Constructional and Conceptual Composition
Ellen K. Dodge · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2010
Goldberg's (1995) recognition that, in addition to various word-level constructions, sentences also instantiate meaningful argument structure constructions enables a nonpolysemy-based analysis of various verb 'alternations' (Levin 1993).In such an analysis, meaning variations associated with the use of the same verb in different argument realization patterns are analyzed as resulting from composition of the same verb meaning with different meaningful argument structure constructions.This compositional analysis raises some important semantic questions: Which specific elements of verb and argument structure construction meanings motivate their composition?And what is the precise nature of the meaning that results from this composition?I argue that to answer these questions, it is essential that we look more closely at the underlying conceptual systems utilized by these constructions.In this dissertation, I examine a set of simple single clause sentence examples which describe a variety of basic experiences involving motion, change of location, action, force, causation, and affectedness.One key assumption that the Neural Theory of Language (NTL) makes about language understanding concerns simulation semantics, the idea that the neural circuitry we use to understand descriptions of experiences is closely similar to that which is activated by the experiences themselves (Feldman 2006).Accordingly, I use linguistic, neuroscientific, and other forms of evidence to define a lattice of interconnected schemas that represent schematic structures and interrelations associated with the types of experiences described in these examples, and use these schemas in the meaning representations of the verb and argument structure constructions instantiated in these examples.In addition, the grammar described in this dissertation includes various word-level, phrasal and clause-level constructions, along with schemas to represent their meanings, all of which are represented using the Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG) formalism (Bergen and Chang 2005, Feldman et al. 2010).Significantly, use of this formalism has made it possible to utilize many of the schemas and constructions in this grammar in a computational implementation of a compositional constructional analysis of sentence meaning.This implementation, called the