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Revisiting the logic in language : the scope of each and every universal quantifier is alike after all Ghent University
A doubly-quantified sentence like Every bear approached a tent is ambiguous: Did every bear approach a different tent, or did they approach the same tent? These two interpretations are assumed to be mentally represented as logical representations, which specify how the different quantifiers are assigned scope with respect to each other. Based on a structural priming study, Feiman and Snedeker (2016) argued that logical representations capture ...
The many guises of productivity : a case-study of Spanish inchoative constructions Ghent University
This study investigates the productivity of a family of inchoative constructions in (Peninsular) Spanish (empezar a + inf., echar a + inf.) and the way it correlates with semantic openness. Productivity is defined as lexical openness of a slot (here the infinitive) of a construction. A range of productivity measures (e.g., type/token ratio, hapax/token ratio, and other parameters related to the frequency of the most frequent types) are discussed ...
Conversion versus coercion in the nominal domain : two phenomena at the lexis-grammar interface Ghent University
This chapter focuses on the dynamic interaction of lexical items with their syntactic and discourse environment in Modern French. If one adopts a multi-criterial approach of class membership, one is forced to conclude that many (ephemerous) tokens resulting from non-canonical yet productive uses of lexemes in conflicting syntactic constructions only exhibit partial class membership. As such, these instances of coercion need to be distinguished ...
La productivité syntaxique à l’aune de la sémantique distributionnelle Ghent University
La productivité peut être définie comme le domaine d’application lexical (potentiel) d’une règle morphologique ou d’une construction syntaxique. Après avoir introduit la notion et son application en syntaxe, nous montrerons comment ses différentes facettes peuvent être mesurées au moyen de comptages dans de grands corpus. Puis, nous rappellerons les principes de la sémantique distributionnelle (ou sémantique vectorielle), pour illustrer comment ...
Productivity in diachrony Ghent University
Individual differences in productivity : intra- and extralinguistic determinants in evaluations of 'creative' uses of grammatical patterns Ghent University
In light of the partial productivity puzzle (see e.g., Goldberg 2019 for a recent discussion), recent work in Construction Grammar has explored the connection between constructional productivity and linguistic creativity (i.a., Hoffmann 2018, 2019, 2020a; Bergs 2019). While current research into productivity has been mainly concerned with intralinguistic determinants such as type/token frequency and semantic similarity, the present study ...
The semantic structuring of minimizing constructions in present-day Netherlandic Dutch : a distribution-based cluster analysis Ghent University
This paper examines the semantic structuring of a paradigm of 89 minimizers, i.e., nouns that reinforce sentential negation in present-day Netherlandic Dutch, such as meter ‘meter’ in voor geen meter vertrouwen ‘not to trust for a meter’. Cosine distances are computed on the basis of the predicates the minimizers combine with in a sample of 100 tokens downloaded from the Dutch Web corpus 2014 (nlTenTen14) and clustered according to the ...
La linguistique française en Flandre Ghent University
Syntactic productivity under the microscope : the lexical and semantic openness of Dutch minimizing constructions Ghent University
This paper investigates different aspects of syntactic productivity and its relation to semantics. Based on a case study of 43 Dutch minimizing constructions, the correlations between nine different variables are examined: metrics of lexical openness (TypeTokenRatio, HapaxTokenRatio, HapaxTypeRatio), measures of conventionalization (FrTop1, MeanFrTop3, SDTop3), characteristics of the frequency distribution (Alpha parameter of the Zipf curve) and ...