Jonathan Dunn

Here is a draft manuscript of my book on computational Construction Grammar:

Computational Construction Grammar: A Usage-Based Approach

Abstract. This Element introduces a usage-based computational approach to Construction Grammar that draws on techniques from natural language processing and unsupervised machine learning. This work explores how to represent constructions, how to learn constructions from a corpus, and how to arrange the constructions in a grammar as a network. From a theoretical perspective, this work examines how construction grammars emerge from usage alone as complex systems, with slot-constraints learned at the same time that constructions are learned. From a practical perspective, this work is accompanied by a Python package which enables linguists to incorporate construction grammars into their own corpus-based work. The computational experiments in this work are important for testing the learnability, variability, and confirmability of Construction Grammar as a theory of language.

Code: https://github.com/jonathandunn/c2xg/

Supplementary Material: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/SA6R3

Live Examples: https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.9944630.v1