Remi van Trijp

Sony Computer Science Laboratories Paris · Language

The German definite article paradigm, which is notorious for its case syncretism, is widely considered to be the accidental by-product of diachronic changes. This paper argues instead that the evolution of the paradigm has been motivated by the needs and constraints of language usage. This hypothesis is supported by experiments that compare the curr...

Semantic maps have offered linguists an appealing and empirically rooted methodology for describing recurrent structural patterns in language development and the multifunctionality of grammatical categories. Although some researchers argue that semantic maps are universal and given, others provide evidence that there are no fixed or universal maps....

The question how a shared vocabulary can arise in a multi-agent population despite the fact that each agent autonomously invents and acquires words has been solved. The solution is based on alignment: Agents score all associations between words and meanings in their lexicons and update these preference scores based on communicative success. A posit...

Despite enormous progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP), our field is still lacking a common deep semantic representation scheme. As a result, the problem of meaning and understanding is typically sidestepped through more simple, approximative methods. This paper argues that in order to arrive at such a scheme, we also need a common modellin...

Equitable and inclusive quality education is a human right. It is crucial to provide for the learning needs of every child, especially those with learning disabilities. Traditional approaches to learning propose education paths performed with speech therapists. One of the most efficient strategies to help children with reading comprehension difficu...

The MUHAI consortium studies how it is possible to build AI systems that rest on meaning and understanding. We call this kind of AI meaningful AI in contrast to AI that rests exclusively on the use of statistically acquired pattern recognition and pattern completion. Because meaning and understanding are rather vague and overloaded notions there is...

Since its inception in the mid-eighties, the field of construction grammar has been steadily growing and constructionist approaches to language have by now become a mainstream paradigm for linguistic research. While the construction grammar community has traditionally focused on theoretical, experimental and corpus-based research, the importance of...

Construction Grammar was founded on the promise of maximal empirical coverage without compromising on formal precision. Its main claim is that all linguistic knowledge can be represented as constructions, similar to the notion of constructions from traditional grammars. As such, Construction Grammar may finally reconcile the needs of descriptive an...

Ambiguity is one of the most fascinating mysteries of human language that divides the linguistic research field in roughly two camps: the mainstream view, which considers ambiguity to be undesirable for communication; and the cognitive-functional view, which argues that ambiguity allows for more efficient communication. This chapter subscribes to t...

The English auxiliaries have been a matter of dispute for decades with two opposing views: one analysis treats them as main verbs that take a VP complement; the other considers them as feature carriers. Proponents of both approaches have convincingly pointed out each other’s weaknesses without however settling the debate and without accounting for...

Word order, argument structure and unbounded dependencies are among the most important topics in linguistics because they touch upon the core of the syntax-semantics interface. One question is whether “marked” word order patterns, such as The man I talked to vs. I talked to the man, require special treatment by the grammar or not. Mainstream lingui...

Human languages have multiple strategies that allow us to discriminate objects in a vast variety of contexts. Colours have been extensively studied from this point of view. In particular, previous research in artificial language evolution has shown how artificial languages may emerge based on specific strategies to distinguish colours. Still, it ha...

Time to fell the syntactic tree. Long-distance dependencies without transformations or filler gaps Long-distance dependencies belong to the most controversial challenges in linguistics. These patterns seem to contain constituents that have left their original position in a sentence and that have landed in a different place. A typical example is the...

One of the most salient hallmarks of construction grammar is its approach to argument structure and coercion: rather than positing many different verb senses in the lexicon, the same lexical construction may freely interact with multiple argument structure constructions. This view has however been criticized from within the construction grammar mov...

Long-distance dependencies are notoriously difficult to analyze in a formally explicit way because they involve constituents that seem to have been extracted from their canonical position in an utterance. The most widespread solution is to identify a gap at an extraction site and to communicate information about that gap to its filler, as in What_...

Construction Grammar has reached a stage of maturity where many researchers are looking for an explicit formal grounding of their work. Recently, there have been exciting developments to cater for this demand, most notably in Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) and Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). Unfortunately, like playing a music instrument,...

Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) is an open-source computational grammar for-malism that is becoming increasingly pop-ular for studying the history and evolution of language. This demonstration shows how FCG can be used to operationalise the cultural processes and cognitive mecha-nisms that underly language evolution and change.

Cognitive linguistics has reached a stage of maturity where many researchers are looking for an explicit formal grounding of their work. Unfortunately, most current models of deep language processing incorporate assumptions from generative grammar that are at odds with the cognitive movement in linguistics. This demonstration shows how Fluid Constr...

Linguistic utterances are full of errors and novel expressions, yet linguistic communication is remarkably robust. This paper presents a double-layered architecture for open-ended language processing, in which ‘diagnostics ’ and ‘repairs’ operate on a meta-level for detecting and solving problems that may occur during habitual processing on a routi...

Almost all languages in the world have a way to formulate commands. Commands specify actions that the body should undertake (such as “stand up”), possibly involving other objects in the scene (such as “pick up the red block”). Action language involves various competences, in particular (i) the ability to perform an action and recognize which action...

Despite centuries of research, the origins of grammatical case are more mysterious than ever. This paper addresses some unanswered questions through language game experiments in which a multi-agent population self-organizes a morphosyntactic case system. The experiments show how the formal part of grammatical constructions may pressure such emergen...

German case syncretism is often assumed to be the accidental by-product of historical development. This paper contradicts this claim and argues that the evolution of German case is driven by the need to optimize the cognitive effort and memory required for processing and interpretation. This hypothesis is supported by a novel kind of computational...

Becoming a proficient speaker of a language requires more than just learning a set of words and grammar rules, it also implies mastering the ways in which speakers of that language typically innovate: stretching the meaning of words, introducing new grammatical constructions, introducing a new category, and so on. This paper demonstrates that such...

Case has fascinated linguists for centuries without however revealing its most important secrets. This paper offers operational explanations for case through language game experiments in which autonomous agents describe real-world events to each other. The experiments demonstrate (a) why a language may develop a case system, (b) how a population ca...

Language change is increasingly recognized as one of the most crucial sources of evidence for understanding human cognition. Unfortunately, despite sophisticated methods for documenting which changes have taken place, the question of why languages evolve over time remains open for speculation. This paper presents a novel research method that addres...

This paper presents a design pattern for handling argument structure and offers a concrete operationalization of this pattern in Fluid Construction Grammar. Argument structure concerns the mapping between ‘participant structure’ (who did what to whom) and instances of ‘argument realization ’ (the linguistic expression of participant structures). Th...

This paper illustrates the use of 'feature matrices', a technique for handling ambiguity and feature indeterminacy in feature structure grammars using unification as the single mechanism for processing. Both phenomena involve forms that can be mapped onto multiple, often conflicting values. This paper illustrates their respective challenges through...

This paper compares two prominent approaches in artificial language evolution: Iterated Learning and Social Coordination. More specifically, the paper contrasts experiments in both approaches on how populations of artificial agents can autonomously develop a grammatical case marking system for indicating event structure (i.e. ‘who does what to whom...

Natural languages are fluid. New conventions may arise and there is never absolute consensus in a population. How can human language users neverthe-less have such a high rate of communicative success? And how do they deal with the incomplete sentences, false starts, errors and noise that is common in normal discourse? Fluidity, ungrammaticality and...

Pronouns form a particularly interesting part-of-speech for evolutionary linguistics because their development is often lagging behind with respect to other changes in their language. Many hypotheses on pronoun evolution exist both for explaining their initial resilience to change as well as for why they eventually cave in to evolutionary pressures...

Pronouns form a particularly interesting part-of-speech for evolutionary linguistics because their development is often lagging behind with respect to other changes in their language. Many hypotheses on pronoun evolution exist - both for explaining their initial resilience to change as well as for why they eventually cave in to evolutionary pressur...

Commentary on S. Cristofaro

Aspect is undoubtedly the most capricious grammatical cate-gory of the Russian language. It has often been asserted as a mystery accessible only to native speakers, leaving all the others lost in its apparently infinite clutter. Recent work in cognitive linguistics has tried to bring order to the seeming chaos of the Russian aspectual system. But t...

This paper shows how experiments on artificial language evolution can provide highly relevant results for important debates in linguistic theories. It reports on a series of experiments that in-vestigate how semantic roles can emerge in a population of artificial embodied agents and how these agents can build a network of constructions. The experim...

Language can be viewed as a complex adaptive system which is continuously shaped and reshaped by the actions of its users as they try to solve communicative problems. To maintain coherence in the overall system, dierent language elements (sounds, words, grammatical con- structions) compete with each other for global acceptance. This paper examines...

This paper is part of an ongoing research program to under- stand the cognitive and functional bases for the origins and evolution of spatial language. Following a cognitive-functional approach, we first investigate the cross-linguistic variety in spatial language, with special at- tention for spatial perspective. Based on this language-typological...

Language users are confronted with a huge search space when processing linguistic utterances, and they unavoidably have to deal with multiple hy- potheses when parsing a sentence. One of the main functions of grammar is therefore to restrict the set of possible combinations and to guide the lan- guage user through this search process. However, gram...