Trends in Cognitive Sciences
OpinionThe semantics of syntactic structures
Section snippets
What are the semantics of syntactic structures (TSOSS)?
By ‘syntactic structures’, we mean large units of syntax, in particular noun phrases (NPs) and verb phrases (VPs). By ‘semantics’ we mean abstract notions such as objecthood, substancehood, causation, motion and mental activity. TSOSS are carried independently of the open-class content words (nouns, verbs and adjectives) that inhabit these structures (although certain closed-class words such as prepositions and the plural marker ‘s’ are also integral to TSOSS). For now, we offer some concrete
TSOSS and linguistic theory
Modern notions of syntactic structure date back to Noam Chomsky's early work 2. Within the framework of his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax 3, transformations served to map deep structures generated by the rules in the base of the grammar to surface structures that could then be pronounced by the phonetic–phonological system. To take an example, the basic structure ‘Elvis shot the television’ served as the deep structure for both the simple active sentence ‘Elvis shot the television’ and the
TSOSS and word learning
Word learners must solve numerous problems. One key problem is knowing what to pay attention to in a world that frequently provides complex scenes open to multiple construals, some more salient than others. Another is learning words whose referents cannot be observed. In this section, these problems are considered as they apply to nouns and verbs, and how TSOSS might help learners to overcome them is discussed.
Conclusions
Two recent linguistic theories, beginning from rather different starting assumptions, both readily permit syntactic structures to carry meanings apart from the words that appear in them. Work on the acquisition of word meanings suggests that meaningful structures are frequently helpful – and sometimes indispensable – for the learning of words, especially those that cannot easily be learned from observation. In our view, this convergence between theoretical and experimental work should not be
Outstanding questions
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To what extent are verb–structure pairings constrained by formal properties of language, and to what extent are they constrained by conceptual factors? The sentence ‘Susan thought the book to John’ strikes most people as highly peculiar at best. One explanation for the oddity of this sentence is that the verb think, because of its formal, linguistic properties, is not permitted in a structure that is typically reserved for verbs of transfer. Another is that the event that it describes is not
Acknowledgements
We thank Lila Gleitman, Debby Kemler Nelson, Fei Xu and the anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments.
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Syntax-Semantics Interface
2015, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences: Second EditionA cognitive interactionist sentence parser with simple recurrent networks
2010, Information SciencesCitation Excerpt :The reason is that the semantics in the first sentence allows for interpretation in whether the defendant is the one who examines, while in the second sentence only the evidence can be examined. This experiment suggests that semantics plays a decisive part in human reading of a sentence, which supports the interactionist approach [26] and argues against the syntax-first theory [15]. As illustrated in Fig. 1, the SRN [9] architecture includes activations from the Recurrent Layer (RL, the hidden layer) as the Context Layer (CL) in the Input Layer (IL), aiming at processing inputs consisting of sequences of patterns of variable length.
The semantic processing of syntactic structure in sentence comprehension: An ERP study
2007, Brain ResearchCitation Excerpt :This finding is in line with recent linguistic (Croft, 2001; Culicover, 1999; Fillmore et al., 1988; Goldberg, 1995, 1997, 2003, 2005; Jackendoff, 2002) and psycholinguistic research (Ahrens, 1995; Bencini and Goldberg, 2000; Chang et al., 2003; Griffin and Weinstein-Tull, 2003; Hare and Goldberg, 1999; Kaschak and Glenberg, 2000), which focused on semantics of syntactic structures. It has been claimed that abstract meanings (e.g., disposal or causation) can be extracted from syntactic structures independent of their constituent content words (e.g., nouns and verbs) during language learning and these meanings are stored with syntactic forms in pair in the long-term memory (Goldberg, 1995, 2003, 2005; Kako and Wagner, 2001). In the incremental sentence processing, the comprehension system starts to build the ba construction when it comes across the proposition ba, which is combined with content words (e.g., objects and verbs) to form a complete syntactic structure (i.e., the ba construction) on the basis of word category information (Friederici, 2002; Friederici and Weissenborn, in press).
Thematic role properties of subjects and objects
2006, CognitionProsodic clues to syntactic processing - A PET and ERP study
2006, NeuroImageHow seriously should we take Minimalist syntax?
2003, Trends in Cognitive Sciences