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Fluid Construction Grammar for Historical and Evolutionary Linguistics

Summary

The paper is a system demonstration of Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). It is an open computational formalism with which historical linguistics can investigate not only which changes took place in a language, but also which cognitive and cultural mechanisms caused them. FCG builds on a cognitive-functional approach rather than on generative grammars with a rigid type system. Each construction in it pairs meaning with form and has a semantic and a syntactic pole, written as feature structures. The same processor applies a construction both for parsing and for production: it is enough to change the direction, and everything runs on two kinds of unification, match and merge. The authors show how to build multi-agent experiments in which a population of FCG agents plays language games. A reflective meta-level with diagnostics and repair strategies allows the agents to learn a grammar and align it among themselves. As an example, they examine an experiment in which grammatical agreement emerges. The paper reports no quantitative results. Its value lies in being a ready-made, extensible tool that complements corpus-based methods.

Key points

  • For each language system, the methodology involves four steps: Reconstruction, Individual Learning, Population Alignment and Grammaticalization.
  • The demo experiment is based on Beuls and Steels (2013). The speaker describes up to three objects in a scene to the hearer. Four strategies are compared: a purely lexical baseline, formal agreement markers without meaning, markers with meaning, and grammaticalization, i.e. the conversion of lexical constructions into markers.
  • FCG connects to FrameNet and WordNet to load thousands of lexical entries. There is a web interface based on HTML/AJAX and construction networks with priming. Processing is a search with configurable heuristics and goal tests.
  • FCG has previously been applied to German case, the grammatical expression of space, the emergence of quantifiers, and aspect in Russian.
  • The code is open source; it is implemented in Common Lisp (CLOS) and runs on SBCL, CCL and LispWorks. It can be downloaded from fcg-net.org.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{wellens2013fluid,
  title = {{Fluid Construction Grammar for Historical and Evolutionary Linguistics}},
  author = {Wellens, Pieter and Trijp, Remi van and Beuls, Katrien and Steels, Luc},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations},
  year = {2013},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/P13-4022/}
}

References

26 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  2. Katrien Beuls and Luc Steels. 2013. Agent-based models of strategies for the emergence and evolution of grammatical agreement. PLoS ONE, 8(3):e58960, 03. find
  3. Katrien Beuls, Remi van Trijp, and Pieter Wellens. 2012. Diagnostics and repairs in Fluid Construction Grammar. In Luc Steels and Manfred Hild, editors, Language Grounding in Robots. Springer Verlag, Berlin. find
  4. Katrien Beuls. 2011. Construction sets and unmarked forms: A case study for Hungarian verbal agreement. In Luc Steels, editor, Design Patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar, pages 237–264. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. find
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