Edited by Alexander Haselow and Gunther Kaltenböck
[Human Cognitive Processing 70] 2020
► pp. 309–354
This chapter discusses the dualistic characteristics of the Agreement Groups (AG) model of linguistic processing and language acquisition, a usage-based distributional approach building on cognitive mechanisms for storing groups of similar utterances in memory, and mechanisms for mapping utterances onto such groups. AGs, i.e. groups of minimally differing utterances, provide a means for processing novel sequences. Furthermore, AGs may facilitate categorisation (lexical/syntactic, semantic), and might serve as the foundations for ‘real’ agreement relations. Longer sequences involve a ‘coverage’ mechanism that processes utterance fragments. I point out three inherently dualistic components of AG processing – familiar/novel utterances, groups/group-combinations, and continuous/discontinuous fragments – that may be relevant for linguistic modelling, and indicate convergences with other fields of research.