On Sentence Interpretation

Author : Lyn Frazier
Publisher : Springer
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2011-10-23
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9401146004

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On Sentence Interpretation by Lyn Frazier Pdf

At present there exists no empirically-motivated theory of how perceivers assign a grammatically-permissible interpretation to a sentence. Implicit in many investigations of language comprehension is the idea that each constituent of a sentence is interpreted by the perceiver at the earliest conceivable point, using all potentially relevant sources of information. A variety of counter examples are presented to argue against this implicit theory of sentence interpretation. It is argued that an explicit alternative theory is needed to specify which decisions are made at which points during interpretive processing and to spell out the principles governing the processor's preferred choice at points of ambiguity or uncertainty. Several specific issues are taken concerning how the processor assigns a focal structure to an input sentence, how it identifies the topic of the sentence, how implicit restrictors on the domain of quantification are interpreted and how the identification of the content of a restrictor may guide the processor's use of discourse information. Exploiting intuitions about preferred interpretations of ambiguous sentences as well as the results of both old and new experimental studies, a theory of the preferred interpretation of Determiner Phrases is presented. This work explores important, but overlooked questions in on-line sentence interpretation and attempts to erect some of the scaffolding for an eventual theory of sentence interpretation.

Author : Lyn Frazier
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789401145992

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On Sentence Interpretation by Lyn Frazier Pdf

At present there exists no empirically-motivated theory of how perceivers assign a grammatically-permissible interpretation to a sentence. Implicit in many investigations of language comprehension is the idea that each constituent of a sentence is interpreted by the perceiver at the earliest conceivable point, using all potentially relevant sources of information. A variety of counter examples are presented to argue against this implicit theory of sentence interpretation. It is argued that an explicit alternative theory is needed to specify which decisions are made at which points during interpretive processing and to spell out the principles governing the processor's preferred choice at points of ambiguity or uncertainty. Several specific issues are taken concerning how the processor assigns a focal structure to an input sentence, how it identifies the topic of the sentence, how implicit restrictors on the domain of quantification are interpreted and how the identification of the content of a restrictor may guide the processor's use of discourse information. Exploiting intuitions about preferred interpretations of ambiguous sentences as well as the results of both old and new experimental studies, a theory of the preferred interpretation of Determiner Phrases is presented. This work explores important, but overlooked questions in on-line sentence interpretation and attempts to erect some of the scaffolding for an eventual theory of sentence interpretation.

Author : Charles Clifton, Jr.,Lyn Frazier,Keith Rayner,Charles Clifton
Publisher : Psychology Press
Page : 549 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2015-12-22
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781317780588

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Perspectives on Sentence Processing by Charles Clifton, Jr.,Lyn Frazier,Keith Rayner,Charles Clifton Pdf

One of the liveliest forums for sharing psychological, linguistic, philosophical, and computer science perspectives on psycholinguistics has been the annual meeting of the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. Documenting the state of the art in several important approaches to sentence processing, this volume consists of selected papers that had been presented at the Sixth CUNY Conference. The editors not only present the main themes that ran through the conference but also honor the breadth of the presentations from disciplines including linguistics, experimental psychology, and computer science. The variety of sentence processing topics examined includes: * how evoked brain potentials reflect sentence comprehension * how auditory words are processed * how various sources of grammatical and nongrammatical information are coordinated and used * how sentence processing and language acquisition might be related. This distinctive volume not only presents the most exciting current work in sentence processing, but also places this research into the broader context of theorizing about it.

Author : Roger P. G. van Gompel
Publisher : Psychology Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2013-09-11
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781135047276

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Sentence Processing by Roger P. G. van Gompel Pdf

What are the psychological processes involved in comprehending sentences? How do we process the structure of sentences and how do we understand their meaning? Do children, bilinguals and people with language impairments process sentences in the same way as healthy monolingual adults? These are just some of the many questions that sentence processing researchers have tried to answer by conducting ever more sophisticated experiments, making this one of the most productive and exciting areas in experimental language research in recent years. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this important field. It contains 10 chapters written by world-leading experts, which discuss influential theories of sentence processing and important experimental evidence, with a focus on recent developments in the area. The chapters also analyse research that has investigated how people process the structure and meaning of sentences, and how sentences are understood within their context. This comprehensive and authoritative work will appeal to students and researchers in the field of sentence processing, as well anyone with an interest in psychology and linguistics.

Author : Lyn Frazier,Edward Gibson
Publisher : Springer
Page : 307 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2015-06-23
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783319129617

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Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing by Lyn Frazier,Edward Gibson Pdf

Top researchers in prosody and psycholinguistics present their research and their views on the role of prosody in processing speech and also its role in reading. The volume characterizes the state of the art in an important area of psycholinguistics. How are general constraints on prosody (‘timing’) and intonation (‘melody’) used to constrain the parsing and interpretation of spoken language? How are they used to assign a default prosody/intonation in silent reading, and more generally what is the role of phonology in reading? Prosody and intonation interact with phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics and thus are at the very core of language processes.

Author : Irina T. Pandarova
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2023-06-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027252838

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Revisiting Sentence Adverbials and Relevance by Irina T. Pandarova Pdf

This book offers a fresh take on several long-standing issues relating to the (non-)truth-conditional interpretation of epistemic, evidential, hearsay and attitudinal sentence adverbials. Drawing on a wealth of data from English and German, it shows for the first time that all four adverbial classes can have both truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional (parenthetical) readings. A novel account is presented according to which (non-)truth-conditional readings may arise at either the syntactic or the pragmatic level. Couched in relevance theory, the book also re-examines the explicature and illocutionary status of the adverbial qualification and the qualified proposition, and refines the notions of pointhood and at-issueness to provide an original information-structural analysis applicable to not just sentence adverbials but a range of other propositional qualifiers. Finally, the investigation identifies five factors affecting (non-)truth-conditional interpretation: linear position, prosody, the semantics of the adverbial, its information-structural properties and the wider context. The book will be of interest to those interested in relevance theory, the semantics/pragmatics interface, the syntax/pragmatics interface and information structure, as well as for syntacticians, semanticists and pragmatists interested in sentence adverbials, other propositional qualifiers and parentheticality, syntactic and interpretational.

Author : Dieter Hillert
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 458 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 1998-07-13
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780585492230

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Sentence Processing: A Crosslinguistic Perspective by Dieter Hillert Pdf

The innovative element of this volume is its overview of the fundamental psycholinguistic topics involved in sentence processing. While most psycholinguistic studies focus on a single language and induce a general model of universal sentence processing, this volume proposes a cross-linguistic approach. It contains two distinct features first embraced in the 18th century by brothers Freiherr Wilhelm von Humboldt and Alexander von Humboldt. First, it offers a linguistic theory that characterizes universal cognitive features of the human language processor (or the mind and its biological source), independent of a single language structure. Second, it contains a language theory which considers the diversity of linguistic structures and provides a powerful theory of language processing. Contributors cover a wide range of topics, including word recognition, fixed expressions, grammatical constraints, empty categories, and parsing. Their research involves analyses of 12 languages. This book provides an overview of central psycholinguistic topics in sentence processing; and combines deductive and inductive methods in fashioning an innovative approach. The contributors address word recognition, fixed expressions, grammatical constraints, empty categories, and parsing. Its original papers form a coherent presentation.

Author : Rainer Bäuerle,Christoph Schwarze,Arnim von Stechow
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 508 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 1983
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 3110089017

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Meaning, Use, and Interpretation of Language by Rainer Bäuerle,Christoph Schwarze,Arnim von Stechow Pdf

Author : Robin S. Chapman
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 96 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2018-11-05
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783110878141

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The Interpretation of Deviant Sentences in English by Robin S. Chapman Pdf

No detailed description available for "The Interpretation of Deviant Sentences in English".

Author : René van Woudenberg
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2021-09-16
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781009035965

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The Epistemology of Reading and Interpretation by René van Woudenberg Pdf

Reading and textual interpretation are ordinary human activities, performed inside as well as outside academia, but precisely how they function as unique sources of knowledge is not well understood. In this book, René van Woudenberg explores the nature of reading and how it is distinct from perception and (attending to) testimony, which are two widely acknowledged knowledge sources. After distinguishing seven accounts of interpretation, van Woudenberg discusses the question of whether all reading inevitably involves interpretation, and shows that although reading and interpretation often go together, they are distinct activities. He goes on to argue that both reading and interpretation can be paths to realistically conceived truth, and explains the conditions under which we are justified in believing that they do indeed lead us to the truth. Along the way, he offers clear and novel analyses of reading, meaning, interpretation, and interpretative knowledge.

Author : M. de Vincenzi
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 1991-10-31
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0792312759

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Syntactic Parsing Strategies in Italian by M. de Vincenzi Pdf

The basic accomplishment of sentence processing research in the 1960s and 70s was to establish that perceivers assign structural representa­ tions to sentences (Fodor et al., 1974) and they do so systematically using the formation rules of the grammar (Forster, 1979). This may sound like a singularly unimpressive accomplishment to a contem­ porary linguist - mere proof of the obvious. But one must recall the extremely impoverished view of language and language processing prevalent in the U.S. in the 1950s. Processing mechanisms were thought to consist of slightly elaborated stimulus-response associations, and sentences were viewed as mere strings of concatenated words. On this view, understanding language comprehension was naturally equated with knowing how words and associations between them were learned. Consequently, language pro­ cessing was investigated by performing a seemingly endless series of tedious paired associate learning studies. The shift in the 1960s to a view of sentences emphasizing hierarchically organized structures con­ taining grammatical depencies between widely separated items was thus dramatic.

Author : Andrew Simpson,Audrey-Li Yen-hui
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2006-03-03
Category : Foreign Language Study
ISBN : 9781134431380

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Functional Structure(s), Form and Interpretation by Andrew Simpson,Audrey-Li Yen-hui Pdf

Part PART I in the DP/NP -- chapter 1 NP as argument -- chapter 2 Copying variables -- chapter 3 Classi?ers and the count/mass distinction -- chapter 4 The demonstratives in modern Japanese -- part PART II of functional structure -- chapter 5 On the Re-Analysis of nominalizers in Chinese, Japanese and Korean -- chapter 6 Three types of existential quantification in Chinese -- chapter 7 On the history of place words and localizers in Chinese: A cognitive approach -- chapter PART III principles of organization -- chapter 8 Judgments, point of view and the interpretation of causee noun phrases -- chapter 9 A computational approach to case and word order in Korean -- chapter 10 Adjuncts and word order typology in east asian languages -- chapter 11 The distribution of negative NPS and some typological correlates.

Author : Magdalena Kaufmann
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2011-10-26
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789400722699

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Interpreting Imperatives by Magdalena Kaufmann Pdf

Imperative clauses are recognized as one of the major clause types alongside those known as declarative and interrogative. Nevertheless, they are still an enigma in the study of meaning, which relies largely on either the concept of truth conditions or the concept of information growth—neither of which are easily applied to imperatives. This book puts forward a fresh perspective. It analyzes imperatives in terms of modalized propositions, and identifies an additional, presuppositional, meaning component that makes an assertive interpretation inappropriate. The author shows how these two elements can help explain the varied effects imperatives have, depending on their usage context. Imperatives have been viewed as elusive components of language because they have a range of functions that makes them difficult to unify theoretically. This fresh view of the semantics-pragmatics interface allows for a uniform semantic analysis while accounting for the pragmatic versatility of imperatives.

Author : Markus Werning,Wolfram Hinzen,Edouard Machery
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 765 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2012-02-09
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780191633294

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The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality by Markus Werning,Wolfram Hinzen,Edouard Machery Pdf

In this book leading scholars from every relevant field report on all aspects of compositionality, the notion that the meaning of an expression can be derived from its parts. Understanding how compositionality works is a central element of syntactic and semantic analysis and a challenge for models of cognition. It is a key concept in linguistics and philosophy and in the cognitive sciences more generally, and is without question one of the most exciting fields in the study of language and mind. The authors of this book report critically on lines of research in different disciplines, revealing the connections between them and highlighting current problems and opportunities. The force and justification of compositionality have long been contentious. First proposed by Frege as the notion that the meaning of an expression is generally determined by the meaning and syntax of its components, it has since been deployed as a constraint on the relation between theories of syntax and semantics, as a means of analysis, and more recently as underlying the structures of representational systems, such as computer programs and neural architectures. The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality explores these and many other dimensions of this challenging field. It will appeal to researchers and advanced students in linguistics and philosophy and to everyone concerned with the study of language and cognition including those working in neuroscience, computational science, and bio-informatics.

Author : Shravan Vasishth,Felix Engelmann
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2021-11-11
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9781107133112

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Sentence Comprehension as a Cognitive Process by Shravan Vasishth,Felix Engelmann Pdf

Presents a computational model of sentence processing that is grounded in decades of research in cognitive psychology and AI.