The creativity of natural language poses a significant
theoretical problem. One example of this is denominal verbs
(those derived from nouns) such as spoon in “She spooned me
some sugar”. Traditional generative approaches typically
posit a unique entry in the lexicon for this usage, though this
approach has difficulty scaling. Construction Grammar has
evolved as a competing theory which instead allows the
syntactic form of the sentence itself to contribute semantic
meaning. However, how people learn syntactic constructions
remains an open question. One suggestion has been that they
are learned through analogical generalization. We evaluate
this hypothesis using a computational model of analogical
generalization to simulate Kaschak and Glenberg’s (2000)
study regarding interpretation of denominal verbs.