Words

Anders, Rudi A Melbourne suburb A short speech Congratulations..

In this paper, I explore two contrasting conceptions of the social character of language. The first takes language to be grounded in social convention. The second, famously developed by Donald Davidson, takes language to be grounded in a social relation called triangulation. I aim both to clarify and to evaluate these two conceptions of language. First, I propose that Davidson’s triangulation-based story can be understood as the result of relaxing core features of conventionalism pertaining to both common-interest and diachronic stability—specifically, (...) Davidson does not require uses of language to be self-perpetuating, in the way required by conventionalism, in order to be bona fide components of linguistic systems. Second, I argue that Davidson’s objections to conventionalism from language innovation and language variation fail, and that certain kinds of negative data in language use require an appeal to diachronic social relations. However, I also argue that recent work on communication in the a.. (shrink)

A language is specified by a Lexicon and a Grammar. A constructive grammar goes like this: The Lexicon provides a set of items. The items are associated with Categories and Denotations. The Grammar gives a recursive specification of the language by defining sets of derived expressions starting with the Lexicon as the base and allowing the combination of lexical items into expressions with their Categories and Denotations, by a rule-to-rule procedure, and so on ad libitum.

The term "morphosemantics" in the title of this talk is intended to raise a fundamental question about linguistic expressions and their meanings. When we talk about the meanings of morphemes and their combination into words should we expect to find the same kinds of meanings and combinations of meanings that we associate with the processes of putting together words into phrases? The answers to this question vary widely or even wildly across different linguists and their schools or theories. For example, (...) some linguists would say: "Decidedly not, since morphemes don't have any meanings at all. Meaning only begins with words and their combinations." Others would say: "Yes, of course! Complex words and their meanings are built up in syntax, so we predict that their complex meanings are made up uniformly across words and syntactic phrases.". (shrink)

A recurrent issue in linguistic theory and psychology concerns the cognitive status of memorized lists and their internal structure. In morphological theory, the collections of inflected forms of a given noun, verb, or adjective into inflectional paradigms are thought to constitute one such type of list. This book focuses on the question of which elements in a paradigm can stand in a relation of partial or total phonological identity. Leading scholars consider inflectional identity from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with (...) an emphasis on both case studies and predictive theories of where syncretism and other "paradigmatic pressures" will occur in natural language. The authors consider phenomena such as allomorphy and syncretism while exploring questions of underlying representations, the formal properties of markedness, and the featural representation of conjugation and declension classes. They do so from the perspective of contemporary theories of morphology and phonology, including Distributed Morphology and Optimality Theory, and in the context of a wide range of languages, among them Amharic, Greek, Romanian, Russian, Saami, and Yiddish. The subjects addressed in the book include the role of featural decomposition of morphosyntactic features, the status of paradigms as the unit of syncretism, asymmetric effects in identity-dependence, and the selection of a base-of-derivation. The Bases of Inflectional Identity will interest linguists and cognitive scientists, especially students and scholars of phonological theory and the phonology-morphology and mind-language interfaces at graduate level and above. (shrink)

The paper studies Heidegger's reading of the poet Stefan George (1868-1933), particularly of his poem "Das Wort" (1928), in the context of Heidegger's narrative of the history of metaphysics. Heidegger reads George's poem as expressing certain experiences with language: first, the constitutive role of language, of naming and discursive determination, in granting things stable identities; second, the unnameable and indeterminable character of language itself as a constitutive process and the concomitant insight into the human being's dependency on language and her (...) incapacity to master in subjectively. Heidegger characterizes this experience as "transitional" (übergänglich). It is shown that in Heidegger's historical narrative, this places George's poem in the ongoing transition (Übergang) from the Hegelian and Nietzschean end of metaphysics to a forthcoming "other beginning" of thinking. (shrink)

This paper develops a semantic analysis of data like It is getting colder and colder. Their meaning is argued to arise from a combination of a comparative with pluractionality. The analysis is embedded in a general theory of plural predication and pluractionality. It supports a semantic theory involving a family of syntactic plural operators.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate which context determines the illocutionary force of written or recorded utterances—those involved in written texts, films and images, conceived as recordings that can be seen or heard in different occasions. More precisely, my paper deals with the “metaphysical” or constitutive role of context—as opposed to its epistemic or evidential role: my goal is to determine which context is semantically relevant in order to fix the illocutionary force of a speech act, as distinct (...) from the information the addressee uses to ascertain the semantically relevant context. In particular I will try to assess two different perspectives on this problem, a Conventionalist Perspective and an Intentionalist Perspective. Drawing on the literature on indexicals in written texts and recorded messages, I will argue in favor of the Intentionalist Perspective: the relevant context is the one intended by the speaker. Bringing intentions into the picture, however, requires qualification; in particular, I will distinguish my Weak Intentionalist proposal from a Strong Intentionalist one. I will show that the Weak Intentionalist Perspective is flexible enough to deal with cases of delayed communication, but not so unrestricted as to yield counter-intuitive consequences. (shrink)

Although Penn et al. make a good case for the existence of deep cognitive discontinuity between humans and animals, they fail to explain how such a discontinuity could have evolved. It is proposed that until the advent of words, no species had mental representations over which higher-order relations could be computed.

Though Bloom makes a good case that learning content-word meanings requires no task-specific apparatus, he does not seriously address problems inherent in learning the meanings of functional items. Evidence from creole languages suggests that the latter process presupposes at least some task-specific mechanisms, perhaps including a list of the limited number of semantic distinctions that can be expressed via functional items, as well as default systems that may operate in cases of impoverished input.

Pulvermüller assumes that words are represented as associations of two cell assemblies formed according to Hebb's coincidence rule. This seems to correspond to the linguistic notion that words consist of lexemes connected to lemmas. Standard examples from theoretical linguistics, however, show that lemmas and lexemes have properties that go beyond coincidence-based assemblies. In particular, they are inherently disposed toward combinatorial operations; push-down storage, modelled by decreasing reverberation in cell assemblies, cannot capture this. Hence, even if the language capacity has an (...) associationist characterization at some level, it cannot just be co-occurrence-based assembly formation. (shrink)

This volume provides an introduction to word and paradigm models of morphology and the general perspectives on linguistic morphology that they embody. The recent revitalization of these models is placed in the larger context of the intellectual lineage that extends from classical grammars to current information-theoretic and discriminative learning paradigms. The synthesis of this tradition outlined in the volume highlights leading ideas about the organization of morphological systems that are shared by word and paradigm approaches, along with strategies that have (...) been developed to formalize these ideas, and ways in which the ideas have been validated by experimental methodologies. An extended comparison of contemporary word and paradigm variants isolates the central assumptions about morphological units and relations that distinguish implicational from realizational models and clarifies the relation of these models to morpheme-based accounts. Designed to be accessible to a wide readership, this book will serve both as an introduction to morphology and morphological theory from the word and paradigm perspective for non-specialists, and for morphologists, as a detailed account of the history of the ideas that underlie these models. (shrink)

I am very grateful to Aaron Cicourel, Penelope Brown, Max Louwerse, and Matthew Ventrura for their constructive comments. Aaron Cicourel provides a helpful summary of my book and his commentary offers a good place to enter the discussion for readers who have not yet read How Children Learn the Meanings of Words. Brown and Louwerse and Ventura raise some critical questions with regard to the text to which I will speak in turn.

How Children Learn the Meanings of Words (HCLMW) defends the theory that words are learned through sophisticated and early-emerging cognitive abilities that have evolved for other purposes; there is no dedicated mental mechanism that is special to word learning. The commentators raise a number of challenges to this theory: Does it correctly characterize the nature and development of early abilities? Does it attribute too much to children, or too little? Does it only apply to nouns, or can it also explain (...) the acquisition of words such as verbs and determiners? More general issues are discussed as well, including the role of the input, the relationship between words and concepts, and debates over nativism, adaptationism, and modularity. (shrink)

Normal children learn tens of thousands of words, and do so quickly and efficiently, often in highly impoverished environments. In How Children Learn the Meanings of Words, I argue that word learning is the product of certain cognitive and linguistic abilities that include the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic cues to meaning, and a rich understanding of the mental states of other people. These capacities are powerful, early emerging, and to some extent uniquely human, but they are (...) not special to word learning. This proposal is an alternative to the view that word learning is the result of simple associative learning mechanisms, and it rejects as well the notion that children possess constraints, either innate or learned, that are specifically earmarked for word learning. This theory is extended to account for how children learn names for objects, substances, and abstract entities, pronouns and proper names, verbs, determiners, prepositions, and number words. Several related topics are also discussed, including naïve essentialism, children's understanding of representational art, the nature of numerical and spatial reasoning, and the role of words in the shaping of mental life. Key Words: cognitive development; concepts; meaning; semantics; social cognition; syntax; theory of mind; word learning. (shrink)

In the first year of life, infants' utterances change from high-intensity crying to low-intensity acoustic sound strings, acoustically labelling the first word. This transition implies: (1) decoding of phonetic sounds, (2) encoding of phonetic sounds, and (3) a unique linking of an articulated sound to a specific object. Comparative, ontogenetic, and phylogenetic aspects are considered for multilevel selective pressures.

This volume is a collection of original contributions from outstanding scholars in linguistics, philosophy and computational linguistics exploring the relation between word meaning and human linguistic creativity. The papers present different aspects surrounding the question of what is word meaning, a problem that has been the center of heated debate in all those disciplines that directly or indirectly are concerned with the study of language and of human cognition. The discussions are centered around the newly emerging view of the mental (...) lexicon, as outlined in the Generative Lexicon theory (Pustejovsky, 1995), which proposes a unified model for defining word meaning. The individual contributors present their evidence for a generative approach as well as critical perspectives, which provides for a volume where word meaning is not viewed only from a particular angle or from a particular concern, but from a wide variety of topics, each introduced and explained by the editors. (shrink)

By hypothesis, awareness is involved in the modulation of feedback from semantics to the lexical level in the visual word recognition system. When subjects are aware of the fact that there are many related prime–target pairs in a semantic priming experiment, this knowledge is used to configure the system to feed activation back from semantics to the lexical level so as to facilitate processing. When subjects are unaware of this fact, the default set is maintained in which activation is not (...) fed back from semantics to the lexical level so as to conserve limited resources. Qualitative differences in the pattern of data from two lexical decision experiments that employ masked priming are consistent with this hypothesis. Semantic context and stimulus quality interact when the prime is processed with awareness whereas these same two factors produce additive effects on RT when the prime is unlikely to have been processed with awareness. These experiments thus illustrate one way in which awareness affects the dynamics of visual word recognition. (shrink)

Reichle et al. claim to successfully simulate a frequency effect of 60% on skipping rate in human data, whereas the original article reports an effect of only 4%. We suspect that the deviation is attributable to the length of the words in the different conditions, which implies that E-Z Reader is wrong in its conception of eye guidance between words.