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Constructions All the Way Up: From Sensory Experiences to Construction Grammars
No full textConstructionist approaches to language posit that all linguistic knowledge is captured in constructions. These constructions pair form and meaning at varying levels of abstraction, ranging from purely substantive to fully abstract and are all acquired through situated communicative interactions. In this paper we provide computational support for these foundational principles. We present a model that enables an artificial learner agent to acquire a construction grammar directly from its sensory experience. The grammar is built from the ground up, i.e. without a given lexicon, predefined categories or ontology and covers a range of constructions, spanning from purely substantive to partially schematic. Our approach integrates two previously separate but related experiments, allowing the learner to incrementally build a linguistic inventory that solves a question-answering task in a synthetic environment. These findings demonstrate that linguistic knowledge at different levels can be mechanistically acquired from experience
