Meaning construction, meaning interpretation and formal expression in the Lexical Constructional Model

This paper proposes an explanatory model for the lexical representation of the native speakers’ lexical knowledge of English prepositions. Lexical knowledge of prepositions as relational predicates includes argument structure (trajector-landmark) as inCognitive Grammar, situation types (position vs state) as inFunctional Grammar, lexical hierarchies (spatial subdomains) based on semantic primitives, as inNatural Semantic Metalanguage, and embodied perceptual parameters configured in four dimensions, namely, geometry, topology, force-dynamics and function (fromCognitive Linguistics). This model is illustrated here by expounding three lexical templates compatible with constructional templates in theLexical Constructional Model, representing the semantic decomposition of English prepositionsat,onandin.

This article reviews briefly some recent work on relationships across a spectrum of functionalist, cognitivist and constructionist approaches to language. It then goes on to chart the history of the model currently known as the Lexical Constructional Model, showing how it has developed from work in a range of earlier approaches: Dikkian Functional Grammar, Coseriu’s Lexematics, Role and Reference Grammar, Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage model, Mel’èuk’s Meaning-Text Theory, and most recently Goldberg’s version of Construction Grammar and the theory of metaphor and metonymy. The strengths of the model are then summarised, and a number of challenges for the future are discussed.

Contents: Piotr Stalmaszczyk: Turning Points in the Philosophy of Language and Linguistics. Preface - Katarzyna M. Jaszczolt: Time as Degress of Epistemic Commitment - Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk: Events as They Are - Francisco Jose Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez/Francisco Gonzalvez-Garcia: Illocutionary Meaning Revisited: Subjective Transitive Constructions in the Lexical Constructional Model - Janusz Badio: Simulation Semantics: A Synopsis - Tomasz Ciszewski: The End of Phonology: Some Philosophical Implications - Maria Jodlowiec: Metarepresentation and Language: A Relevance Theoretic Approach - Andrew Jorgensen: Understanding Semantic Scepticism - Henryk Kardela: Ludwik Fleck's Thought Style Revisited. Where Do Facts in Linguistics Come From? - Krzysztof Kosecki: Do Mechanisms and Abstract Ideas Have Inner Lives? The Concepts of Subject and Self in English Personification Metaphors - Jakub Macha: Metaphor in the Twilight Area between Philosophy and Linguistics - Ratikanta Panda: Is Anything Static About Meanings? A Wittgensteinian Perspective - Wiktor Pskit: Categories and Constructions in Current Syntactic Theory - Monika Rymaszewska-Chwist: So Who Is Right? In Search of Philosophy behind Cognitive Science - Slawomir Wacewicz: Concepts as Correlates of Lexical Items - Lei Zhu: Sound, Body and Writing: A Phenomenological View of Linguistics as Representation of Speech - Przemyslaw Zywiczynski: Classical Indian Philosophy of Language.

The aim of this study is to reexamine the status of constructions in ARTEMIS (Automatically Representing TExt Meaning via an Interlingua-based System), a Natural Language Understanding prototype that seeks to provide the syntactic and semantic structure of a given fragment in a natural language. The architecture of ARTEMIS has been designed to conform to the tenets of the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM), a theory in which constructions are a central tool for the linguistic description of languages. However, since ARTEMIS is a computational device, there are many formalization requirements which involve the adaptation of the LCM, a process which necessarily leads to reconsidering several issues, as are: (i) what counts as a constructional structure; (ii) how constructions contribute to parsing operations in ARTEMIS; and (iii) the location and the format of constructional patterns.

Construction Grammar approaches assume the existence of a constructicon , i.e. a network of grammatical constructions, or the conventionalized form-meaning pairings of a given language. However, construction grammarians generally offer analyses of constructions at one specific level of linguistic enquiry, without exploring the connections that exist with constructions belonging to other levels of description. The constructicon as a whole is thus hardly ever accounted for in a single explanatory theory or approach. Moving towards a more holistic view of language, this paper discusses the way in which a Construction Grammar model (the Lexical Constructional Model ) deals with constructions of diverse nature and complexity and with parallel inferential meaning-making mechanisms by relating both to the common idealized cognitive model types that they exploit.

This monograph studies cognitive operations on cognitive models across levels and domains of meaning construction. It explores in what way the same set of cognitive operations, either in isolation or in combination, account for meaning representation whether obtained on the basis of inferential activity or through constructional composition. As a consequence, it makes explicit links between constructional and figurative meaning. The pervasiveness of cognitive operations is explored across the levels of meaning construction (argument, implicational, illocutionary, and discourse structure) distinguished by the Lexical Constructional Model. This model is a usage-based approach to language that reconciles insights from functional and cognitive linguistics and offers a unified account of the principles and constraints that regulate both inferential activity and the constructional composition of meaning. This book is of value to scholars with an interest in linguistic evidence of cognitive activity in meaning construction. The contents relate to the fields of Cognitive Grammar, Cognitive Semantics, Construction Grammar, Functional Linguistics, and Inferential Pragmatics. Cognitive Modeling has been awarded the 2015 prize of the Spanish Association for Applied Linguistics (Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada, AESLA) for work by experienced researchers.

This paper does not deal with the topic of ‘the generosity of artificial languages from an Asian or a comparative perspective’. Rather, it is concerned with a particular case taken from a development in the Western tradition, when in the wake of the rise of formal logic at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century people in philosophy and later in linguistics started to use formal languages in the study of the semantics of natural languages. This undertaking rests on certain philosophical assumptions and instantiates a particular methodology, that we want to examine critically. However, that in itself is still too broad a topic for a single paper, so we will focus on a particular aspect, viz., the distinction between grammatical form and logical form and the crucial role it plays in how the relationship between natural languages and formal languages is understood in this tradition. We will uncover two basic assumptions that underlie the standard view on the distinction between grammatical form and logical form, and discuss how they have contributed to the shaping of a particular methodology and a particular view on the status of semantics as a discipline. But before we turn to the topic at hand, a few more words on the general nature of the investigation are in order. Its general aim is to find out how semantics constructs its object, i.e., we are interested in what semanticists view as the proper object of study, how they think this object can best be approached, and how they view the relations between their own undertaking and neighbouring disciplines that deal with related, or even the same kind of phenomena, such as cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology. The background assumption is that, much like in other disciplines, semantics, too, does not have its object of investigation cut out for itself by nature, but constructs it in a complex process that involves empirical elements (‘facts’ being already too dangerous a term), philosophical assumptions, and borrowings

This paper analyses the domain of verbs of anger and closely related emotions in order to implement a formalised lexical constructional account. Through a detailed analysis of psych-verbs, this research explores their syntactic and semantic specifications. By investigating the roles of experiencers and stimuli arguments either as syntactic subject or object when causing changes in psychological states, the study attempts to shed light on the syntactic and semantic properties of anger and related verbs and the constructions in which they occur. Drawing on constructional and lexical templates for argument structure, this study provides a detailed mapping of how language lexicalises verbal predicates of anger. Overall, this research offers an insight into their formalised representation, relying on the general principles of the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM) (Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera-Masegosa, 2014; Ruiz de Mendoza & Mairal-Usón, 2007, 2008, 2011), Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) (Bentley et al., 2023; Van Valin, 2005; Van Valin & La Polla, 1997), and Construction Grammar (CxG) (Fillmore & Kay, 1996; Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Hoffmann, 2022; Michaelis, 2013; Sag & Boas, 2012).

Lexical Classes and the Conative Construction in Old English This paper is concerned with the description of the event structure and the meaning components that motivate the realization of the conative construction within some canonical Old English verb classes. In the same line as the latest proposals framed within the Lexical Constructional Model, this kind of description is intended to evidence the essential role of semantic features that are not necessarily realized in the syntax and thus help elucidate and comprehend lexical-constructional processes. Besides, this work seeks to establish adequate criteria to identify the conative construction and provides insights into the distribution of diathetic alternations associated to the conative construction in Old English.

A good number of lexical and grammatical models make use of systems of meaning representation which are based on a theory of event structure. Theories of event structure quite often take aspectual features as the backbone for the semantic representation of symbolic units, i.e predicates and constructions. One of the most comprehensive and detailed proposals for the aspectual characterization of both lexical units and argumental constructions can be found in the Lexical Constructional Model, which in turn is based on the system for semantic representations from Role and Reference Grammar. However, such a system presents some drawbacks, which stem mainly from not establishing a neat distinction between what is properly lexical and what is contributed by higher constructional units in the denotation of specific events. Taking such a distinction as a basic premise for a sound characterization of events, in this paper a reassessment of the typology of aspectual classes from these models is made; this critical revision is followed by a hierarchical reorganization of such aspectual classes.

This chapter offers an overview of Ronald Langacker's Cognitive Grammar (CG), with special reference to the relation between CG and constructionist approaches. It explains that although CG was developed prior to constructionist approaches, it shares many assumptions with them. CG views language as being grounded in embodied human experience and language-independent cognitive processes, and it assumes grammar to be inherently meaningful, and that language consists of form-meaning pairings or assemblies of symbolic structures. The chapter also addresses the relation between lexemes and constructions and discusses semantic and grammatical roles in CG.

The expression hybrid-computing denotes a category of computing elements where human-based and machine-based computing elements complement each other. The aim from such hybridity is to support human tasks. For example, TopCoder could be used to develop hybrid computing elements to be used in crowdsourcing software. Developing human-based computing elements is a more complex process than developing machine-based computing elements, as the task must be structured well as the Turing machines. This leads to the most difficult question of the unknown requirements and having to deal with more macro-sociological factors on tasks than formal languages usually work with. In this paper, we model the hybridity using two types of computing elements: the humanbased, with whatever purposes the crowd envision, and the machine-based, which is used to develop it. We present a new framework to help provide such hybridity. It identifies the underlying building-blocks by using a biological metaphor. We call these building-blocks the of collective intelligence systems, the conditions under which each gene is useful, and the possibilities for combining and re-combining these genes to harness crowds effectively. Employing an analogy from biology where the operator relating the crowd and the parameter to be social phenomena is assumed to belong to semi-algebraic sets. We evaluated our framework by developing a business application through crowd work. The primary result was completed well for managing the crowdsourced software.

The definition and simulation of processes using Work flow technology is becoming more and more popular. In that way, to standardize and simulate complex processes it is needed high expressive languages able to be automatically executed by computers. Currently, high expressive languages that can be used for simulation and definition of processes are based in Petri Nets technology. Nevertheless, Petri Nets are difficult to understand by processes experts with no computer science training or expertise and are more complex to be executed than other simpler approaches like finite automatons. In this paper an automata based mathematical tool with a high expressivity capacity is presented. This framework is easier to understand also by non computer science expert sand its automation is simple in order to allow to experts to define formal work flows that can be easily automated.

A tanulmányi célú migráció értelmezésemben transznacionális migráció, míg az e folyamatban résztvevő migránsok a transznacionális migránsok ideáltípusához közelítenek. A tanulmányi célú migrációt nem egyirányú és egyszeri elmozdulásként, hanem időben elhúzódó, nyitott kimenetelű folyamatként értelmezhetjük. Bármeddig húzódnak is el a tanulmányok, a migránsoknak előbb vagy utóbb döntést kell hozniuk a végleges (vagy annak tervezett) letelepedésről, arról, hogy életüket hol képzelik el. Írásomban azt mutatom be, hogy a magyarországi továbbtanulásról, illetve az itt maradásról vagy a hazatelepedésről szóló történetek milyen jellegzetes narratívákba ágyazódva jelennek meg a vajdasági magyar fiatalok elbeszéléseiben. A családorientált, a kisebbségi magyar identitás köré szerveződő, valamint az orientalista diskurzushoz kapcsolódó narratívák elemzésének kapcsán a migrációról szóló történetek, a migrációs döntések és a narratív identitás összefüggéseit igyekszem feltárni.

Biochemical reactions that take place concurrently in a cell can be explored and analyzed by symbolic systems biology. These cellular processes can be modeled with symbolic mathematical models through the use of rewrite rules. Our goal is to define formal models that capture biologists intuitions and reasoning. Pathway Logic is a system for developing executable formal models of biomolecular processes. Analyses of biological facts can be obtained from such models. Ocular melanoma is the most frequent malignant primary intraocular tumor in adult population and the second most common site of malignant melanoma in the body. The knowledge of the signaling pathways involved in melanoma offers new treatment strategies. In this paper, we provide a symbolic system that explores complex and dynamic cellular signaling processes that induce cellular proliferation and survival in choroidal melanoma.