Ambridge reviews and augments an impressive body of research demonstrating both the advantages and the necessity of an exemplar-based model of knowledge of one’s language. He cites three computational models that have been applied successfully to issues of phonology and morphology. Focusing on Ambridge’s discussion of sentence-level constructions, this commentary cites additional research in support of his exemplar hypothesis. It then provides an informal demonstration of how Skousen’s (1989) Analogical Model might be extended to the processing of sentence-level constructions.
EddingtonD. (2002). A comparison of two analogical models, Tilburg memory-based learner versus analogical modeling. In SkousenR.LonsdaleD.ParkinsonD. B. (Eds.), Analogical modeling, an exemplar-based approach to language (pp. 141–155). John Benjamins Publishing Co.
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ElmanJ. L. (2009). On the meaning of words and dinosaur bones: Lexical knowledge without a lexicon. Cognitive Science, 33, 547–582. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.01023.x
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GahlS.JurapskyD.RolandD. (2004). Verb subcategorization frequencies: American English corpus data, methodological studies, and cross-corpus comparisons. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36(3), 432–443.
9.
GriesS. T. (2011). Data in construction grammar. In HoffmannT.TrousdaleG. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of construction grammar (pp. 93–110). Oxford University Press.
10.
HoffmannT. (2017). Construction grammars. In DancygierB. (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of cognitive linguistics (pp. 310–329). Cambridge University Press.
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NosofskyR. M. (1990). Relations between exemplar similarity and likelihood models of classification. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 34, 393–418.
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SatoM.SchaferA. J.BergenB. K. (2013). One word at a time: Mental representations of object shape change incrementally during sentence processing. Language and Cognition, 54(4), 345–373. https://doi.org/10.1515/langcog-2013-0022
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SkousenR. (1989). Analogical modeling of language. Springer.
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