When the functions of constructions clash

Presentation by Adele Goldberg, Princeton University.

So-called “island constraints” are argued to result from a clash between the functions of grammatical constructions being combined. Experimental evidence in English is based on robust interaction between function and acceptability ratings, across several long-distance dependency constructions and a wide range of ‘island’ types, including verb complements and verb-phrase conjunctions. Explicit probing of a Large Language Model replicates the striking relationship between the constructions’ functions and independent acceptability ratings,  despite the 0-shot, explicit nature of the tasks, and little to no chance of contamination. When the function of constructions is manipulated with prosody, acceptability judgments are influenced as predicted, demonstrating a causal role for function on the island phenomenon in humans and LLMs.

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Adele Goldberg has been a professor at Princeton University since 2004, initially in the linguistics programme and currently the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Psychology.

Goldberg’s research highlights the role of constructions in language, providing evidence that speakers learn a network of systematically related pairings of form and function, including words, idioms, and productive grammatical patterns. Most recently, she has been working on what Large Language Models tell us about human language and vice versa.