020), Fonteyn (2021), Fonteyn &Manjavacas (2021), andDesagulier (2022).…”

A connectionist approach to analogy. On the modal meaning of periphrastic do in Early Modern English

“…Word embeddings are derived fully automatically from the distribution of words in a large corpus and implicitly encode semantic properties (like near-synonymity) as well as syntactic properties (like part of speech) (e.g. Mikolov et al 2013;Hamilton et al 2016;Budts and Petré 2020) for neural embeddings; Hilpert and Perek 2015 for non-neural embeddings; Dubossarsky et al 2017;Tahmasebi et al 2018 for a comparison between various types of embeddings). If the embeddings of all the words in a sentence are placed right next to each other, the sentence representation forms a 2D-grid not unlike a picture.…”