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Linguistics Department

Stanford University

Stanford Humanities Center
Mellon Foundation
Graduate Research Workshop Program

 Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop:

THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING



Friday, October 3, 3:30pm in 460-126:

From Lexical to Constructional: Learning Constructional Meaning

Adele Goldberg (University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign)

General correlations between form and meaning at the level of argument structure patterns have often been assumed to be innate. Claims of innateness typically rest on the idea that the input is not rich enough for general learning strategies to yield the required representations. The present work demonstrates that the semantics associated with argument structure generalizations can indeed by learned, given the nature of the input and an understanding of general categorization strategies. It is well-established that (non-linguistic) categorization is driven by a functional demand for prediction and is sensitive to frequency effects. Experimental results are reported that demonstrate that the same elements can account for how semantic generalizations about argument structure constructions can be learned from the input.

Please contact one of the workshop organizers if you have suggestions for presentations or the workshop in general.
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This workshop is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, and funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.













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