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How to make construction grammars fluid and robust

  • Luc Steels and Remi van Trijp
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Design Patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar
This chapter is in the book Design Patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar

Abstract

Natural languages are fluid. New conventions may arise and there is never absolute consensus in a population. How can human language users nevertheless have such a high rate of communicative success? And how do they deal with the incomplete sentences, false starts, errors and noise that is common in normal discourse? Fluidity, ungrammaticality and error are key problems for formal descriptions of language and for computational implementations of language processing because these seem to be necessarily rigid and mechanical. This chapter discusses how these issues are approached within the framework of Fluid Construction Grammar. Fluidity is not achieved by a single mechanism but through a combination of intelligent grammar design and flexible processing principles.

Abstract

Natural languages are fluid. New conventions may arise and there is never absolute consensus in a population. How can human language users nevertheless have such a high rate of communicative success? And how do they deal with the incomplete sentences, false starts, errors and noise that is common in normal discourse? Fluidity, ungrammaticality and error are key problems for formal descriptions of language and for computational implementations of language processing because these seem to be necessarily rigid and mechanical. This chapter discusses how these issues are approached within the framework of Fluid Construction Grammar. Fluidity is not achieved by a single mechanism but through a combination of intelligent grammar design and flexible processing principles.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Foreword vii
  4. Part I. Introduction
  5. Introducing Fluid Construction Grammar 3
  6. A first encounter with Fluid Construction Grammar 31
  7. Part II. Grammatical structures
  8. A design pattern for phrasal constructions 71
  9. A design pattern for argument structure constructions 115
  10. Part III. Managing processing
  11. Search in linguistic processing 149
  12. Organizing constructions in networks 181
  13. Part IV. Case studies
  14. Feature matrices and agreement 205
  15. Construction sets and unmarked forms 237
  16. Syntactic indeterminacy and semantic ambiguity 265
  17. Part V. Fluidity and robustness
  18. How to make construction grammars fluid and robust 301
  19. Index 331
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.11.16ste

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Foreword vii
  4. Part I. Introduction
  5. Introducing Fluid Construction Grammar 3
  6. A first encounter with Fluid Construction Grammar 31
  7. Part II. Grammatical structures
  8. A design pattern for phrasal constructions 71
  9. A design pattern for argument structure constructions 115
  10. Part III. Managing processing
  11. Search in linguistic processing 149
  12. Organizing constructions in networks 181
  13. Part IV. Case studies
  14. Feature matrices and agreement 205
  15. Construction sets and unmarked forms 237
  16. Syntactic indeterminacy and semantic ambiguity 265
  17. Part V. Fluidity and robustness
  18. How to make construction grammars fluid and robust 301
  19. Index 331
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