Goldwater Micah B
School of Psychology, The University of Sydney.
Top Cogn Sci. 2017 Jul;9(3):776-799. doi: 10.1111/tops.12272. Epub 2017 Jun 26.
This paper argues that grammatical constructions, specifically argument structure constructions that determine the "who did what to whom" part of sentence meaning and how this meaning is expressed syntactically, can be considered a kind of relational category. That is, grammatical constructions are represented as the abstraction of the syntactic and semantic relations of the exemplar utterances that are expressed in that construction, and it enables the generation of novel exemplars. To support this argument, I review evidence that there are parallel behavioral patterns between how children learn relational categories generally and how they learn grammatical constructions specifically. Then, I discuss computational simulations of how grammatical constructions are abstracted from exemplar sentences using a domain-general relational cognitive architecture. Last, I review evidence from adult language processing that shows parallel behavioral patterns with expert behavior from other cognitive domains. After reviewing the evidence, I consider how to integrate this account with other theories of language development.
本文认为，语法结构，特别是那些决定句子意义中“谁对谁做了什么”部分以及该意义如何通过句法表达的论元结构，可以被视为一种关系范畴。也就是说，语法结构被表示为以该结构表达的示例话语的句法和语义关系的抽象，并且它能够生成新的示例。为了支持这一论点，我回顾了相关证据，即儿童学习一般关系范畴的方式与他们学习特定语法结构的方式之间存在平行的行为模式。然后，我讨论了使用领域通用关系认知架构从示例句子中抽象出语法结构的计算模拟。最后，我回顾了来自成人语言处理的证据，这些证据显示出与其他认知领域专家行为的平行行为模式。在回顾这些证据之后，我思考如何将这一解释与其他语言发展理论相结合。
