Constructions: a new theoretical approach to language.

By Adele E. Goldberg. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2003

1,079 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A new theoretical approach to language has emerged in the past 10-15 years that allows linguistic observations about form-meaning pairings, known as 'constructions', to be stated directly. Constructionist approaches aim to account for the full range of facts about language, without assuming that a particular subset of the data is part of a privileged 'core'. Researchers in this field argue that unusual constructions shed light on more general issues, and can illuminate what is required for a complete account of language.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b77d57da72abba4859b8ed2672765928acd4d03d

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Citations in the corpus

Theories of reading should predict reading speed (2012, neutral): “One is the encyclopedic approach to language held by the schools of Cognitive Linguistics (Croft & Cruse 2004; Langacker 1987) and Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2003), which assume the existence of linguistic networks of subtle form–function relations learned on the basis of the input coupled with ”
Jumping NLP Curves: A Review of Natural Language Processing Research [Review Article] (2014, positive): “The use of constructions , defined as “stored pairings of form and function” (A. Goldberg, 2003) makes it possible to link distributed linguistic components to one another, easing extraction of semantics from linguistic structures.”
Statistical learning of language: Theory, validity, and predictions of a statistical learning account of language acquisition (2015, background): “Instead, this perspective shares much in common with connectionist and usage-based approaches (e.g., Elman, 1998; Goldberg, 2003; Tomasello, 2000; Tomasello, 2003) and argues that language is composed of statistics atmany different levels.”
Constructing a second language: Analyses and computational simulations of the emergence of linguistic constructions from usage. (2009, positive): “…our theoretical framework is also informed by cognitive linguistics, particularly constructionist perspectives (e.g., Bates & MacWhinney, 1987; Goldberg, 1995, 2003, 2006; Lakoff, 1987; Langacker, 1987; Ninio, 2006; Robinson & Ellis, 2008; Tomasello, 2003), corpus linguistics (Biber, Conrad,…”
Pragmatic Language Interpretation as Probabilistic Inference. (2016, positive): “While the systematization of structural features of language is one of the proudest accomplishments of cognitive science (e.g., Chomsky, 1965; Jackendoff, 2002; Goldberg, 2003), its contextual flexibility – its pragmatics – has been stubbornly difficult to formalize.”
Cognitive Perspectives on SLA: The Associative-Cognitive CREED (2006, background): “Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective.”
The emergence of verb-particle constructions in Italian: locative and actional meanings (2007, background): “Finally, we discuss the theoretical implications of our results and give an account of Italian VPCs in terms of Construction Grammar (Fillmore, Kay, & O’Connor, 1988; Goldberg, 1995, 2003, 2006 ).”
Word learning as Bayesian inference. (2007, result): “More broadly, various phenomena of entrenchment and conservatism in language acquisition (Braine & Brooks, 1995; Goldberg, 2003) may be more consistent with our softer, statistical model than with the hard commitments of the subset principle.”
The logic of syntactic priming and acceptability judgments (2016, positive): “Additionally, Chang, Bock, and Goldberg (2003) found priming that was compatible with thematic-function mappings or thematic-order mappings.”
How Language Programs the Mind (2016, background): “Even though a person may have never heard a given combination of words before— " spin the coconut " —the phrase is similar in its form to other, previously heard phrases (it can be classified as a transitive construction, for example, Goldberg, 2003).”
Language Is a Complex Adaptive System: Position Paper (2009, background): “…which are direct form-meaning pairings that range from the very specific (words or idioms) to the more general (passive construction, ditransitive construction), and from very small units (words with affixes, walked) to clause-level or even discourse-level units (Croft, 2001; Goldberg, 2003, 2006).”
On the Meaning of Words and Dinosaur Bones: Lexical Knowledge Without a Lexicon (2009, background): “In some theories, the distinction between rule and word is blurred, with both seen as objects that implement form-mapping relationships (Goldberg, 2003; Jackendoff, 2007).”
The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents (2005, background): “Therefore, these questions could be formed by the kinds of ‘‘cut-andpaste’’ operations that experience-based approaches invoke to explain how complex constructions are formed by combining simple constructions (e.g., Goldberg, 2003; Tomasello, 2000).”
Embodied Sentence Comprehension (2005, background): “result, entire sequences of words can be treated as constructions ( Goldberg, 1995, 2003 ).”