Adele E Goldberg
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3842274 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Adele E Goldberg |
| PRENOMES | Adele E |
| SOBRENOME | Goldberg |
| ASSINATURA | GOLDBERG A E |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Princeton University |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 36 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 111 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1989 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
A Suite of LMs Comprehend Puzzle Statements as Well or Better Than Humans
This paper reexamines a recent claim that Large Language Models lag behind humans in language comprehension on what were described as minimally complex statements. We argue that human performance was overestimated and LM performance, underestimated. Moreover, both people and lower-performing LMs are disproportionately challenged by queries involving potentially appropriate inferences, suggesting shared pragmatic sensitivity rather than model-spec…
The English phrase-as-lemma construction
This article examines the English phrase-as-lemma (PAL) construction, which treats phrases syntactically as if they were words (e.g. a don’t-mess-with-me driver ). We argue that it is important to acknowledge and represent the construction’s unique syntax directly rather than trying to shoehorn it into a more familiar grammatical category such as Noun or Adjective. PALs do not share the same distribution as other categories, and critically, their…
Learning Unacceptability
Adults learning a new language tend to judge unconventional utterances more leniently than fluent speakers do; ratings on acceptable utterances, however, tend to align more closely with fluent speakers. This asymmetry raises a question as to whether unconventional utterances can be statistically preempted by conventional utterances for adult learners. We report a preregistered study that provided undergraduates in Spanish classes with three days …
Word meaning is complex
The current study marries two important observations. First, there is a growing recognition that word meanings need to be flexibly extended in new ways as new contexts arise. Second, as evidenced primarily within the perceptual domain, autistic individuals tend to find generalization more challenging while showing stronger veridical memory in comparison to their neurotypical peers. Here we report that a group of 80 autistic adults finds it more c…
The discourse functions of grammatical constructions explain an enduring syntactic puzzle
Each grammatical construction serves a function, such as conveying that part an utterance is at-issue or is backgrounded. When multiple constructions combine to produce an utterance, their functions must be compatible. This preregistered study (N = 680) addresses the enigmatic case of "syntactic island constraints": Long-distance dependency constructions (LDDs) do not combine equally well with all base constructions. While widely presumed to requ…
Conventional metaphors elicit greater real-time engagement than literal paraphrases or concrete sentences
Conventional metaphors (e.g., a firm grasp on an idea) are extremely common. A possible explanation for their ubiquity is that they are more engaging, evoking more focused attention, than their literal paraphrases (e.g., a good understanding of an idea). To evaluate whether, when, and why this may be true, we created a new database of 180 English sentences consisting of conventional metaphors, literal paraphrases, and concrete descriptions (e.g.,…
The constructionist approach offers a useful lens on language learning in autistic individuals
The constructionist approach argues that communication is central to language learning, language use, and language change. We argue that the approach provides a useful perspective on how autistic children learn language, as it anticipates variable outcomes and suggests testable predictions. First, a reduced ability and interest in tracking the attention and intentions of others should negatively impact early language development, and a wealth of …
The nice-of-you construction and its fragments
This article argues that a usage-based construction (a conventional pairing of form and function) is required to account for a certain pattern of English exemplified by e.g., it’s nice of you to read this . Contemporary corpus and survey data reveal that the construction is strongly associated with certain adjectives (e.g., nice, good ) over others, while diachronic data demonstrate that the construction’s overall frequency has systematically wax…
Reduced Competition Effects and Noisier Representations in a Second Language
Native speakers strongly disprefer novel formulations when a conventional alternative expresses the same intended message, presumably because the more conventional form competes with the novel form. In five studies, second language (L2) speakers were less influenced by competing alternatives than native speakers. L2 speakers accepted novel interpretable sentences more readily than native speakers, and were somewhat less likely to offer competing …
Explain Me This
The blowfish effect
Learners preferentially interpret novel nouns at the basic level (‘dog’) rather than at a more narrow level (‘Labrador’). This ‘basic-level bias’ is mitigated by statistics: children and adults are more likely to interpret a novel noun at a more narrow label if they witness ‘a suspicious coincidence’ – the word applied to three exemplars of the same narrow category. Independent work has found that exemplar typicality influences learners’ inferenc…
Explain Me This
Why our use of language is highly creative yet also constrained We use words and phrases creatively to express ourselves in ever-changing contexts, readily extending language constructions in new ways. Yet native speakers also implicitly know when a creative and easily interpretable formulation-such as Explain me or She considered to go-doesn't sound quite right. In this incisive book, Adele Goldberg explores how these creative but constrained la…
When regularization gets it wrong
Children tend to regularize their productions when exposed to artificial languages, an advantageous response to unpredictable variation. But generalizations in natural languages are typically conditioned by factors that children ultimately learn. In two experiments, adult and six-year-old learners witnessed two novel classifiers, probabilistically conditioned by semantics. Whereas adults displayed high accuracy in their productions – applying the…
Another look at the universal grammar hypothesis
Another look at the universal grammar hypothesis: Commentary on Evans 2014 Adele E. Goldberg It is important to recognize that The language myth (TLM) is not a research monograph, but is instead aimed at a popular audience, and therefore it should be judged in this light. Popular books necessarily oversimplify certain issues, on pain of not being very popular, yet TLM does satisfy its intended purpose: it demonstrates, in a clear and engaging way…
Nonnative Speakers Do Not Take Competing Alternative Expressions Into Account the Way Native Speakers Do
When native speakers judge the acceptability of novel sentences, they appear to implicitly take competing formulations into account, judging novel sentences with a readily available alternative formulation to be less acceptable than novel sentences with no competing alternative. Moreover, novel sentences with a competing alternative are more strongly dispreferred when they contain high- compared to low-frequency verbs. We replicate these findings…
A -adjectives, statistical preemption, and the evidence
A certain class of English adjectives known as a -adjectives resist appearing attributively as prenominal modifiers (e.g. ?? the afraid boy , ?? the asleep man ). Boyd & Goldberg 2011 had offered experimental evidence suggesting that the dispreference is learnable on the basis of categorization and statistical preemption : repeatedly witnessing predicative formulations in contexts in which the attributive form would otherwise be appropriate. The …
Metaphorical Sentences Are More Emotionally Engaging than Their Literal Counterparts
Why do people so often use metaphorical expressions when literal paraphrases are readily available? This study focuses on a comparison of metaphorical statements involving the source domain of taste (e.g., “She looked at him sweetly”) and their literal paraphrases (e.g., “She looked at him kindly”). Metaphorical and literal sentences differed only in one word and were normed for length, familiarity, imageability, emotional valence, and arousal. O…
Fitting a slim dime between the verb template and argument structure construction approaches
Young children fail to fully generalize a novel argument structure construction when exposed to the same input as older learners
The present study 1 exposed five-year-olds ( M =5 ; 2), seven-year-olds ( M =7 ; 6) and adults ( M =22 ; 4) to instances of a novel phrasal construction, then used a forced choice comprehension task to evaluate their learning of the construction. The abstractness of participants' acquired representations of the novel construction was evaluated by varying the degree of lexical overlap that test items had with exposure items. We found that both chi…
The partial productivity of constructions as induction
Whether words can be coerced by constructions into new uses is determined in part by semantic sensicality and statistical preemption. But other factors are also at play. Experimental results reported here suggest that speakers are more confident that a target coinage is acceptable to the degree that attested instances cover the semantic space that includes the target coinage. The relevance of coverage is supported by combined effects of type freq…
Learning What NOT to Say
A persistent mystery in language acquisition is how speakers are able to learn seemingly arbitrary distributional restrictions. This article investigates one such case: the fact that speakers resist using certain adjectives prenominally (e.g. ?? the asleep man ). Experiment 1 indicates that speakers tentatively generalize or categorize the distributional restriction beyond their previous experience. Experiment 2 demonstrates that speakers are sen…
Linking Rule Acquisition in Novel Phrasal Constructions
All natural languages rely on sentence-level form-meaning associations (i.e., linking rules) to encode propositional content about who did what to whom. Although these associations are recognized as foundational in many different theoretical frameworks (Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Lidz, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 2003; Pinker, 1984, 1989) and are—at least in principle—learnable (Allen, 1997; Morris, Cottrell, & Elman, 2000), very little empirical work has b…
Chapter 11 Construction Grammar
Fast mapping between a phrasal form and meaning
This is the first study to investigate experimentally how children come to learn mappings between novel phrasal forms and novel meanings: a central task in learning a language. Two experiments are reported. In both studies 5‐ to 7‐year‐old children watched a short set of video clips depicting objects appearing in various ways. Each scene was described using a novel verb embedded in a novel construction. Children who watched the videos and heard t…
The role of prediction in construction-learning
It is well-established that (non-linguistic) categorization is driven by a functional demand of prediction. We suggest that prediction likewise may well play a role in motivating the learning of semantic generalizations about argument structure constructions. We report corpora statistics that indicate that the argument frame or construction has roughly equivalent cue validity as a predictor of overall sentence meaning as the morphological form of…
Learning argument structure generalizations
General correlations between form and meaning at the level of argument structure patterns have often been assumed to be innate. Claims of in-nateness typically rest on the idea that the input is not rich enough for gen-eral learning strategies to yield the required representations. The present work demonstrates that the semantics associated with argument structure generalizations can indeed be learned, given the nature of the input and an underst…
The English Resultative as a Family of Constructions
English resultative expressions have been a major focus of research on the syntax-semantics interface. We argue in this article that a family of related constructions is required to account for their distribution. We demonstrate that a number of generalizations follow from the semantics of the constructions we posit: the syntactic argument structure of the sentence is predicted by general principles of argument linking; and the aspectual structur…
Learning What NOT to Say
A persistent mystery in language acquisition is how speakers are able to learn seemingly arbitrary distributional restrictions. This article investigates one such case: the fact that speakers resist using certain adjectives prenominally (e.g. ?? the asleep man ). Experiment 1 indicates that speakers tentatively generalize or categorize the distributional restriction beyond their previous experience. Experiment 2 demonstrates that speakers are sen…
Nonnative Speakers Do Not Take Competing Alternative Expressions Into Account the Way Native Speakers Do
When native speakers judge the acceptability of novel sentences, they appear to implicitly take competing formulations into account, judging novel sentences with a readily available alternative formulation to be less acceptable than novel sentences with no competing alternative. Moreover, novel sentences with a competing alternative are more strongly dispreferred when they contain high- compared to low-frequency verbs. We replicate these findings…
Patient arguments of causative verbs can be omitted
The Pragmatics of Obligatory Adjuncts
The existence of OBLIGATORY ADJUNCTS in both predication and modification constructions is best understood as following from general conversational pragmatics, rather than from grammatical factors. In the case of clausal predication, adjuncts are used to satisfy the often-cited requirement that every utterance have a focus that serves to convey new information in the discourse; adjuncts are just one of several ways in which the focal requirement …
Reduced Competition Effects and Noisier Representations in a Second Language
Native speakers strongly disprefer novel formulations when a conventional alternative expresses the same intended message, presumably because the more conventional form competes with the novel form. In five studies, second language (L2) speakers were less influenced by competing alternatives than native speakers. L2 speakers accepted novel interpretable sentences more readily than native speakers, and were somewhat less likely to offer competing …
The partial productivity of constructions as induction
Whether words can be coerced by constructions into new uses is determined in part by semantic sensicality and statistical preemption. But other factors are also at play. Experimental results reported here suggest that speakers are more confident that a target coinage is acceptable to the degree that attested instances cover the semantic space that includes the target coinage. The relevance of coverage is supported by combined effects of type freq…
Learning Unacceptability
Adults learning a new language tend to judge unconventional utterances more leniently than fluent speakers do; ratings on acceptable utterances, however, tend to align more closely with fluent speakers. This asymmetry raises a question as to whether unconventional utterances can be statistically preempted by conventional utterances for adult learners. We report a preregistered study that provided undergraduates in Spanish classes with three days …
Linking Rule Acquisition in Novel Phrasal Constructions
All natural languages rely on sentence-level form-meaning associations (i.e., linking rules) to encode propositional content about who did what to whom. Although these associations are recognized as foundational in many different theoretical frameworks (Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Lidz, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 2003; Pinker, 1984, 1989) and are—at least in principle—learnable (Allen, 1997; Morris, Cottrell, & Elman, 2000), very little empirical work has b…
The End Result(ative)
The end result(ative) Adele E. Goldberg and Ray Jackendoff This volume’s discussion notes include comments by Hans Boas and by Stephen Wechsler on our article, ‘The English resultative as a family of constructions’ (Goldberg & Jackendoff 2004), which we hope will raise further discussion about the nature of the semantic constraints and narrow productivity of the construction.1 The main objectives of our article were to argue against the position …
A Unified Account of the Semantics of the English Ditransitive
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1989), pp. 79-90
It Can’t Go Down the Chimney Up
Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure (1991), pp. 368-378
Argument Structure
Words by Default
Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Role of Learnability in Grammatical Theory (1996)
Patient arguments of causative verbs can be omitted
The Pragmatics of Obligatory Adjuncts
The existence of OBLIGATORY ADJUNCTS in both predication and modification constructions is best understood as following from general conversational pragmatics, rather than from grammatical factors. In the case of clausal predication, adjuncts are used to satisfy the often-cited requirement that every utterance have a focus that serves to convey new information in the discourse; adjuncts are just one of several ways in which the focal requirement …
Surface generalizations
Since the earliest days of generative grammar, there has existed a strong tendency to consider one argument structure construction in relation to a particular rough paraphrase. Initially this was a result of the emphasis on transformations that derived one pattern from another. While today there exist many non-derivational theories for which this motivation no longer exists, the traditional outlook has not completely lost its grip, as can be seen…
Constructions
Learning argument structure generalizations
General correlations between form and meaning at the level of argument structure patterns have often been assumed to be innate. Claims of in-nateness typically rest on the idea that the input is not rich enough for gen-eral learning strategies to yield the required representations. The present work demonstrates that the semantics associated with argument structure generalizations can indeed be learned, given the nature of the input and an underst…
The English Resultative as a Family of Constructions
English resultative expressions have been a major focus of research on the syntax-semantics interface. We argue in this article that a family of related constructions is required to account for their distribution. We demonstrate that a number of generalizations follow from the semantics of the constructions we posit: the syntactic argument structure of the sentence is predicted by general principles of argument linking; and the aspectual structur…
Fast mapping between a phrasal form and meaning
This is the first study to investigate experimentally how children come to learn mappings between novel phrasal forms and novel meanings: a central task in learning a language. Two experiments are reported. In both studies 5‐ to 7‐year‐old children watched a short set of video clips depicting objects appearing in various ways. Each scene was described using a novel verb embedded in a novel construction. Children who watched the videos and heard t…
The role of prediction in construction-learning
It is well-established that (non-linguistic) categorization is driven by a functional demand of prediction. We suggest that prediction likewise may well play a role in motivating the learning of semantic generalizations about argument structure constructions. We report corpora statistics that indicate that the argument frame or construction has roughly equivalent cue validity as a predictor of overall sentence meaning as the morphological form of…
Subject-auxiliary inversion
This article argues that subject auxiliary inversion in English (SAI) provides an example of a syntactic generalization that is strongly motivated by a family of closely related functions. Recognition of the functional properties of each subconstruction associated with SAI allows us to predict many seemingly arbitrary properties of SAI: e.g., its (partial) restriction to appear in main clauses, the fact that the inversion only involves the first …
The End Result(ative)
The end result(ative) Adele E. Goldberg and Ray Jackendoff This volume’s discussion notes include comments by Hans Boas and by Stephen Wechsler on our article, ‘The English resultative as a family of constructions’ (Goldberg & Jackendoff 2004), which we hope will raise further discussion about the nature of the semantic constraints and narrow productivity of the construction.1 The main objectives of our article were to argue against the position …
Chapter 11 Construction Grammar
Linking Rule Acquisition in Novel Phrasal Constructions
All natural languages rely on sentence-level form-meaning associations (i.e., linking rules) to encode propositional content about who did what to whom. Although these associations are recognized as foundational in many different theoretical frameworks (Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Lidz, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 2003; Pinker, 1984, 1989) and are—at least in principle—learnable (Allen, 1997; Morris, Cottrell, & Elman, 2000), very little empirical work has b…
The partial productivity of constructions as induction
Whether words can be coerced by constructions into new uses is determined in part by semantic sensicality and statistical preemption. But other factors are also at play. Experimental results reported here suggest that speakers are more confident that a target coinage is acceptable to the degree that attested instances cover the semantic space that includes the target coinage. The relevance of coverage is supported by combined effects of type freq…
Learning What NOT to Say
A persistent mystery in language acquisition is how speakers are able to learn seemingly arbitrary distributional restrictions. This article investigates one such case: the fact that speakers resist using certain adjectives prenominally (e.g. ?? the asleep man ). Experiment 1 indicates that speakers tentatively generalize or categorize the distributional restriction beyond their previous experience. Experiment 2 demonstrates that speakers are sen…
Young children fail to fully generalize a novel argument structure construction when exposed to the same input as older learners
The present study 1 exposed five-year-olds ( M =5 ; 2), seven-year-olds ( M =7 ; 6) and adults ( M =22 ; 4) to instances of a novel phrasal construction, then used a forced choice comprehension task to evaluate their learning of the construction. The abstractness of participants' acquired representations of the novel construction was evaluated by varying the degree of lexical overlap that test items had with exposure items. We found that both chi…
Metaphorical Sentences Are More Emotionally Engaging than Their Literal Counterparts
Why do people so often use metaphorical expressions when literal paraphrases are readily available? This study focuses on a comparison of metaphorical statements involving the source domain of taste (e.g., “She looked at him sweetly”) and their literal paraphrases (e.g., “She looked at him kindly”). Metaphorical and literal sentences differed only in one word and were normed for length, familiarity, imageability, emotional valence, and arousal. O…
Fitting a slim dime between the verb template and argument structure construction approaches
A -adjectives, statistical preemption, and the evidence
A certain class of English adjectives known as a -adjectives resist appearing attributively as prenominal modifiers (e.g. ?? the afraid boy , ?? the asleep man ). Boyd & Goldberg 2011 had offered experimental evidence suggesting that the dispreference is learnable on the basis of categorization and statistical preemption : repeatedly witnessing predicative formulations in contexts in which the attributive form would otherwise be appropriate. The …
Another look at the universal grammar hypothesis
Another look at the universal grammar hypothesis: Commentary on Evans 2014 Adele E. Goldberg It is important to recognize that The language myth (TLM) is not a research monograph, but is instead aimed at a popular audience, and therefore it should be judged in this light. Popular books necessarily oversimplify certain issues, on pain of not being very popular, yet TLM does satisfy its intended purpose: it demonstrates, in a clear and engaging way…
Nonnative Speakers Do Not Take Competing Alternative Expressions Into Account the Way Native Speakers Do
When native speakers judge the acceptability of novel sentences, they appear to implicitly take competing formulations into account, judging novel sentences with a readily available alternative formulation to be less acceptable than novel sentences with no competing alternative. Moreover, novel sentences with a competing alternative are more strongly dispreferred when they contain high- compared to low-frequency verbs. We replicate these findings…
When regularization gets it wrong
Children tend to regularize their productions when exposed to artificial languages, an advantageous response to unpredictable variation. But generalizations in natural languages are typically conditioned by factors that children ultimately learn. In two experiments, adult and six-year-old learners witnessed two novel classifiers, probabilistically conditioned by semantics. Whereas adults displayed high accuracy in their productions – applying the…
Linguistics (35 obras) · Computer Science (26 obras) · Psychology (24 obras) · Philosophy (22 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (18 obras) · Cognitive psychology (15 obras) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (13 obras) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (10 obras) · Mathematics (9 obras) · Natural language processing (9 obras)