This page provides the manuscript for my two monographs on Construction Grammar: the first, Computational Construction Grammar explores the emergence of structure; and the second, Syntactic Variation from Individuals to Populations, explores variation in structure.
Syntactic Variation from Individuals to Populations: Language as a Complex System
Abstract. This Element presents a computational theory of syntactic variation that brings together (i) models of individual differences across distinct speakers, (ii) models of dialectal differences across distinct populations, and (iii) models of register differences across distinct contexts. This computational theory is based in Construction Grammar (CxG) because its usage-based representations can capture differences in productivity across multiple levels of abstraction. Drawing on corpora representing over 300 local dialects across 14 countries, this Element undertakes three data-driven case-studies to show how variation unfolds across the entire grammar. These case-studies are reproducible given supplementary material that accompanies the Element. Rather than focus on discrete variables in isolation, we view the grammar as a complex system. The essential advantage of this computational approach is scale: we can observe an entire grammar across millions of speakers representing dozens of local populations.
Supplementary Material: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/A57US
Computational Construction Grammar: A Usage-Based Approach
Abstract. This Element introduces a usage-based computational approach to Construction Grammar that draws on techniques from natural language processing and unsupervised machine learning. This work explores how to represent constructions, how to learn constructions from a corpus, and how to arrange the constructions in a grammar as a network. From a theoretical perspective, this work examines how construction grammars emerge from usage alone as complex systems, with slot-constraints learned at the same time that constructions are learned. From a practical perspective, this work is accompanied by a Python package which enables linguists to incorporate construction grammars into their own corpus-based work. The computational experiments in this work are important for testing the learnability, variability, and confirmability of Construction Grammar as a theory of language.
Code: https://github.com/jonathandunn/c2xg/
Supplementary Material: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/SA6R3
Live Examples: https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.9944630.v1
Jonathan Dunn 