Web demonstration supporting "Inflectional Patterns as Constructions: Spanish Verb Morphology in Fluid Construction Grammar"

This web page contains supplementary material that supports the following paper:

    K. Beuls (2012). Inflectional Patterns as Constructions: Spanish Verb Morphology in Fluid Construction Grammar. Constructions and Frames , 4:2.

This is an interactive demo: You can click on all the boxes and inspect the constructions in further detail. Take some time to understand the marker constructions. More information on the language processing formalism that has been used to implement this Spanish grammar can be found on www.fcg-net.org

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The following topics are illustrated by this demo:

Regular verb conjugation

The processing of the verb forms "hablas" (Figure 9) and "hablamos" (Figures 10 and 11) requires the application of lexical, phrasal, morphological and phonological constructions (stress). The workings of these constructions are explained as we go through the application process of the production of the "hablas" verb form.

The lexical construction applies first in the production pipeline. It is included here below. When you click on the sem and syn labels above the coupling arrow, the two poles will unfold itself. The meaning and the form of the construction are kept in the so-called top-units. These units match with the existing linguistic structure at the time of application. This means in production that if the meaning (hablar ?event ?context) (the symbols that start with a question mark are variables) is found in the existing linguistic structure and no previous hablar construction could apply (see footprints), the rest of the construction ois merged into the linguistic structure. On the syntactic pole, the verb stem "habl", phonetic categories and syntactic categories are added to the newly created hablar unit. This information will be used by later constructions. The details of the matching and merging of this construction into the existing linguistic structure, can be inspected when you open the first node in the production process application tree.

The present indicative construction works on the present tense predicates that are part of the meaning feature in the initial linguistic structure. This meaning is now added to the hablar unit. If you open the syntactic pole of the construction that is displayed below, you will see that a TAM feature is merged in, and that the is-finite feature is filled in with a plus sign.

The agreement construction works in a similar way. Matching on the agent meaning that is present in the initial node, it expands the hablar unit meaning and adds information on person and number to the syntactic categorization of the unit. This agreement information is subsequently used by the morphological construction that expresses the "-s" ending.

There are two morphological constructions responsible in the building of the "hablas" verb form: the TAM morpheme "-a-" and the 2sg agreement morpheme "-s". They exploit their respective features in the syntactic categorization of the hablar unit and merge in two new subunits of this unit that contain their form features.

The "hablas" verb form has two endings, which is the trigger for the application of the stress construction. Since these two endings contain only one vowel ("-a-"), this construction places the diacritic stress on the stem vowel, leading to the pronunciation "há¡blas".

The parsing and production processes use the same inventory of constructions but start off on opposite poles in the initial linguistic structure. We now look at the parsing of the verb form "hablamos", which can lead to both a present interpretation (we talk; we are talking) as well as a past perfect interpretation (we talked (yesterday)). The two application processes, resulting linguistic structures and applied constructions are included below.

Periphrastic forms are very common in the expression of the recent past (present perfect) and events that happened before a given time point in the past (past perfect). Below, we provide an example of such a form in production for "has hablado" (you have spoken).

Semi-regular verb conjugation

Now that you are familiarized with the regular verb conjugation, we can go one step further and analyze some forms that contain stem changes due to stress patterns or assimilation processes. The two verb forms that are presented in the paper, "pienso" (Figure 12) and "leyeron" (Figure 13), are analysed in detail here.

The production of "pienso"

If you compare the application process of the production of the regular verb form "hablas" with the production of "pienso", you see that (except from the respective lexical and morphological constructions) the only real difference lies in the the application of the phonological construction ie-e-pensar. It is this construction that takes the "-e-" nucleus of the verb stem "pens-" and translates it into the palatalized "ie" form. Now open the ie-e-pensar construction in the list of applied constructions. On the leftmost syntactic pole, this construction requires a verb unit of the type "pensar" (see footprints feature) and has a stressed nucleus. When these conditions are met, it overrides the existing "-e-" nucleus with an "-ie-" nucleus. This is done by the overrides operator (->). Another construction word investigating is the a->o-morph construction, which translates the TAM -a- infix with an -o agreement ending for the first person singular.

The production of "leyeron"

The production process of "leyeron" only involves one suffix: "-ieron" that contains TAM as well as agreement information for the past perfect 3rd person plural. This time, we observe another process, namely the assimilation of "e-i-e" into a palatalized version "e-y-e". There is one construction responsible for this change: the eyeron-eieron-morph construction (applies last in production).

Irregular verb conjugation

Irregular forms are saved as lexical constructions, memorized as a holistic form. The verb stem and endings cannot be detected any longer. Below, you see how the I-am-construction (soy) applies first and receives some pro forma agreement and tense constructions

Unmarked forms and future tenses

First we look at the production of "habla", which is the third person singular present form of the verb "hablar" (to speak). It is characterized by only one verb suffix instead of two: "-a". The person/number suffix is not overtly expressed. In order to receive a 3rd person meaning, the 3sg Morph Construction applies. The production as well as the parsing process (of the produced utterance) can be explored below.

An example of a future tense conjugation is included below (also for production and parsing).