Introduction to the course

August 26, 2008

What is Embodied Construction Grammar?

It’s a type of grammar
It’s based on constructions
It’s embodied

1. What’s a grammar?

One idea of what a grammar is is a Generative (notice the capital ‘G’) grammar:

Language data is nothing more than an infinite set of sentence forms (meaning just words and morphemes in some order) that are grammatical, contrasted with an infinite number of sentences are not grammatical.
The human language capacity is centrally a grammar, which is an engine that produces all and only the grammatical utterances and none of the ungrammatical ones.
If this is what we think a grammar is, its character is pretty much unconstrained. It could be made up of a bunch of ordered rules, like in logical proofs. Or it could be a bunch of constraints that are ordered relative to one another. Or it could be any other type of production system.
This type of grammar is inherently dis-embodied – it has nothing to do with the human body or human experience in the world. This is in line with the Cartesian notion of dualism where the mind and the body have nothing to do with each other.
A Generative grammar is usually assumed to be shared by all members of a speech community.
The meanings of words and sentences, the contexts in which they are used, the influence of context on interpretation, and individual linguistic differences are usually not part of Generative grammars.

Another idea of a grammar is a descriptive grammar, which is a description of the language of a language community, used by linguists or language specialists.

ECG is a type of grammar different from these two. It doesn't focus just on utterances, and whether they're grammatical or not. Instead, it focus on the knowledge and processes that actual human language users bring to bear on the processes of language use. In this way it is cognitively oriented - it aims to capture what's going on inside people's heads when they produce and process language.

Inclusivity. A grammar is all the knowledge that an individual language user has about how to produce and understand meaningful language, including meaning, interpretation, context, speaker-specific details, etc.
The One Big Assumption of ECG: It assumes that linguistic knowledge is comprised of pairings of form and meaning, in the form of words, morphemes, idioms, and potentially, sequences of multiple words or classes of word.

2. What’s a construction?

A construction is any pairing of form and meaning.

Some people (e.g. Langacker in his Cognitive Grammar) call these symbolic structures.
Words are obviously constructions – they have some meaning, and a phonological form.
Morphemes are constructions for the same reason.
Idioms are constructions, too, because like words and morphemes, they pair some form with some meaning, except that the form may include phonological and syntactic components.
Phrasal patterns, such as the English ditransitive and dative, are constructions, because the pair some form (purely syntactic) with some meaning (like a transfer event or a motion event). Think about sentences like

John gave a cake to his brother versus John gave his brother a cake.

Mary willed her daughter a fortune vs. Mary willed a fortune to her daughter.

These sentences have slightly different meanings - the ditransitive includes the intent on the part of the agent of transferring possession of the patient to the recipient, and the recipient must be able to take possession.

She brought a book to the storeroom. But not ?She brought the storeroom a book.

That is unless, of course, “the storeroom” is standing not for the physical location but rather for some people or an organization located there. The differences in meaning and grammaticality, and the possible interpretation of the last sentence can be attributed to the meaning of the different phrasal constructions.

Some people, including many Generative grammarians, do not believe that constructions are actually part of language. For example, Chomsky (1989:43):

[…] within syntax […] there are no rules for particular languages and no construction-specific principles. A language […] is not, then, a system of rules, but a set of specifications for parameters in an invariant system of principles of UG, and traditional grammatical constructions are perhaps best regarded as taxonomic epiphenomena—collections of structures with properties resulting from the interaction of fixed principles with parameters set one way or another.

But these people are talking about a Generative grammar.

Remember that if all a grammar is is an engine for producing grammatical sentences, then it is relatively unconstrained. So you decide exactly how you want your grammar to look.
Many Generative grammarians want their grammars to be minimal, so anything syntactic pattern that can be predicted on the basis of other stuff is not represented.
This is a very different notion of grammar from the one we are adopting – which aims to document not just syntactic behavior but a broader base of linguistic behavior.
We can see that in order to account for the constructional behavior we saw above - where syntactic differences correlate with semantic ones - constructions, or something like them, must be operating in the human language user’s grammar.

3. What is embodiment?

Disembodied notions of language, like disembodied approaches to other aspects of cognition, treat language as completely independent of the organisms that produce it. Embodied approaches to language, by contrast, allow for the possibility that the particularities of the organism producing, learning, and understanding language may have an effect on the character of language.

Neural embodiment: How the brain is structured may have an effect on language.
Experiential embodiment: The particular experiences an individual has had may have an effect on language.
Social embodiment: The social purposes to which language is put and the social contexts in which it is used may have an effect on it.
Corporeal embodiment: Characteristics of the human body may have an effect on language.

ECG is embodied in these four ways:

Neural embodiment: Its formalism can be mapped down to neural architectures (though we won't talk much about this).
Experiential embodiment: It can demonstrably be learned on the basis of simple exposure to language in a given social and physical context.
Social embodiment: It interfaces with representations of the speaker’s and interlocutor’s beliefs, desires, and previous utterances.
Corporeal embodiment: It is built to be realized in a computational systems that perform actual language tasks, like understanding, production, and translation, using internal mechanisms similar to those in the human body.

4. The big picture

ECG can be best seen from the following depiction of the language understanding process.

Language users have knowledge of constructions, which are pairings of form knowledge and meaning knowledge.
This knowledge is used to form an analysis of an incoming utterance, which is compared with (combinations of) the constructions in the constructicon for both form and meaning.
The communicative context is also accessed during the formation of an analysis.
The product of an analysis is a parameterized meaning of the utterance, which is the input to a simulation mechanism.
The simulation is run, and the results serve to update the language user’s knowledge of the context and the world (and possibly also the constructicon – arrow not shown).

These constructions are specified formally, in a notation that is not dissimilar to the programming language java. Some examples:

5. What are we going to do in this class?

The goals of this class are twofold:

To encourage students to think critically about issues in grammar like constructions and embodiment
For students to gain fluency in ECG, such that they can apply it to their own research interests

To these ends, the course will proceed as follows

First, we’ll to look at the foundations for ECG: Construction Grammar and Cognitive Grammar, spending a week on each.
Then we’ll to get into the nitty-gritty of how ECG works, looking at a number of topics, including how constructions combine, how they are learned, the relation between morphological and lexical constructions, how agreement is done, how ECG allows us to capture subtle cross-linguistic differences, among others.
Finally, students will present their own research, conducted through the course of the semester.