Sign-based Construction Grammar Center for the Study of Language and Information

The good news for advocates of Construction Grammar (CxG) is that language scholars from a wide array of backgrounds have adopted its fundamental insight: knowledge of language includes grammatical generalizations of varied grains. CxG, or constructionbased syntax more generally, informs models of acquisition (Tomasello 2003, Diessel and Tomasello 2000), aphasia (Gahl et al. 2000), syntactic processing (Glenberg and Kaschak 2000, Goldberg and Bencini 2005, Bencini and Valian 2008, Boyd et al. 2009), concept learning by autonomous agents (Steels and De Beule 2006) and mental simulation, the activation of neural motor programs during perception (Feldman 2006). A variety of natural-language processing projects, including the LinGO project and others in the DELPH-IN consortium use construction-based grammars for parsing, generation and profiling applications (Baldwin et al. 2004). In addition, much recent work in corpus linguistics has constructionist foundations, including exemplar-based syntax and phonology (Bybee 2001, 2007) and statistically based collocation analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2005). Finally, constructions, and their adaptive and exaptive properties, have become the focus of recent work on language evolution (Jackendoff 1999, 2002).