# Exposure and Emergence in Usage-Based Grammar: Computational Experiments in 35 Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.14160 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14160/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Learning Word Vectors for 157 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06893/) (2018)
- [Mapping Languages: The Corpus of Global Language Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00798/) (2020)
- [CxGBERT: BERT meets Construction Grammar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04134/) (2020)
- [Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in English Using Dialect Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05527/) (2019)
- [Frequency vs. Association for Constraint Selection in Usage-Based Construction Grammar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05529/) (2019)
- [Finding Variants for Construction-Based Dialectometry: A Corpus-Based Approach to Regional CxGs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01299/) (2021)
- [Global Syntactic Variation in Seven Languages: Towards a Computational Dialectology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01306/) (2021)
- [Representations of Language Varieties Are Reliable Given Corpus Similarity Measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01294/) (2021)
- [A Robust Transformation-Based Learning Approach Using Ripple Down Rules for Part-of-Speech Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.4021/) (2014)
- [Modeling the Complexity and Descriptive Adequacy of Construction Grammars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05588/) (2019)
- [Production vs Perception: The Role of Individuality in Usage-Based Grammar Induction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09033/) (2021)
- [Learned Construction Grammars Converge Across Registers Given Increased Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05663/) (2021)
- [Stability of Syntactic Dialect Classification Over Space and Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04958/) (2022)
- [Predicting Embedding Reliability in Low-Resource Settings Using Corpus Similarity Measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04330/) (2022)
- [Register Variation Remains Stable Across 60 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09813/) (2022)
- [Multi-Unit Directional Measures of Association: Moving Beyond Pairs of Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01297/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Large corpora and large language models: a replicable method for automating grammatical annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11260/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Constructicon: Linguistic Analysis of a Computational CxG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12642/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Language Representation with Constructional Information for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02819/) (2023)
- [Syntactic Variation Across the Grammar: Modelling a Complex Adaptive System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11869/) (2023)
- [The Computational Learning of Construction Grammars: State of the Art and Prospective Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07606/) (2024)
- [A Method for Learning Large-Scale Computational Construction Grammars from Semantically Annotated Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12754/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper uses computational experiments to explore the role of exposure in the emergence of construction grammars. While usage-based grammars are hypothesized to depend on a learner's exposure to actual language use, the mechanisms of such exposure have only been studied in a few constructions in isolation. This paper experiments with (i) the growth rate of the constructicon, (ii) the convergence rate of grammars exposed to independent registers, and (iii) the rate at which constructions are forgotten when they have not been recently observed. These experiments show that the lexicon grows more quickly than the grammar and that the growth rate of the grammar is not dependent on the growth rate of the lexicon. At the same time, register-specific grammars converge onto more similar constructions as the amount of exposure increases. This means that the influence of specific registers becomes less important as exposure increases. Finally, the rate at which constructions are forgotten when they have not been recently observed mirrors the growth rate of the constructicon. This paper thus presents a computational model of usage-based grammar that includes both the emergence and the unentrenchment of constructions.