  Natural language relies on a finite lexicon to express an unbounded set of
emerging ideas. One result of this tension is the formation of new
compositions, such that existing linguistic units can be combined with emerging
items into novel expressions. We develop a framework that exploits the
cognitive mechanisms of chaining and multimodal knowledge to predict emergent
compositional expressions through time. We present the syntactic frame
extension model (SFEM) that draws on the theory of chaining and knowledge from
"percept", "concept", and "language" to infer how verbs extend their frames to
form new compositions with existing and novel nouns. We evaluate SFEM
rigorously on the 1) modalities of knowledge and 2) categorization models of
chaining, in a syntactically parsed English corpus over the past 150 years. We
show that multimodal SFEM predicts newly emerged verb syntax and arguments
substantially better than competing models using purely linguistic or unimodal
knowledge. We find support for an exemplar view of chaining as opposed to a
prototype view and reveal how the joint approach of multimodal chaining may be
fundamental to the creation of literal and figurative language uses including
metaphor and metonymy.
