Title Abstract "Inflectional patterns as constructions: Spanish verb morphology in Fluid Construction Grammar" "Although often a painful and prolonged process, conjugating verbs correctly is essential when you try to master a foreign language. Verbs that exhibit an irregular conjugation paradigm, however, are often the verbs that occur most frequently in a language. The nature of inflectional morphemes and the mechanism for conjugating verbs have been the topic of debate for 25 years now. This has lead to many different accounts of the problem, both in the field of descriptive linguistics as well as in a range of modeling approaches. The field of Construction Grammar has recently witnessed the theoretical work on Construction Morphology by Geert Booij (2010), but there has been no computational implementation suggested that could test the theory on a large scale. Using the framework of Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG), I investigate the grammar and morphological constructions that are needed to automatically conjugate the full paradigms of the 600 most frequently used verbs in Spanish. This paper reports a fully operational rule-based implementation of such a grammar and goes into the details of the constructions that support it. The results also show that morphological constructions are exemplary constructions since they combine two (or more) units (a stem and a suffix(es)) into a single meaningful unit (a conjugated verb form) that can be picked up by other discourse elements. Extensions towards embedding the conjugation constructions into a bigger grammar or automatically learning new morphological constructions remain the focus of future work." "Priming through Constructional Dependencies: a case study in Fluid Construction Grammar" "Pieter Wellens" "According to recent developments in (computational) Construction Grammar, language processing occurs through the incremental buildup of meaning and form according to constructional specifications. If the number of available constructions becomes large however, this results in a search process that quickly becomes cognitively unfeasible without the aid of additional guiding principles. One of the main mechanisms the brain recruits (in all sorts of tasks) to optimize processing efficiency is priming. Priming in turn requires a specific organisation of the constructions. Processing efficiency thus must have been one of the main evolutionary pressures driving the organisation of linguistic constructions. In this paper we show how constructions can be organized in a constructional dependency network in which constructions are linked through semantic and syntactic categories. Using Fluid Construction Grammar, we show how such a network can be learned incrementally in a usage-based fashion, and how it can be used to guide processing by priming the suitable constructions." "Constructions at Work! Visualising Linguistic Pathways for Computational Construction Grammar" "Sébastien Hoorens" "Computational construction grammar combines well known concepts from artificial intelligence, linguistics and computer science into fully operational language processing models. These models allow to map an utterance to its meaning representation (comprehension), as well as to map a meaning representation to an utterance (formulation). The processing machinery is based on the unification of usage-patterns that combine morpho-syntactic and semantic information (constructions) with intermediate structures that contain all information that is known at a certain point in processing (transient structures). Language processing is then implemented as a search process, which searches for a sequence of constructions (a linguistic pathway) that successfully transforms an initial transient structure containing the input into a transient structure that qualifies as a goal. For larger grammars, these linguistic pathways become increasingly more complex, which makes them difficult to interpret and debug for the human researcher. In order to accommodate this problem, we present a novel approach to visualising the outcome of constructional language processing. The linguistic pathways are visualised as graphs featuring the applied constructions, why they could apply, with which bindings, and what information they have added. The visualisation tool is concretely implemented for Fluid Construction Grammar, but is also of interest to other flavours of computational construction grammar, as well as more generally to other unification-based search problems of high complexity." "Special issue of Constructions and Frames: Asymmetries, mismatches and Construction Grammar" "'Wonder' Nouns and the Development of a Mirative Constructional Network: An Exercise in Semiotic Diachronic Construction Grammar" "An Van linden, Lieselotte Brems" "Computational Construction Grammar and Constructional Change" "Remi Van Trijp" "Multimodal Construction Grammar issues are Construction Grammar issues" "Steven Schoonjans" "© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. If multimodal work in terms of Construction Grammar is still rare nowadays, this is not just because the upsurge of multimodality in linguistics in general is rather recent. Attempts to include nonverbal layers of expression (especially gesture) in Construction Grammar have uncovered a number of theoretical issues that need to be reflected upon before any serious claims on the existence of multimodal constructions can be made. While some scholars take these issues as reasons for leaving the non-verbal outside of the scope of Construction Grammar, this paper shows that several of these issues are not actually related to multimodality, but rather hint at more general theoretical issues in Construction Grammar. Hence, it is argued that these issues should be seen as an incentive for rethinking and refining the notion of ‘construction’, rather than as a reason for leaving multimodality aside." "Russian verbs of motion and their aspectual partners in Fluid Construction Grammar" "Yana Knight, Michael Spranger" "Russian boasts a highly complex aspectual system which can appear irregular and difficult to learn. It has recently been suggested that motion verbs, which are normally seen as exceptional in their nature, may in fact be at the core of this system, motivating aspectual behavior based on stem directionality. This suggests that analyzing motion verbs may help understand the Russian aspectual system as a whole. The present work demonstrates how Russian motion verbs and their aspectual partners can be implemented and processed successfully with Fluid Constructional Grammar. The study presents an example of language processing in both production and comprehension in operation and highlights the flexibility and power of this formalism, despite the challenges that this complex aspectual system poses." "Exploring the Creative Potential of Computational Construction Grammar" "Paul Van Eecke, Katrien Beuls" "Computational construction grammar aims to provide concrete processing models that operationalise construction grammar accounts of the different aspects of language. This paper discusses the computational mechanisms that allow construction grammar models to exhibit, to a certain extent, the creativity and inventiveness that is observed in human language use. It addresses two main types of language-related creativity. The first type concerns the ‘free combination of constructions,’ which gives rise to the open-endedness of language. The second type concerns the ‘appropriate violation of usual constraints’ that permits language users to go beyond what is possible when adhering to the usual constraints of the language, and be truly creative by relaxing these constraints and by introducing novel constructions. All mechanisms and examples discussed in this paper are fully operationalised and implemented in Fluid Construction Grammar." "Aspectual Morphology of Russian Verbs in Fluid Construction Grammar." "Kateryna Gerasymova, Remi Van Trijp" "Aspect is undoubtedly the most capricious grammatical cate- gory of the Russian language. It has often been asserted as a mystery accessible only to native speakers, leaving all the others lost in its apparently infinite clutter. Recent work in cognitive linguistics has tried to bring order to the seeming chaos of the Russian aspectual system. But these approaches have not been operationalized so far. This paper demonstrates how the aspectual derivation of Russian verbs can be handled successfully with Fluid Constructional Grammar, a computa- tional formalism recently developed for the representation and processing of constructions."