Learnability and falsifiability of Construction Grammars

Authors

  • Jonathan Dunn Illinois Institute of Technology

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v2i0.4009

Keywords:

construction grammar, grammar induction, discovery-device grammar, computational construction grammar

Abstract

The strength of Construction Grammar (CxG) is its descriptive power; its weakness is the learnability and falsifiability of its unconstrained representations. Learnability is the degree to which the optimum set of constructions can be consistently selected from the large set of potential constructions; falsifiability is the ability to make testable predictions about the constructions present in a dataset. This paper uses grammar induction to evaluate learnability and falsifiability: given a discovery-device CxG and a set of observed utterances, its learnability is its stability over sub-sets of data and its falsifiability is its ability to predict a CxG.

Author Biography

  • Jonathan Dunn, Illinois Institute of Technology

    Research Assistant Professor

    Department of Computer Science

    Illinois Institute of Technology

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Published

2017-06-12

How to Cite

Dunn, Jonathan. 2017. “Learnability and Falsifiability of Construction Grammars”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 2 (June): 1:1–15. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v2i0.4009.