In this paper we analyze the semantic and pragmatic properties of a colloquial interrogative construction attested in European Spanish, which we label invariable "qué" questions (IQQs). In doing so, we contribute to the better understanding of a relatively understudied phenomenon in Spanish, given that IQQs have been mainly approached…

During language acquisition children generalise at multiple layers of granularity. Ambridge argues that abstraction-based accounts suffer from lumping (over-general abstractions) or splitting (over-precise abstractions). Ambridge argues that the only way to overcome this conundrum is in a purely exemplar/analogy-based system in which…

The syntactic behaviour of human beings cannot be explained by analogical generalization on the basis of concrete exemplars: analogies in surface form are insufficient to account for human grammatical knowledge, because they fail to hold in situations where they should, and fail to extend in situations where they need to. [For Ben Ambridge's…

Ambridge argues that the existence of exemplar models for individual phenomena (words, inflection rules, etc.) suggests the feasibility of a unified, exemplars-everywhere model that eschews abstraction. The argument would be strengthened by a description of such a model. However, none is provided. I show that any attempt to do so would immediately…

In this response to commentators, I agree with those who suggested that the distinction between exemplar- and abstraction-based accounts is something of a false dichotomy and therefore move to an abstractions-made-of-exemplars account under which (a) we store all the exemplars that we hear (subject to attention, decay, interference, etc.) but (b)…

The literature provides diverging perspectives on the universality and stability of economic metaphors over time. This article contains a diachronic analysis of economic metaphors describing trade in a corpus of 225 years of US State of the Union addresses (1790-2014). We focused on two types of change: (i) replacement of a source domain by…

Ambridge's proposal cannot account for the most basic observations about phonological patterns in human languages. Outside of the earliest stages of phonological production by toddlers, the phonological systems of speakers/learners exhibit internal behaviours that point to the representation and processing of inter-related units ranging in size…

Ambridge calls for exemplar-based accounts of language acquisition. Do modern neural networks such as transformers or word2vec -- which have been extremely successful in modern natural language processing (NLP) applications -- count? Although these models often have ample parametric complexity to store exemplars from their training data, they also…

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,…

Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…

Metaphor research has always been conducted with various purposes in mind, among which the diachronic analysis of metaphor variation in discourse is outstanding. The current work followed a qualitative research mould to analyze the use of conceptual metaphors within the two novels "Persuasion" and "The Fault in Our Stars,"…

This paper addresses the issues with current systems of categorisation and measurement of linguistic metaphoricity, which have coloured most research into the area to-date. The paper discusses the role of metaphor as a form of creative language and a deviation from more linguistic norms and conventionalities. Two current theories are discussed as…

The aim of this article is to present and summarize the main research findings in the area of learning and teaching second language (L2) collocations. Being a large part of naturally occurring language, collocations and other types of multiword units (e.g., idioms, phrasal verbs, lexical bundles) have been identified as important aspects of L2…

Language use that embodies a mechanistic, instrumental view of nature contributes to the environmental predicament. This paper argues that interpersonal relationships can be applied as suitable analogies and metaphors for human-nature relationships. To show that such reframing is necessary and possible, we used the Google Ngram Viewer to study how…

The purpose of this lexicological study is to present a typology of patients' euphemizing lay denominations of medical terms illustrated by examples in English and French. Various textbooks and lexicons dealing with English and French for medical purposes served as corpora. The euphemisms were classified according to the three semantic processes…