Revisiting Aktionsart types for lexical classes

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.

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).

This paper discusses how the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM) contributes to our understanding of meaning is constructed, interpreted and expressed. It especially addresses the role of constructional meaning in this complex process, while making critical revisions of other constructionist accounts of language, whether cognitivist or functionalist. It includes the notion of replicability into the definition of construction. According to this notion, a form-meaning pairing can be considered a construction, even if the pairing is not frequent, provided that it can be felt by competent native speakers as being ‘potentially replicable’, i.e. as being naturally meaningful without doing any violence to the nature of the language to which the construction belongs. The paper further argues that constructional structure mediates the syntactic realization of verbal meaning. In this view, meaning is not composed by assembling concepts, as postulated in Cognitive Grammar, but rather by making use of the conceptual scaffolding provided by constructions. Then, the paper relates the architecture of the LCM to a taxonomy of cognitive models and addresses meaning construction from the point of view of the descriptive and explanatory tools of the LCM. These tools include the definition of several central processes: subsumption, amalgamation, and saturation of variables. The role of each process is assessed at the various descriptive levels of the LCM. Finally, the paper relates formal expression to meaning representation in terms of idiomatic and non-idiomatic constructions. In this connection it specifies the requirements for full formal expression and relates such requirements to the format of constructional templates in the LCM.

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 article is dedicated to the question on the authorship of the “Answer to a Protest” which is adjacent to the cycle of essays by V.P. Meshchersky “Letters of a Freethinker” in the weekly journal “Grazhdanin” (“The Citizen”). The attributions of the “Answer to a Protest” undertaken by V.A. Viktorovich (Dostoevsky’s authorship hypothesis) and B.V. Fedorenko (Meshchersky’s authorship hypothesis) are compared and critically examined. The documentary sources for the attribution of the article are analyzed: the fee list of the journal “Grazhdanin”, Meshchersky’s letter to Dostoevsky dated August 19, 1873, Dostoevsky’s testimony in the published note to the “Answer to a Protest”, etc. In the text of the “Answer to a Protest” lexical units and syntactic constructions are typical for both Meshchersky’s and Dostoevsky’s publications, and equally inherent in the texts of both possible authors. The analysis of the content and style of the article (with the involvement of documentary sources) allows us to consider it as the result of a co-authorship between Dostoevsky and Meshchersky, arising from edits and additions made by the editor of the journal “Grazhdanin” on the original author’s manuscript.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

In this paper, we present two experiments focussing on linguistic classification and annotation of examples, using zero-shot prompting. The aim is to show how large language models can confirm or reject the linguistic judgements of experts in order to increase the productivity of their work. In the first experiment, new lexical units evoking a particular FrameNet semantic frame are selected simultaneously with the annotation of examples with the core frame elements. The second experiment attempts to categorise verbs into the aspectual classes, assuming that only certain combinations of verbs.

The article deals with the sociolect of the drifting subculture and its lexical features. Like any other, this sociolect not only generates unique lexical units to describe the realities of life of those belonging to the subculture but also contains numerous borrowings of lexemes and lexical constructions from other systems and subsystems of language, such as literary language, substandard language, related terminological and jargon systems. The author analyzed vocabulary collected with the use of the continuous sampling method when viewing numerous videos on the subject of drift. The analysis has shown that the sociolect contains borrowings from literary language, general jargon, sports jargon, motorsport jargon, jargon of car mechanics and substandard language. The presence of a large number of lexemes and lexical structures borrowed from the above-mentioned terminological and jargon systems is due to the mixed composition of carriers of the drifting sociolect. It includes not only pilots, judges and fans but also mechanics, commentators, track staff, as well as street racers. All the above experts and amateurs largely use motorsport, engineering, technical and special sports terms and jargon describing the realities of the subculture under study. As part of the sociolect, borrowings from Japanese and English languages have been found, which is due to the fact that the subculture originated in Japan and then developed in the west. The study has also identified an extensive onomastic system of the sociolect. This system includes both individual and group onyms. The relevance of this article is due to the lack of research on the sociolect and vocabulary of the drifting subculture despite the fact that the subculture itself is becoming increasingly popular.

Modern theory of automatic control of dynamical systems contains in its arsenal an extremely valuable tool. We are talking about the structural representation of an arbitrary dynamical system. Such representation allows us to divert attention from the physical nature of a process (thermal, vibrational, diffusion, etc) to the physical nature of the elements (mechanical, pneumatic, etc). In the context of structural representation of a mechanical system, we can explore diverse aspects of dynamic processes (controllability, invariance, stability, etc.) [1–3]. The theory of vibration protection is a very attractive application area of structural theory for several reasons. First, many fundamental aspects and concepts of control theory in general and the theory of vibration protection coincide; these include input–output concepts, transfer function, etc. Second, a vibration protection system consists of pronounced blocks and can be represented in symbolic form by a functional block diagram. Successful attempts that consider the problems of vibration protection in terms of the structural theory have been performed by Kolovsky [4, 5], Eliseev [6], and Bozhko et al. [7]. Systematic exposition of the structural theory to systems with distributed parameters was presented by Butkovsky [8]. Structural representation of the system in conjunction with the vibration protection device is a common way of describing complex dynamical systems with lumped and distributed parameters. Structural theory allows us to easily introduce changes into a vibration protection system of the object and find a relationship between any coordinates of a system, while the differential equation of the system assumes a fixed input–output. The Simulink (MATLAB) package has a full set of blocks that allows us to implement just about any structural model.

The Tigrinya language is agglutinative and has a large number of inflected and derived forms of words. Therefore a Tigrinya large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system often has a large number of different units and a high out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rate if a word is used as a recognition unit of a language model (LM) and lexicon. Therefore a morpheme-based approach has often been used and a morpheme is used as the recognition unit to reduce the high OOV rate. This paper presents an automatic speech recognition experiment conducted to see the effect of OOV words on the performance speech recognition system for Tigrinya. We tried to solve the OOV problem by using morphemes as lexicon and language model units. It has been found that the morpheme-based recognition system is better lexical and language modeling units than words. An absolute improvement (in word recognition accuracy) of 3.45 token and 8.36 types has been obtained as a result of using a morph-based vocabulary.

In this paper we propose a new approach to the constructive mathematical representation of nonlinear systems transforming stochastic signals. The approach is based on a combination of a new best ap...