Compositional Syntactico- S em B anking for E nglish as a Second or Foreign Language (2025)

Abstract: Despite the widespread use of English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESFL), developing syntactico-semantic representations for it is limited — the irregularities in ESFL complicate systematic composition and subsequently the derivation of its semantics.This paper draws on constructivism and proposes a novel Synchronous Hyperedge Replacement Grammar (SHRG)-based constructivist approach to address the challenges. By using constructions as fundamental units, this approach not only accommodates both the idiosyncrasies and the compositional nature of ESFL, but also bridges the gap between literal cues and intended meaning.The feasibility of this constructivist approach is demonstrated using real ESFL data, resulting in a gold-standard, medium-sized syntactico-semantic bank that covers a wide range of ESFL phenomena.

## introduction the human language faculty is widely believed to consist of two key components: (i) a lexicon of stored, memorized listmes and (ii) a mental grammar that defines how novel utterances are composed from them @xcite . guided by the principle of compositionality, which holds that the meaning of an expression arises from the meanings of its parts and their syntactic combination @xcite , these components are thought to enable humans to systematically generate or comprehend an infinite number of expressions. however, such a compositional approach faces significant challenges in characterizing the syntaxsemantics interface of non-native languages. the frequent presence of irregularities in them, including unconventional tokens and structures, makes it exceedingly difficult to define their lexicons and grammars. yet, speakers consistently demonstrate the ability to interpret these languages effectively @xcite . consider sentences 1a-1c which are real-world examples of non-native english, i.e., english as a second or foreign language (esfl) foot_0 . despite containing apparent syntactic errors, each sentence successfully conveys its intended semantics: how can coherent semantics arise from an "imperfect" syntactic foundation? this question has become increasingly pressing, as esfl, with the advent of globalization, has come to be recognized not merely as an erroneous forms of native english @xcite , but as a linguistic system in its own right @xcite @xcite . notably, over 70% of english speakers worldwide are non-native @xcite . in response, this paper draws on insights from constructivist linguistics to address this challenge. specifically, grounded in the constructivist theories which conceptualize words, idioms, and phrases as form-meaning pairings, or constructions, stored in an inventory that exhaustively captures human language @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite , this paper proposes using syntacticosemantic constructions as the fundamental units for modeling the computational systems underlying the human language faculty. as illustrated in figure 1 , this approach treats diverse "errors" in esfl as distinct form-meaning pairings. in doing so, it not only accommodates these deviations but also integrates them into constructional templates, thereby enabling their participation in broader syntactico-semantic composition. at the implementation level, we represent the syntax of esfl using context free grammar (cfg) trees and the semantics using graphs in the framework of english resource semantics (ers; @xcite . to model the parallel composition of syntactic and semantic representations, synchronous hyperedge replacement grammar (shrg), a synchronous extension of hypergraph replacement grammar (hrg) that has been widely applied in semantics-based parsing and generation for english @xcite @xcite , is adopted. details of the constructivist syntactico-semantic formalism is presented in §2. the feasibility and the effectiveness of the shrg-based constructivist syntax-semantics interface is tested on real esfl data. following the workflow demonstrated in figure 2 , we develop a syntactico-semantic bank (sembank; §3), which achieves high inter-annotator agreement, addresses various phenomena effectively, and extends coverage to data previously deemed unparsable. we argue that our newly-developed sembank for esfl benefits both linguistic theory and practical applications. theoretically, it shows that esfl is compositional -not a random collection of expressions, but a natural language governed by systematic rules @xcite . its derivational process parallels that of native english, accounting for its generativity. practically, since language acquisition involves mastering form-meaning pairings of the target language, our sembank serves as a valuable resource for empirical research in this domain @xcite @xcite , offering a deeper and more comprehensive analysis than existing esfl corpora @xcite @xcite . ## esfl sembank we apply the shrg-based syntax-semantics interface to esfl data, resulting a syntactico-semantic esfl sembank. generally speaking, its development involves three main steps: ## conclusion compositionality is not only a key notion of theoretical linguistics, as linguistics concerns itself with understanding the human language capacity, but also an emerging crucial topic in cognitive science and artificial intelligence @xcite @xcite given the defining role played by compositionality in distinguishing human language from animal communication systems. however, the "erroneous" tokens and grammars frequently observed in non-native language varieties, particularly esfl, present significant challenges to systematic semantic derivation and seemingly undermine the principle of compositionality. this paper addresses the issue by integrating insights from constructivist theories and validating this approach through computational modeling. our findings show that, despite surface-level syntactic imperfections, compositionality operates similarly in the underlying mechanisms of both esfl and native english. we also present a more accurate, consistent, and comprehensive syntacticosemantic bank, containing robust and syntactically informed annotations for 1643 esfl sentences. given the global prevalence of esfl, we believe our contributions, including the proposed framework and the sembank, are of substantial importance. by providing a rich empirical foundation, they could address long-standing questions and open new avenues for both theoretical and computational linguistics, as well as other fields beyond.