The current study marries two important observations. First, there is a growing recognition that word meanings need to be flexibly extended in new ways as new contexts arise. Second, as evidenced primarily within the perceptual domain, autistic individuals tend to find generalization more challenging while showing stronger veridical memory in comparison to their neurotypical peers. Here we report that a group of 80 autistic adults finds it more challenging to flexibly extend the meanings of familiar words in new ways than a group of 80 neurotypical peers, while the autistic individuals outperform the neurotypicals on a novel word-learning task that does not require flexible extension. Results indicate that recognized differences in generalization present an ongoing challenge for autistic adults in the domain of language, separate from social cognition, executive function, or the ability to assign single fixed meanings to new words.

The constructionist approach argues that communication is central to language learning, language use, and language change. We argue that the approach provides a useful perspective on how autistic children learn language, as it anticipates variable outcomes and suggests testable predictions. First, a reduced ability and interest in tracking the attention and intentions of others should negatively impact early language development, and a wealth of evidence indicates that it does. Second, and less discussed until recently, a hyperfocus on specifics at the expense of generalizations, common among people on the spectrum, should also negatively impact language development, and recent evidence suggests this is also the case. Pace Kissine's 2021 target article, it is unsurprising that children can learn some second language from watching videos, and it is unclear how an appeal to 'innate' language-specific knowledge could explain the range of outcomes of individuals on the autism spectrum.

The current work suggests that two factors conspire to make vocabulary learning challenging for youth on the Autism spectrum: (1) a tendency to focus on specifics rather than on relationships among entities, and (2) up to 80% of words are associated with distinct but related meanings (e.g. a baseball cap, pen cap, bottle cap). Neurotypical (NT) children find it easier to learn multiple related meanings of words (polysemy) in comparison to multiple unrelated meanings (homonymy). We exposed 60 NT children and 40 verbal youth on the Autism spectrum to novel words. The groups’ performance learning homonyms was comparable, but unlike their NT peers, youth on the spectrum did not display the same advantage for learning polysemous words compared to homonyms.

The constructionist framework is more relevant than ever, due to efforts by a broad range of researchers across the globe, a steady increase in the use of corpus and experimental methods among linguists, consistent findings from laboratory phonology and sociolinguistics, and striking advances in transformer- based large language models. These advances promise exciting developments and a great deal more clarity over the next decade. The constructionist approach rests on two interrelated but distinguishable tenets: a recognition that constructions pair form with function at varying levels of specificity and abstraction, and the recognition that our knowledge and use of language are dynamic and usage based.

Languages are powerful solutions to coordination problems: They provide stable, shared expectations about how the words we say correspond to the beliefs and intentions in our heads. Yet, language use in a variable and nonstationary social environment requires linguistic representations to be flexible: Old words acquire new ad hoc or partner-specific meanings on the fly. In this article, we introduce continual hierarchical adaptation through inference (CHAI), a hierarchical Bayesian theory of coordination and convention formation that aims to reconcile the long-standing tension between these two basic observations. We argue that the central computational problem of communication is not simply transmission, as in classical formulations, but continual learning andadaptation over multiple timescales. Partner-specific common ground quickly emerges from social inferences within dyadic interactions, while community-wide social conventions are stable priors that have been abstracted away from interactions with multiple partners. We present new empirical data alongside simulations showing how our model provides a computational foundation for several phenomena that have posed a challenge for previous accounts: (a) the convergence to more efficient referring expressions across repeated interaction with the same partner, (b) the gradual transfer of partner-specific common ground to strangers, and (c) the influence of communicative context on which conventions eventually form.

Speakers use different language to communicate with partners in different communities. But how do we learn and represent which conventions to use with which partners? In this paper, we argue that solving this challenging computational problem requires speakers to supplement their lexical representations with knowledge of social group structure. We formalize this idea by extending a recent hierarchical Bayesian model of convention formation with an intermediate layer explicitly representing the latent communities each partner belongs to, and derive predictions about how conventions formed within a group ought to extend to new in-group and out-group members. We then present evidence from two behavioral experiments testing these predictions using a minimal group paradigm. Taken together, our findings provide a first step toward a formal framework for understanding the interplay between language use and social group knowledge.

A key property of linguistic conventions is that they hold over an entire community of speakers, allowing us to communicate efficiently even with people we have never met before. At the same time, much of our language use is partner-specific: we know that words may be understood differently by different people based on local common ground. This poses a challenge for accounts of convention formation. Exactly how do agents make the inferential leap to community-wide expectations while maintaining partner-specific knowledge? We propose a hierarchical Bayesian model of convention to explain how speakers and listeners abstract away meanings that seem to be shared across partners. To evaluate our model's predictions, we conducted an experiment where participants played an extended natural-language communication game with different partners in a small community. We examine several measures of generalization across partners, and find key signatures of local adaptation as well as collective convergence. These results suggest that local partner-specific learning is not only compatible with global convention formation but may facilitate it when coupled with a powerful hierarchical inductive mechanism.

People regularly produce novel sentences that sound native-like (e.g., she googled us the information), while they also recognize that other novel sentences sound odd, even though they are interpretable (e.g., ? She explained us the information). This work offers a Bayesian, incremental model that learns clusters that correspond to grammatical constructions of different type and token frequencies. Without specifying in advance the number of constructions, their semantic contributions, nor whether any two constructions compete with one another, the model successfully generalizes when appropriate while identifying and suggesting an alternative when faced with overgeneralization errors. Results are consistent with recent psycholinguistic work that demonstrates that the existence of competing alternatives and the frequencies of those alternatives play a key role in the partial productivity of grammatical constructions. The model also goes beyond the psycholinguistic work in that it investigates a role for constructions’ overall frequency.

Natural language acquisition relies on appropriate generalization: the ability to produce novel sentences, while learning to restrict productions to acceptable forms in the language. Psycholinguists have proposed various properties that might play a role in guiding appropriate generalizations, looking at learning of verb alternations as a testbed. Several computational cognitive models have explored aspects of this phenomenon, but their results are hard to compare given the high variability in the linguistic properties represented in their input. In this paper, we directly compare two recent approaches, a Bayesian model and a connectionist model, in their ability to replicate human judgments of appropriate generalizations. We find that the Bayesian model more accurately mimics the judgments due to its richer learning mechanism that can exploit distributional properties of the input in a manner consistent with human behaviour.

This article argues that a usage-based construction (a conventional pairing of form and function) is required to account for a certain pattern of English exemplified by e.g., it’s nice of you to read this. Contemporary corpus and survey data reveal that the construction is strongly associated with certain adjectives (e.g., nice, good) over others, while diachronic data demonstrate that the construction’s overall frequency has systematically waxed and waned over the past century. The construction’s unique function – namely to concisely convey a judgment regarding how an action reflects on the agent of the action – enables us to predict many observations about its distribution without stipulation. These include restrictions on the interpretation of adjectives that occur in the construction, its infinitive complement, the modal verbs that may appear in it and its ability to be embedded. We further observe that certain conventional fragments of the construction evoke the semantics of the entire construction. Finally, we situate the construction within a network of related constructions, as part of a speaker’s construct-i-con.

How do people learn to use language in creative but constrained ways? Experiment 1 investigates linguistic creativity by exposing adult participants to two novel word order constructions that differ in terms of their semantics: One construction exclusively describes actions that have a strong effect; the other construction describes actions with a weaker but otherwise similar effect. One group of participants witnessed novel verbs only appearing in one construction or the other, while another group witnessed a minority of verbs alternating between constructions. Subsequent production and judgment results demonstrate that participants in both conditions extended and accepted verbs in whichever construction best described the intended message. Unlike related previous work, this finding is not naturally attributable to prior knowledge of the likely division of labor between verbs and constructions. In order to investigate how speakers learn to constrain generalizations, Experiment 2 includes one verb (out of 6) that was witnessed in a single construction to describe both strong and weak effects, essentially statistically preempting the use of the other construction. In this case, participants were much more lexically conservative with this verb and other verbs, while they nonetheless displayed an appreciation of the distinct semantics of the constructions with new novel verbs. Results indicate that the need to better express an intended message encourages generalization, while statistical preemption constrains generalization by providing evidence that verbs are restricted in their distribution.

In language, abstract phrasal patterns provide an important source of meaning, but little is known about whether or how such constructions are used to predict upcoming visual scenes. Findings from two fMRI studies indicate that initial exposure to a novel construction allows its semantics to be used for such predictions. Specifically, greater activity in the ventral striatum, a region sensitive to prediction errors, was linked to worse overall comprehension of a novel construction. Moreover, activity in occipital cortex was attenuated when a visual event could be inferred from a learned construction, which may reflect predictive coding of the event. These effects disappeared when predictions were unlikely: that is, when phrases provided no additional information about visual events. These findings support the idea that learners create and evaluate predictions about new instances during comprehension of novel linguistic constructions.

How do people glean meaning from language? A Principle of Compositionality is generally understood to entail that the meaning of every expression in a language must be a function of the meaning of its immediate constituents and the syntactic rule used to combine them. This paper explores perspectives that range from acceptance of the principle as a truism, to rejection of the principle as false. Controversy has arisen basedon the role of extra-constituent linguistic meaning (idioms; certain cases of paradigmatic morphology; constructional meanings; intonation), and context (e.g., metonymy; the resolution of ambiguity and vagueness).

A growing emphasis on statistics in language learning raises the question of whether learning a language consists wholly in extracting statistical regularities from the input. In this paper we explore the hypothesis that the functions of learned constructions can lead learners to use language in ways that go beyond the statistical regularities that have been witnessed. The present work exposes adults to two novel word order constructions that differed in terms of their functions: one construction but not the other was exclusively used with pronoun undergoers. In Experiment 1, participants in a lexicalist condition witnessed three novel verbs used exclusively in one construction and three exclusively in the other construction; a distinct group, the alternating condition, witnessed two verbs occurring in both constructions and two other verbs in each of the constructions exclusively. Production and judgment results demonstrate that participants in the alternating condition accepted all verbs in whichever construction was more appropriate, even though they had seen just two out of six verbs alternating. The lexicalist group was somewhat less productive, but even they displayed a tendency to extend verbs to new uses. Thus participants tended to generalize the constructions for use in appropriate discourse contexts, ignoring evidence of verb-specific behavior, especially when even a minority of verbs were witnessed alternating. A second experiment demonstrated that participants’ behavior was not likely due to an inability to learn which verbs had occurred in which constructions. Our results suggest that construction learning involves an interaction of witnessed usage together with the functions of the constructions involved.

All linguistic and psycholinguistic theories aim to provide psychologically valid analyses of particular grammatical patterns and the relationships that hold among them. Until recently, no tools were available to distinguish neural correlates of particular grammatical constructions that shared the same content words, propositional meaning, and degree of surface complexity, such as the dative (e.g., Sally gave the book to Joe) and the ditransitive (e.g., Sally gave Joe a book). We report the first fMRI data that distinguish such closely related, abstract grammatical patterns. Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) proved capable of discriminating at above-chance levels between activity patterns arising during reading of dative and ditransitive sentences. Region-of-interest analyses reveal that the union of certain language-relevant areas, anterior and posterior BA22, BA44/45 and BA47, yield classification accuracy above chance and above that of control conditions in the left hemisphere but not in the right. Looking more closely at the LH ROIs, we find that the combination of areas aBA22 and BA47 is sufficient to distinguish the two constructions better than the controls and better than chance. The fact that both of these areas-particularly BA47-have been implicated in semantics, lends support to claims that the two constructions are distinguishable semantically. More generally, the ability to distinguish closely related grammatical constructions using MVPA offers the promise of addressing traditional theoretical questions on a neuroscientifically grounded basis.

This article investigates the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of utterances such as This is to count as a construction. It is argued that a construction is required to capture certain semi-idiosyncratic aspects of the pattern. We call this construction the is-to construction. At the same time, its properties are motivated by relating the construction to other well-known constructions via a default inheritance hierarchy. The article also discusses a non-productive “object-related” construction and suggests a diachronic relationship between the two. The proposal is contrasted with word-based, semantic, and purely syntactic accounts.

The present paper provides evidence that suggests that speakers determinewhich constructions can be combined, at least in part, on the basis of thecompatibility of the information structure properties of the constructions in-volved. The relative ‘‘island’’ status of the following sentence complementconstructions are investigated: ‘‘bridge’’ verb complements, manner-of-speaking verb complements and factive verb complements. Questionnairedata is reported that demonstrates a strong correlation between acceptabil-ity judgments and a negation test used to operationalize the notion of‘‘backgroundedness’’. Semantic similarity of the main verbs involved tothinkorsay(the two verbs that are found most frequently in long-distanceextraction from complement clauses) did not account for any variance; thisfinding undermines an account which might predict acceptability by analogyto a fixed formula involvingthinkorsay. While the standard subjacencyaccount also does not predict the results, the findings strongly support theidea that constructions act as islands to wh-extraction to the degree thatthey are backgrounded in discourse.

It is well-established that (non-linguistic) categorization is driven by a functional demand of prediction. We suggest that prediction likewise may well play a role in motivating the learning of semantic generalizations about argument structure constructions. We report corpora statistics that indicate that the argument frame or construction has roughly equivalent cue validity as a predictor of overall sentence meaning as the morpho- logical form of the verb, and has greater category validity. That is, the construction is at least as reliable and more available than the verb. Moreover, given the fact that many verbs have quite low cue validity in isolation, attention to the contribution of the construction is essential.

When do children extend a construction (“rule”) productively? A recent Threshold proposal claims that a construction is productive if and only if it has been witnessed applying to a sufficient proportion of cases and sufficiently few exceptions. An alternative proposal, Communicate + Access (C&A), argues that children extend a construction productively because they wish to express an intended message and are unable to access a “better” (appropriate and more conventional) way to do it. Accessibility, in turn, is negatively affected by interference from competing alternatives. In a (preregistered) experiment, 32 4-6-year-old children were provided with exposure to 2 mini-artificial languages for which the two proposals make opposite predictions. Results support the C&A proposal: children were more productive after witnessing 3 rule-following cases than after 5, due to differences in interference. We conclude that productivity is encouraged by a desire to communicate a message and is constrained by accessibility/interference.

Children tend to regularize their productions when exposed to artificial languages, an advantageous response to unpredictable variation. But generalizations in natural languages are typically conditioned by factors that children ultimately learn. In two experiments, adult and six-year-old learners witnessed two novel classifiers, probabilistically conditioned by semantics. Whereas adults displayed high accuracy in their productions—applying the semantic criteria to familiar and novel items—children were oblivious to the semantic conditioning. Instead, children regularized their productions, over-relying on only one classifier. However, in a two-alternative forced-choice task, children’s performance revealed greater respect for the system’s complexity: they selected both classifiers equally, without bias toward one or the other, and displayed better accuracy on familiar items. Given that natural languages are conditioned by multiple factors that children successfully learn, we suggest that their tendency to simplify in production stems from retrieval difficulty when a complex system has not yet been fully learned.

How do people learn to use language in creative but constrained ways? Experiment 1 investigates linguistic creativity by exposing adult participants to two novel word order constructions that differ in terms of their semantics: One construction exclusively describes actions that have a strong effect; the other construction describes actions with a weaker but otherwise similar effect. One group of participants witnessed novel verbs only appearing in one construction or the other, while another group witnessed a minority of verbs alternating between constructions. Subsequent production and judgment results demonstrate that participants in both conditions extended and accepted verbs in whichever construction best described the intended message. Unlike related previous work, this finding is not naturally attributable to prior knowledge of the likely division of labor between verbs and constructions. In order to investigate how speakers learn to constrain generalizations, Experiment 2 includes one verb (out of 6) that was witnessed in a single construction to describe both strong and weak effects, essentially statistically preempting the use of the other construction. In this case, participants were much more lexically conservative with this verb and other verbs, while they nonetheless displayed an appreciation of the distinct semantics of the constructions with new novel verbs. Results indicate that the need to better express an intended message encourages generalization, while statistical preemption constrains generalization by providing evidence that verbs are restricted in their distribution.

People regularly produce novel sentences that sound native-like (e.g., she googled us the information), while they also recognize that other novel sentences sound odd, even though they are interpretable (e.g., ? She explained us the information). This work offers a Bayesian, incremental model that learns clusters that correspond to grammatical constructions of different type and token frequencies. Without specifying in advance the number of constructions, their semantic contributions, nor whether any two constructions compete with one another, the model successfully generalizes when appropriate while identifying and suggesting an alternative when faced with overgeneralization errors. Results are consistent with recent psycholinguistic work that demonstrates that the existence of competing alternatives and the frequencies of those alternatives play a key role in the partial productivity of grammatical constructions. The model also goes beyond the psycholinguistic work in that it investigates a role for constructions’ overall frequency.

Grammatical constructions are typically partially but not fully productive, which leads to a conundrum for the learner. When can a construction be extended for use with new words and when can it not? The solution suggested here relies on two complementary processes. The first is DYNAMIC CATEGORIZATION: as learners record the statistics of their language, they implicitly categorize the input on the basis of form and function. On the basis of this categorization process, general semantic and phonological constraints on productivity emerge, and productivity is to a large extent determined by the degree to which the category is well attested by similar exemplars. Occasionally, a semantically sensical and phonologically well-formed instance of a well-attested construction is simply not fully acceptable. It is suggested that a process of STATISTICAL PREEMPTION is at work in these cases: learners avoid using a construction if an alternative formulation has been systematically witnessed instead. The mechanism proposed for statistical preemption is competition-driven learning: when two competitors are activated but one reliably wins, the loser becomes less accessible over time. In this way, the paradox of partial productivity can be resolved.

Natural language acquisition relies on appropriate generalization: the ability to produce novel sentences, while learning to restrict productions to acceptable forms in the language. Psycholinguists have proposed various properties that might play a role in guiding appropriate generalizations, looking at learning of verb alternations as a testbed. Several computational cognitive models have explored aspects of this phenomenon, but their results are hard to compare given the high variability in the linguistic properties represented in their input. In this paper, we directly compare two recent approaches, a Bayesian model and a connectionist model, in their ability to replicate human judgments of appropriate generalizations. We find that the Bayesian model more accurately mimics the judgments due to its richer learning mechanism that can exploit distributional properties of the input in a manner consistent with human behaviour.

A growing emphasis on statistics in language learning raises the question of whether learning a language consists wholly in extracting statistical regularities from the input. In this paper we explore the hypothesis that the functions of learned constructions can lead learners to use language in ways that go beyond the statistical regularities that have been witnessed. The present work exposes adults to two novel word order constructions that differed in terms of their functions: one construction but not the other was exclusively used with pronoun undergoers. In Experiment 1, participants in a lexicalist condition witnessed three novel verbs used exclusively in one construction and three exclusively in the other construction; a distinct group, the alternating condition, witnessed two verbs occurring in both constructions and two other verbs in each of the constructions exclusively. Production and judgment results demonstrate that participants in the alternating condition accepted all verbs in whichever construction was more appropriate, even though they had seen just two out of six verbs alternating. The lexicalist group was somewhat less productive, but even they displayed a tendency to extend verbs to new uses. Thus participants tended to generalize the constructions for use in appropriate discourse contexts, ignoring evidence of verb-specific behavior, especially when even a minority of verbs were witnessed alternating. A second experiment demonstrated that participants’ behavior was not likely due to an inability to learn which verbs had occurred in which constructions. Our results suggest that construction learning involves an interaction of witnessed usage together with the functions of the constructions involved.

The present study1 exposed five-year-olds (M=5 ; 2), seven-year-olds (M=7 ; 6) and adults (M=22 ; 4) to instances of a novel phrasal construction, then used a forced choice comprehension task to evaluate their learning of the construction. The abstractness of participants' acquired representations of the novel construction was evaluated by varying the degree of lexical overlap that test items had with exposure items. We found that both child groups were less proficient than adults, but seven-year-olds showed evidence of across-the-board generalization whereas five-year-olds were sensitive to lexical overlap at test. This outcome is consistent with more conservative, item-based learning of syntactic patterns in younger children. Additionally, unlike adults and seven-year-olds, five-year-olds showed no evidence of having mastered the novel construction's linking rules. Thus, younger learners are less likely to generalize abstract argument structure constructions when exposed to the SAME systematic input as older learners.

It is widely believed that explicit verbatim memory for language is virtually nonexistent except in certain circumstances, for example if participants are warned they are to receive a memory test, if the language is ‘interactive’ (emotion-laden), or if the texts are exceedingly short and memory is tested immediately. The present experiments revisit the question of verbatim mem- ory for language and demonstrate that participants do reliably recognize and recall full sentences that they are exposed to only once at above chance rates (Experiments 1 and 3). The texts are 300 words long, non-interac- tive, and no advanced warning of a memory test is given. Verbatim memory is demonstrated even when lexical content and memory for gist are con- trolled for (Experiments 2 and 4). The most striking finding is one of inci- dental recall: even after a six-day delay, participants reliably reproduce sentences they have heard before when asked to describe scenes, even though they are not asked to recall what they had heard (Experiment 5).

Adults learning a new language tend to judge unconventional utterances more leniently than fluent speakers do; ratings on acceptable utterances, however, tend to align more closely with fluent speakers. This asymmetry raises a question as to whether unconventional utterances can be statistically preempted by conventional utter- ances for adult learners. We report a preregistered study that provided undergraduates in Spanish classes with three days of exposure to conventional Spanish sentences without feedback. Judgment data reveal a significant effect of statistical preemption, particularly on intermediate learners, as predicted: Repeatedly witnessing conventional sentences led learners to subsequently judge as significantly lower the corresponding unconven- tional formulations in comparison to unrelated unconventional sentences. Current find- ings indicate that adult learners can take advantage of statistical preemption to learn the unacceptability of unconventional sentences from repeated exposure to acceptable alternatives, without explicit instruction or feedback.

Native speakers strongly disprefer novel formulations when a conventional alternative expresses the same intended message, presumably because the more conventional form competes with the novel form. In five studies, second language (L2) speakers were less influenced by competing alternatives than native speakers. L2 speakers accepted novel interpretable sentences more readily than native speakers, and were somewhat less likely to offer competing alternatives as paraphrases or to prefer competing alternatives in forced‐choice tasks. They were unaffected by exposure to competing alternatives immediately before judgments. Reduced sensitivity to competing alternatives was confirmed by L2 speakers’ greater divergence from native speakers on judgments for novel formulations compared to familiar ones. Reduced sensitivity to competing alternatives also predicts noisier linguistic representations; consistent with this, L2 speakers performed worse on a verbatim recognition task, with performance correlating with more nativelike judgments. Proficiency was a modest predictor of judgments, but transfer effects were not.

The present study aims to investigate the neural correlates of processing conventional figurative language in non-native speakers in a comparison with native speakers. Italian proficient L2 learners of German and German native speakers read conventional metaphorical statements as well as literal paraphrases that were comparable on a range of psycholinguistic variables. Results confirm previous findings that native speakers show increased activity for metaphorical processing, and left amygdala activation increases with increasing Metaphoricity. At the whole-brain level, L2 learners showed the expected overall differences in activation when compared to native speakers (in the fronto-temporal network). But L2 speakers did not show any distinctive activation outside the caudate nucleus as Metaphoricity increased, suggesting that the L2 speakers were less affected by increasing Metaphoricity than native speakers were. With small volume correction, only a single peak in the amygdala reached threshold for L2 speakers as Metaphoricity increased. The findings are consistent with the view that metaphorical language is more engaging for native speakers but not necessarily for L2 speakers.

The present study replicates the findings in Robenalt & Goldberg (2015) with a group of native speakers and critically extends the paradigm to non-native speakers. Recent findings in second language acquisition suggest that second language (L2) learners are less able to generate online expectations during language processing, which in turn predicts a reduced ability to differentiate between novel sentences that have a competing alternative and those that do not. We test this prediction and confirm that while L2 speakers display evidence of learning from positive exemplars, they show no evidence of taking competing grammatical alternatives into account, except at the highest quartile of speaking proficiency in which case L2 judgments align with native speakers.

Learners preferentially interpret novel nouns at the basic level (“dog”) rather than at a more narrow level (“Labrador”). This “basic-level bias” is mitigated by statistics: children and adults are more likely to interpret a novel noun at a more narrow label if they witness “a suspicious coincidence” — the word applied to 3 exemplars of the same narrow category. Independent work has found that exemplar typicality influences learners’ inferences and category learning. We bring these lines of work together to investigate whether the content (typicality) of a single exemplar affects the level of interpretation of words and whether an atypicality effect interacts with input statistics. Results demonstrate that both 4-5 year olds and adults tend to assign a narrower interpretation to a word if it is exemplified by an atypical category member. This atypicality effect is roughly as strong as, and independent of, the suspicious coincidence effect, which is replicated.

Up to 80% of words have multiple, related meanings (polysemy), yet work on early word learning has almost uniformly assumed one-to-one mappings between form and meaning. Using a looking-while-listening procedure, we present the first evidence that toddlers (n=32) can recognize multiple meanings for common nouns, e.g. collar of a dog, shirt collar. In an English-meaning condition, toddlers were tested on their ability to recognize multiple English meanings for polysemous words such as cap(e.g. a baseball cap and a bottle cap). Another condition prompted them with the same English words (e.g., cap), but target referents instead corresponded to the word’s polysemous extension in an unfamiliar language, (e.g., “lid” is a meaning for Spanish’s “cap”, tapa). Toddlers looked to the correct targets above chance in both trial types, but with greater accuracy on English-meaning trials, demonstrating a recognition of familiar word-meaning pairs and an ability to infer potential new meanings (Spanish-meaning trials).

One anaphora (e.g., She has a better one) has been used as a key diagnostic in syntactic analyses of the English noun phrase, and ‘one-replacement’ has also figured prominently in debates about the learnability of language. However, much of this work has been based on faulty premises, as a few perceptive researchers, including Ray Jackendoff, have made clear. Abandoning the view of anaphoric one (a-one) as a form of syntactic replacement allows us to take a fresh look at various uses of the word one. In the present work, we investigate its use as a cardinal number (1-one) in order to better understand its anaphoric use. Like all cardinal numbers, 1-one can only quantify an individuated entity and provides an indefinite reading by default. Owing to unique combinatoric properties, cardinal numbers defy consistent classification as determiners, quantifiers, adjectives or nouns. Once the semantics and distribution of cardinal numbers including 1-one are appreciated, many properties of a-one follow with minimal stipulation. We claim that 1-one and a-one are distinct but very closely related lexemes. When 1-one appears without a noun (e.g., Take one), it is nearly indistinguishable from a-one (e.g., take one)—the only differences being interpretive (1-one foregrounds its cardinality while a-one does not) and prosodic (presence versus absence of primary accent). While we ultimately argue that a family of constructions is required to describe the full range of syntactic contexts in which one appears, the proposed network accounts for properties of a-one by allowing it to share (inherit) most of its syntactic and interpretive constraints from its historical predecessor, 1-one.

Conventional metaphors (e.g., a firm grasp on an idea) are extremely common. A possible explanation for their ubiquity is that they are more engaging, evoking more focused attention, than their literal paraphrases (e.g., a good understanding of an idea). To evaluate whether, when, and why this may be true, we created a new database of 180 English sentences consisting of conventional metaphors, literal paraphrases, and concrete descriptions (e.g., a firm grip on a doorknob). Extensive norming matched differences across sentence types in complexity, plausibility, emotional valence, intensity, and familiarity of the key phrases. Then, using pupillometry to study the time course of metaphor processing, we predicted that metaphors would elicit greater event-evoked pupil dilation compared to other sentence types. Results confirmed the predicted increase beginning at the onset of the key phrase and lasting seconds beyond the end of the sentence. When metaphorical and literal sentences were compared directly in survey data, participants judged metaphorical sentences to convey “richer meaning,” but not more information. We conclude that conventional metaphors are more engaging than literal paraphrases or concrete sentences in a way that is irreducible to difficulty or ease, amount of information, short-term lexical access, or downstream inferences.

The present study aims to investigate the neural correlates of processing conventional figurative language in non-native speakers in a comparison with native speakers. Italian proficient L2 learners of German and German native speakers read conventional metaphorical statements as well as literal paraphrases that were comparable on a range of psycholinguistic variables. Results confirm previous findings that native speakers show increased activity for metaphorical processing, and left amygdala activation increases with increasing Metaphoricity. At the whole-brain level, L2 learners showed the expected overall differences in activation when compared to native speakers (in the fronto-temporal network). But L2 speakers did not show any distinctive activation outside the caudate nucleus as Metaphoricity increased, suggesting that the L2 speakers were less affected by increasing Metaphoricity than native speakers were. With small volume correction, only a single peak in the amygdala reached threshold for L2 speakers as Metaphoricity increased. The findings are consistent with the view that metaphorical language is more engaging for native speakers but not necessarily for L2 speakers.

Conventional metaphorical sentences such as She’s a sweet child have been found to elicit greater amygdala activation than matched literal sentences (e.g., She’s a kind child). In the present fMRI study, this finding is strengthened and extended with naturalistic stimuli involving longer passages and a range of conventional metaphors. In particular, a greater number of activation peaks (four) were found in the bilateral amygdala when passages containing conventional metaphors were read than when their matched literal versions were read (a single peak); while the direct contrast between metaphorical and literal passages did not show significant amygdala activation, a parametric analysis revealed that BOLD signal changes in the left amygdala correlated with an increase in metaphoricity ratings across all stories. Moreover, while a measure of complexity was positively correlated with increase in activation of a broad bilateral network mainly involving the temporal lobes, complexity was not predictive of amygdala activity. Thus, the results suggest that amygdala activation is not simply a result of stronger overall activity related to language comprehension, but is more specific to the processing of metaphorical language.

Why do people so often use metaphorical expressions when literal paraphrases are readily available? This study focuses on a comparison of metaphorical statements involving the source domain of taste (e.g., “She looked at him sweetly”) and their literal paraphrases (e.g., “She looked at him kindly”). Metaphori- cal and literal sentences differed only in one word and were normed for length, familiarity, imageability, emotional valence, and arousal. Our findings indicate that conventional metaphori- cal expressions are more emotionally evocative than literal expressions, as the amygdala and the anterior portion of the hippocampus were more active in the metaphorical sentences. They also support the idea that even conventional metaphors can be grounded in sensorimotor and perceptual represen- tations in that primary and secondary gustatory areas (lateral OFC, frontal operculum, anterior insula) were more active as well. A comparison of the individual words that distinguished the metaphorical and literal sentences revealed greater activa- tion in the lateral OFC and the frontal operculum for the taste- related words, supporting the claim that these areas are relevant to taste.

Conventional metaphors (e.g., a firm grasp on an idea) are extremely common. A possible explanation for their ubiquity is that they are more engaging, evoking more focused attention, than their literal paraphrases (e.g., a good understanding of an idea). To evaluate whether, when, and why this may be true, we created a new database of 180 English sentences consisting of conventional metaphors, literal paraphrases, and concrete descriptions (e.g., a firm grip on a doorknob). Extensive norming matched differences across sentence types in complexity, plausibility, emotional valence, intensity, and familiarity of the key phrases. Then, using pupillometry to study the time course of metaphor processing, we predicted that metaphors would elicit greater event-evoked pupil dilation compared to other sentence types. Results confirmed the predicted increase beginning at the onset of the key phrase and lasting seconds beyond the end of the sentence. When metaphorical and literal sentences were compared directly in survey data, participants judged metaphorical sentences to convey “richer meaning,” but not more information. We conclude that conventional metaphors are more engaging than literal paraphrases or concrete sentences in a way that is irreducible to difficulty or ease, amount of information, short-term lexical access, or downstream inferences.

The present study aims to investigate the neural correlates of processing conventional figurative language in non-native speakers in a comparison with native speakers. Italian proficient L2 learners of German and German native speakers read conventional metaphorical statements as well as literal paraphrases that were comparable on a range of psycholinguistic variables. Results confirm previous findings that native speakers show increased activity for metaphorical processing, and left amygdala activation increases with increasing Metaphoricity. At the whole-brain level, L2 learners showed the expected overall differences in activation when compared to native speakers (in the fronto-temporal network). But L2 speakers did not show any distinctive activation outside the caudate nucleus as Metaphoricity increased, suggesting that the L2 speakers were less affected by increasing Metaphoricity than native speakers were. With small volume correction, only a single peak in the amygdala reached threshold for L2 speakers as Metaphoricity increased. The findings are consistent with the view that metaphorical language is more engaging for native speakers but not necessarily for L2 speakers.

In language, abstract phrasal patterns provide an important source of meaning, but little is known about whether or how such constructions are used to predict upcoming visual scenes. Findings from two fMRI studies indicate that initial exposure to a novel construction allows its semantics to be used for such predictions. Specifically, greater activity in the ventral striatum, a region sensitive to prediction errors, was linked to worse overall comprehension of a novel construction. Moreover, activity in occipital cortex was attenuated when a visual event could be inferred from a learned construction, which may reflect predictive coding of the event. These effects disappeared when predictions were unlikely: that is, when phrases provided no additional information about visual events. These findings support the idea that learners create and evaluate predictions about new instances during comprehension of novel linguistic constructions.

Conventional metaphorical sentences such as She’s a sweet child have been found to elicit greater amygdala activation than matched literal sentences (e.g., She’s a kind child). In the present fMRI study, this finding is strengthened and extended with naturalistic stimuli involving longer passages and a range of conventional metaphors. In particular, a greater number of activation peaks (four) were found in the bilateral amygdala when passages containing conventional metaphors were read than when their matched literal versions were read (a single peak); while the direct contrast between metaphorical and literal passages did not show significant amygdala activation, a parametric analysis revealed that BOLD signal changes in the left amygdala correlated with an increase in metaphoricity ratings across all stories. Moreover, while a measure of complexity was positively correlated with increase in activation of a broad bilateral network mainly involving the temporal lobes, complexity was not predictive of amygdala activity. Thus, the results suggest that amygdala activation is not simply a result of stronger overall activity related to language comprehension, but is more specific to the processing of metaphorical language.

Why do people so often use metaphorical expressions when literal paraphrases are readily available? This study focuses on a comparison of metaphorical statements involving the source domain of taste (e.g., “She looked at him sweetly”) and their literal paraphrases (e.g., “She looked at him kindly”). Metaphori- cal and literal sentences differed only in one word and were normed for length, familiarity, imageability, emotional valence, and arousal. Our findings indicate that conventional metaphori- cal expressions are more emotionally evocative than literal expressions, as the amygdala and the anterior portion of the hippocampus were more active in the metaphorical sentences. They also support the idea that even conventional metaphors can be grounded in sensorimotor and perceptual represen- tations in that primary and secondary gustatory areas (lateral OFC, frontal operculum, anterior insula) were more active as well. A comparison of the individual words that distinguished the metaphorical and literal sentences revealed greater activa- tion in the lateral OFC and the frontal operculum for the taste- related words, supporting the claim that these areas are relevant to taste.

All linguistic and psycholinguistic theories aim to provide psychologically valid analyses of particular grammatical patterns and the relationships that hold among them. Until recently, no tools were available to distinguish neural correlates of particular grammatical constructions that shared the same content words, propositional meaning, and degree of surface complexity, such as the dative (e.g., Sally gave the book to Joe) and the ditransitive (e.g., Sally gave Joe a book). We report the first fMRI data that distinguish such closely related, abstract grammatical patterns. Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) proved capable of discriminating at above-chance levels between activity patterns arising during reading of dative and ditransitive sentences. Region-of-interest analyses reveal that the union of certain language-relevant areas, anterior and posterior BA22, BA44/45 and BA47, yield classification accuracy above chance and above that of control conditions in the left hemisphere but not in the right. Looking more closely at the LH ROIs, we find that the combination of areas aBA22 and BA47 is sufficient to distinguish the two constructions better than the controls and better than chance. The fact that both of these areas-particularly BA47-have been implicated in semantics, lends support to claims that the two constructions are distinguishable semantically. More generally, the ability to distinguish closely related grammatical constructions using MVPA offers the promise of addressing traditional theoretical questions on a neuroscientifically grounded basis.

This article argues that a usage-based construction (a conventional pairing of form and function) is required to account for a certain pattern of English exemplified by e.g., it’s nice of you to read this. Contemporary corpus and survey data reveal that the construction is strongly associated with certain adjectives (e.g., nice, good) over others, while diachronic data demonstrate that the construction’s overall frequency has systematically waxed and waned over the past century. The construction’s unique function – namely to concisely convey a judgment regarding how an action reflects on the agent of the action – enables us to predict many observations about its distribution without stipulation. These include restrictions on the interpretation of adjectives that occur in the construction, its infinitive complement, the modal verbs that may appear in it and its ability to be embedded. We further observe that certain conventional fragments of the construction evoke the semantics of the entire construction. Finally, we situate the construction within a network of related constructions, as part of a speaker’s construct-i-con.

There are times when a curiously odd relic of language presents us with a thread, which when pulled, reveals deep and general facts about human language. This paper unspools such a case. Prior to 1930, English speakers uniformly preferred male-before-female word order in conjoined nouns such as uncles and aunts; nephews and nieces; men and women. Since then, at least a half dozen items have systematically reversed their preferred order (e.g., aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews) while others have not (men and women). We review evidence that the unusual reversals began with mother and dad(dy) and spread to semantically and morphologically related binomials over a period of decades. The present work proposes that three aspects of cognitive accessibility combine to quantify the probability of A&B order: 1) the relative accessibility of the A and B terms individually, 2) competition from B&A order, and critically, 3) cluster strength (i.e., similarity to related A’& B’ cases). The emergent cluster of female-first binomials highlights the influence of semantic neighborhoods in memory retrieval. We suggest that cognitive accessibility can be used to predict the word order of both familiar and novel binomials generally, as well as the diachronic change focused on here.

This chapter emphasizes the shared communicative motivation of ellipsis constructions that leads to cross-linguistic similarities and certain predictable functional constraints. More specifically, ellipsis is licensed by a system of motivated constructions, i.e. learned pairings of form and function. Constructions capture a range of restrictions on form and function, including those related to semantics, discourse context, register, genre, and dialect. Generalizations across constructions are captured by a network of constructions with partially overlapping representations. Semantic recoverability is facilitated not by copying and deleting syntactic structure at the ellipsis site, but by a cognitive process that ‘points’ to information that is, typically but not always, available from the memory trace of an antecedent. This mechanism is independently required for fragments, non-elliptical expressions such as ditto and respectively, and the many examples that do not display the ‘connectivity’ effects that are predicted by copy and deletion accounts.

One anaphora (e.g., She has a better one) has been used as a key diagnostic in syntactic analyses of the English noun phrase, and ‘one-replacement’ has also figured prominently in debates about the learnability of language. However, much of this work has been based on faulty premises, as a few perceptive researchers, including Ray Jackendoff, have made clear. Abandoning the view of anaphoric one (a-one) as a form of syntactic replacement allows us to take a fresh look at various uses of the word one. In the present work, we investigate its use as a cardinal number (1-one) in order to better understand its anaphoric use. Like all cardinal numbers, 1-one can only quantify an individuated entity and provides an indefinite reading by default. Owing to unique combinatoric properties, cardinal numbers defy consistent classification as determiners, quantifiers, adjectives or nouns. Once the semantics and distribution of cardinal numbers including 1-one are appreciated, many properties of a-one follow with minimal stipulation. We claim that 1-one and a-one are distinct but very closely related lexemes. When 1-one appears without a noun (e.g., Take one), it is nearly indistinguishable from a-one (e.g., take one)—the only differences being interpretive (1-one foregrounds its cardinality while a-one does not) and prosodic (presence versus absence of primary accent). While we ultimately argue that a family of constructions is required to describe the full range of syntactic contexts in which one appears, the proposed network accounts for properties of a-one by allowing it to share (inherit) most of its syntactic and interpretive constraints from its historical predecessor, 1-one.

This work investigates English verb particle combinations (e.g., put on) and argues that item-specific and general information are needed and should be related within a default inheritance hierarchy. When verb particle combinations appear within verb phrases, a tripartite phrasal syntax is defended, whether or not the V and P are adjacent (e.g., She puton the wrong shoes; she put the wrong shoes on). The < V NP P > order is motivated as the default word order by explicitly relating a verb-particle construction to the caused-motion construction (e.g., she put the shoes on her feet). Well-known and independently needed processing considerations related to complement length, information status, and semantics motivate system-wide generalizations that can serve to override the default word order. Lexical verb-particle combinations (e.g., a pickup truck; a showdown) and an idiomatic case, V-off are also briefly discussed as providing further evidence for the need for both item-specific and more general constructions.

This article investigates the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of utterances such as This is to count as a construction. It is argued that a construction is required to capture certain semi-idiosyncratic aspects of the pattern. We call this construction the is-to construction. At the same time, its properties are motivated by relating the construction to other well-known constructions via a default inheritance hierarchy. The article also discusses a non-productive “object-related” construction and suggests a diachronic relationship between the two. The proposal is contrasted with word-based, semantic, and purely syntactic accounts.

English resultative expressions have been a major focus of research on the syntax-se
interface. We argue in this article that a family of related constructions is required to acc
their distribution. We demonstrate that a number of generalizations follow from the sem
the constructions we posit: the syntactic argument structure of the sentence is predicted by g
principles of argument linking; and the aspectual structure of the sentence is determine
aspectual structure of the constructional subevent, which is in turn predictable from general
ples correlating event structure with change, extension, motion, and paths. Finally, the se
and syntax of resultatives explain the possibilities for temporal relations between the tw
events. While these generalizations clearly exist, there is also a great deal of idiosyncrasy
in resultatives. Many idiosyncratic instances and small subclasses of the construction
learned and stored individually. This account serves to justify aspects of what we sha
overall vision of grammar, what we might call the CONSTRUCTIONAL view. To the extent
treatment of the resultative can be stated only within the constructional view, it serves as
for this view as a whole.

This paper examines the English Phrase as Lemma (PAL) construction, which treats phrases syntactically as if they were words (e.g., a don't-mess-with- me driver). We argue that it is important to acknowledge and represent the construction’s unique syntax directly rather than trying to shoehorn it into a more familiar grammatical category such as Noun or Adjective. PALs do not share the same distribution as other categories, and critically, their unique syntax influences their interpretation in predictable ways, which we demonstrate with survey data (N=600). In particular, PALs convey the type of meaning associated with individual English words—LEMMAs—and thus evoke semantic frames that are presumed shared common knowledge. We further predict that the shared common knowledge and the use of quotes encourages PALs to be interpreted as witty and sarcastic. We show that a full analysis of PALs requires a family of constructions that includes certain conventional instances and productive subtypes. Because the construction’s special form and function are intimately related, we predict comparable PAL constructions should appear in other, unrelated languages. While the PAL construction is not terribly frequent in any language, the implications we draw are quite broad: our knowledge of language is rich and complex, providing subtle means for language users to indicate familiarity with listeners while conveying their messages.

When do children extend a construction (“rule”) productively? A recent Threshold proposal claims that a construction is productive if and only if it has been witnessed applying to a sufficient proportion of cases and sufficiently few exceptions. An alternative proposal, Communicate + Access (C&A), argues that children extend a construction productively because they wish to express an intended message and are unable to access a “better” (appropriate and more conventional) way to do it. Accessibility, in turn, is negatively affected by interference from competing alternatives. In a (preregistered) experiment, 32 4-6-year-old children were provided with exposure to 2 mini-artificial languages for which the two proposals make opposite predictions. Results support the C&A proposal: children were more productive after witnessing 3 rule-following cases than after 5, due to differences in interference. We conclude that productivity is encouraged by a desire to communicate a message and is constrained by accessibility/interference.

Whenever the number of exceptions to a rule reaches its maximum, as it often does in the examples cited, the SP claims that learners must witness and retain all other cases that potentially follow a rule actually following the rule, in order for the rule to become “productive.” While children have been argued to be conservative learners, the SP takes conservatism to a whole new level.

How do people learn to use language in creative but constrained ways? Experiment 1 investigates linguistic creativity by exposing adult participants to two novel word order constructions that differ in terms of their semantics: One construction exclusively describes actions that have a strong effect; the other construction describes actions with a weaker but otherwise similar effect. One group of participants witnessed novel verbs only appearing in one construction or the other, while another group witnessed a minority of verbs alternating between constructions. Subsequent production and judgment results demonstrate that participants in both conditions extended and accepted verbs in whichever construction best described the intended message. Unlike related previous work, this finding is not naturally attributable to prior knowledge of the likely division of labor between verbs and constructions. In order to investigate how speakers learn to constrain generalizations, Experiment 2 includes one verb (out of 6) that was witnessed in a single construction to describe both strong and weak effects, essentially statistically preempting the use of the other construction. In this case, participants were much more lexically conservative with this verb and other verbs, while they nonetheless displayed an appreciation of the distinct semantics of the constructions with new novel verbs. Results indicate that the need to better express an intended message encourages generalization, while statistical preemption constrains generalization by providing evidence that verbs are restricted in their distribution.

The present study replicates the findings in Robenalt & Goldberg (2015) with a group of native speakers and critically extends the paradigm to non-native speakers. Recent findings in second language acquisition suggest that second language (L2) learners are less able to generate online expectations during language processing, which in turn predicts a reduced ability to differentiate between novel sentences that have a competing alternative and those that do not. We test this prediction and confirm that while L2 speakers display evidence of learning from positive exemplars, they show no evidence of taking competing grammatical alternatives into account, except at the highest quartile of speaking proficiency in which case L2 judgments align with native speakers.

Grammatical constructions are typically partially but not fully productive, which leads to a conundrum for the learner. When can a construction be extended for use with new words and when can it not? The solution suggested here relies on two complementary processes. The first is DYNAMIC CATEGORIZATION: as learners record the statistics of their language, they implicitly categorize the input on the basis of form and function. On the basis of this categorization process, general semantic and phonological constraints on productivity emerge, and productivity is to a large extent determined by the degree to which the category is well attested by similar exemplars. Occasionally, a semantically sensical and phonologically well-formed instance of a well-attested construction is simply not fully acceptable. It is suggested that a process of STATISTICAL PREEMPTION is at work in these cases: learners avoid using a construction if an alternative formulation has been systematically witnessed instead. The mechanism proposed for statistical preemption is competition-driven learning: when two competitors are activated but one reliably wins, the loser becomes less accessible over time. In this way, the paradox of partial productivity can be resolved.

A certain class of English adjectives known as a-adjectives resists appearing attributively as prenominal modifiers (e.g., ??the afraid boy, ??the asleep man). Boyd & Goldberg (2011) had offered experimental evidence suggesting that the dispreference is learnable on the basis of categorization and statistical preemption: repeatedly witnessing predicative formulations in contexts in which the attributive form would otherwise be appropriate. The present paper addresses Yang (2015)’s counterproposal for how a-adjectives are learned, and his instructive critique of statistical preemption. The counterproposal is that children receive evidence that a-adjectives behave like locative particles in occurring with certain adverbs such as far and right. However, in an analysis of the 450 million word COCA corpus, the suggested adverbial evidence is virtually non-existent (e.g., *far alive; *straight afraid). In fact, these adverbs occur much more frequently with typical adjectives (e.g., far greater, straight alphabetical). Furthermore, relating a-adjectives to locative particles does not provide evidence of the restriction, because locative particles themselves can appear as prenominal modifiers (the down payment, the outside world). The critique of statistical preemption is based on a 4.3 million word corpus analysis of child directed speech that suggests that children cannot amass the requisite evidence before they are three years old. While we clarify which sorts of data are relevant to statistical preemption, we concur that the required data is relatively sparsely represented in the input. In fact, recent evidence suggests that children are not actually cognizant of the restriction until they are roughly ten years old, an indication that input of an order of magnitude more than 4.3 million words may be required. We conclude that a combination of categorization and statistical preemption is consistent with the available evidence of how the restriction on a-adjectives is learned.

How do speakers know when they can use language creatively and when they cannot? Prior research indicates that higher frequency verbs are more resistant to overgeneralization than lower frequency verbs with similar meaning and argument structure constraints. This result has been interpreted as evidence for conservatism via entrenchment, which proposes that people prefer to use verbs in ways they have heard before, with the strength of dispreference for novel uses increasing with overall verb frequency. This paper investigates whether verb frequency is actually always relevant in judging the acceptability of novel sentences or whether it only matters when there is a readily available alternative way to express the intended message with the chosen verb, as is predicted by statistical preemption. Two experiments are reported in which participants rated novel uses of high and low frequency verbs in argument structure constructions in which those verbs do not normally appear. Separate norming studies were used to divide the sentences into those with and without an agreed-upon preferred alternative phrasing which would compete with the novel use for acceptability. Experiment 2 controls for construction type: all target stimuli are instances of the caused-motion construction. In both experiments, we replicate the stronger dispreference for a novel use with a high frequency verb relative to its lower frequency counterpart, but only for those sentences for which there exists a competing alternative phrasing. When there is no consensus about a preferred way to phrase a sentence, verb frequency is not a predictive factor in sentences’ ratings. We interpret this to mean that while speakers prefer familiar formulations to novel ones, they are willing to extend verbs creatively if there is no readily available alternative way to express the intended meaning.

A certain class of English adjectives known as a-adjectives resists appearing attributively as prenominal modifiers (e.g., ??the afraid boy, ??the asleep man). Boyd & Goldberg (2011) had offered experimental evidence suggesting that the dispreference is learnable on the basis of categorization and statistical preemption: repeatedly witnessing predicative formulations in contexts in which the attributive form would otherwise be appropriate. The present paper addresses Yang (2015)’s counterproposal for how a-adjectives are learned, and his instructive critique of statistical preemption. The counterproposal is that children receive evidence that a- adjectives behave like locative particles in occurring with certain adverbs such as far and right. However, in an analysis of the 450 million word COCA corpus, the suggested adverbial evidence is virtually non-existent (e.g., *far alive; *straight afraid). In fact, these adverbs occur much more frequently with typical adjectives (e.g., far greater, straight alphabetical). Furthermore, relating a-adjectives to locative particles does not provide evidence of the restriction, because locative particles themselves can appear as prenominal modifiers (the down payment, the outside world). The critique of statistical preemption is based on a 4.3 million word corpus analysis of child directed speech that suggests that children cannot amass the requisite evidence before they are three years old. While we clarify which sorts of data are relevant to statistical preemption, we concur that the required data is relatively sparsely represented in the input. In fact, recent evidence suggests that children are not actually cognizant of the restriction until they are roughly ten years old, an indication that input of an order of magnitude more than 4.3 million words may be required. We conclude that a combination of categorization and statistical preemption is consistent with the available evidence of how the restriction on a-adjectives is learned.

Each grammatical construction serves a function, such as conveying that part an utterance is at-issue or is backgrounded. When multiple constructions combine to produce an utterance, their functions must be compatible. This preregistered study (N = 680) addresses the enigmatic case of “syntactic island constraints”: Long-distance dependency constructions (LDDs) do not combine equally well with all base constructions. While widely presumed to require unlearned syntactic constraints, we test the idea that it is infelicitous to make an element both prominent (via an LDD construction) and backgrounded (via the base construction). Using 10 base constructions of English (144 base stimuli), results confirm two independent measures of backgroundedness strongly correlate with acceptability ratings on each of three LDD constructions. Results indicate that “island” constraints arise from a clash between the functions of the constructions being combined.

The current work tests the hypothesis that the island status of clausal adjuncts, as determined by judgments on wh-questions, are predicted by the degree of “backgroundedness” of the adjuncts, as determined by a separate negation task. Results of two experiments support the hypothesis that acceptability of extraction from adjuncts in wh-questions is inversely correlated with the degree to which the adjunct is backgrounded in discourse. Taken together, results show that temporal clausal adjuncts (headed by before, after, while) are stronger islands than adjuncts that are causal (here, headed by to or by). This demonstrates that adjuncts differ in degree of island status, depending on their meaning, despite parallel syntactic structure.

In 1990, Bock and Loebell found that passives (e.g., The 747 was radioed by the airport’s control tower) can be primed by intransitive locatives (e.g., The 747 was landing by the airport’s control tower). This finding is often taken as strong evidence that structural priming occurs on the basis of a syntactic phrase structure that abstracts across lexical content, including prepositions, and is uninfluenced by the semantic roles of the arguments. However, all of the intransitive locative primes in Bock and Loebell contained the preposition by (by-locatives), just like the passive targets. Therefore, the locative-to-passive priming may have been due to the adjunct headed by by, rather than being a result of purely abstract syntax. The present experiment investigates this possibility. We find that passives and intransitive by-locatives are equivalent primes, but intransitive locatives with other prepositions (e.g., The 747 has landed near the airport control tower) do not prime passives. We conclude that a shared abstract, content-less tree structure is not sufficient for passive priming to occur. We then review the prior results that have been offered in favor of abstract tree priming, and note the range of evidence can be considerably narrowed and possibly eliminated, once effects of animacy, semantic roles, shared morphology, information structure, and rhythm are taken into account.

One anaphora (e.g., She has a better one) has been used as a key diagnostic in syntactic analyses of the English noun phrase, and ‘one-replacement’ has also figured prominently in debates about the learnability of language. However, much of this work has been based on faulty premises, as a few perceptive researchers, including Ray Jackendoff, have made clear. Abandoning the view of anaphoric one (a-one) as a form of syntactic replacement allows us to take a fresh look at various uses of the word one. In the present work, we investigate its use as a cardinal number (1-one) in order to better understand its anaphoric use. Like all cardinal numbers, 1-one can only quantify an individuated entity and provides an indefinite reading by default. Owing to unique combinatoric properties, cardinal numbers defy consistent classification as determiners, quantifiers, adjectives or nouns. Once the semantics and distribution of cardinal numbers including 1-one are appreciated, many properties of a-one follow with minimal stipulation. We claim that 1-one and a-one are distinct but very closely related lexemes. When 1-one appears without a noun (e.g., Take one), it is nearly indistinguishable from a-one (e.g., take one)—the only differences being interpretive (1-one foregrounds its cardinality while a-one does not) and prosodic (presence versus absence of primary accent). While we ultimately argue that a family of constructions is required to describe the full range of syntactic contexts in which one appears, the proposed network accounts for properties of a-one by allowing it to share (inherit) most of its syntactic and interpretive constraints from its historical predecessor, 1-one.

Much has been written about the unlikelihood of innate, syntax-specific, universal knowledge of language (Universal Grammar) on the grounds that it is biologically implausible, unresponsive to cross-linguistic facts, theoretically inelegant, and implausible and unnecessary from the perspective of language acquisition. While relevant, much of this discussion fails to address the sorts of facts that generative linguists often take as evidence in favor of the Universal Grammar Hypothesis: subtle, intricate, knowledge about language that speakers implicitly know without being taught. This paper revisits a few often-cited such cases and argues that, although the facts are sometimes even more complex and subtle than is generally appreciated, appeals to Universal Grammar fail to explain the phenomena. Instead, such facts are strongly motivated by the functions of the constructions involved. The following specific cases are discussed: (a) the distribution and interpretation of anaphoric one , (b) constraints on long-distance dependencies, (c) subject-auxiliary inversion, and (d) cross-linguistic linking generalizations between semantics and syntax.