Being up front: narrative context and aspectual choice

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSHUA C. FEDDER ◽  
LAURA WAGNER
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Situation Model ◽  
Location Information ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Semantic Representations ◽  
Discourse Function ◽  
Four Dimensions ◽  
Grammatical Aspect ◽  
Reading Text ◽  
Representational Models

abstractReaders actively construct representational models of meaning when reading text, and they do so by drawing on a range of kinds of information, from the specific linguistic forms of the sentences to knowledge about how the world works (Ferretti, Kutas, & McRae, 2007; Madden & Zwaan, 2003). The present set of studies focused on how grammatical aspect is integrated into a situation model and how it is connected to other dimensions of model construction. In three experiments, participants were asked to complete sentences with a choice of grammatical aspect form (perfective or imperfective). The test sentences systematically varied four dimensions of the sentence that were linked to grammatical aspect in different ways: telicity and transitivity (both linked through their semantic representations), subject animacy (linked through an inference over semantic representations), and related location information (linked through an inference grounded in world knowledge). In addition, to examine the influence of discourse function (backgrounding vs. foregrounding) on aspectual choice different construction types were varied across experiments – specifically a fronted locative construction and the presence of a generic narrative opener (Once upon a time). The results found that aspectual choice depends on information linked to the semantic representation of grammatical aspect; however, in contrast to previous work (e.g., Ferreti et al., 2007) information grounded in world knowledge (location information) did not influence aspectual choice except when it was integrated in a specialized discourse construction.

scholarly journals Task-Dependent Warping of Semantic Representations During Search for Visual Action Categories

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mo Shahdloo ◽  
Emin Çelik ◽  
Burcu A Urgen ◽  
Jack L. Gallant ◽  
Tolga Çukur
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Natural Scenes ◽  
Action Perception ◽  
Semantic Representations ◽  
Object Categories ◽  
Search For Objects ◽  
The Brain

Object and action perception in cluttered dynamic natural scenes relies on efficient allocation of limited brain resources to prioritize the attended targets over distractors. It has been suggested that during visual search for objects, distributed semantic representation of hundreds of object categories is warped to expand the representation of targets. Yet, little is known about whether and where in the brain visual search for action categories modulates semantic representations. To address this fundamental question, we studied human brain activity recorded via functional magnetic resonance imaging while subjects viewed natural movies and searched for either communication or locomotion actions. We find that attention directed to action categories elicits tuning shifts that warp semantic representations broadly across neocortex, and that these shifts interact with intrinsic selectivity of cortical voxels for target actions. These results suggest that attention serves to facilitate task performance during social interactions by dynamically shifting semantic selectivity towards target actions, and that tuning shifts are a general feature of conceptual representations in the brain.

Semantic Representation and Naming in Young Children

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 332-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karla K. McGregor ◽  
Rena M. Friedman ◽  
Renée M. Reilly ◽  
Robyn M. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Picture Naming ◽  
Semantic Representation ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Visual Complexity ◽  
Semantic Knowledge ◽  
Object Representations ◽  
Semantic Representations ◽  
Dynamic Nature ◽  
Retrieval Failure ◽  
Age Appropriate

Children's semantic representations and semantic naming errors were the focus of this study. In Experiment 1, 25 normally developing children (mean age=5 years 4 months) named, drew, and defined 20 age-appropriate objects. The results suggested that functional and physical properties are core aspects of object representations in the semantic lexicon and that these representations are often organized and accessed according to a taxonomic hierarchy. Results of a new procedure, comparative picture naming/picture drawing, suggested that the degree of knowledge in the semantic lexicon makes words more or less vulner-able to retrieval failure. Most semantic naming errors were associated with limited semantic knowledge, manifested as either lexical gaps or fragile representations. Comparison of definitions for correctly named and semantically misnamed objects provided converging evidence for this conclusion. In Experiment 2, involving 16 normally developing children (mean age=5 years 5 months), the comparative picture naming/picture drawing results were replicated with a stimulus set that allowed a priori matching of the visual complexity of items drawn from correct and semantic error pools. Discussion focuses on the dynamic nature of semantic representations and the relation between semantic representation and naming during a period of slow mapping. The value of comparative picture naming/ picture drawing as a new method for exploring children's semantic representa-tions is emphasized.

Grammatical aspect and world knowledge in second language reading

2019 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyun-Sook Kang ◽  
Nayoung Kim ◽  
Kiel Christianson
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Reading Fluency ◽  
First Language ◽  
Second Language Reading ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Event Duration ◽  
Semantic Cues ◽  
Grammatical Aspect ◽  
Long Duration ◽  
L2 Learners

Abstract During normal reading, readers’ perceptions of time in a narrative shift according to grammatical and semantic cues. This study investigated the extent to which second-language (L2) readers’ interpretations of situations depicted in narratives are influenced by the grammatical aspect (perfective/progressive) and temporal duration (short/long) of intervening events. The study further examined whether reading fluency and L2 proficiency modulated how readers’ mentally constructed the depicted situations. Thirty-one L2 learners of English and 37 English-first-language (L1) controls completed a reading comprehension task in which each of 40 stories contained a target event with an inherent endpoint, with accomplishment verbs that were described as completed or in progress, followed by a short- or long-duration event. A reading-fluency task and a cloze test were administered. While grammatical marking played a significant role for both groups of participants, grammatical aspect and event duration showed an interaction only for L2 learners. The construction of a situation was modulated for both groups by reading fluency.

scholarly journals Aspect and Narrative Event Segmentation

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel P. Feller ◽  
Anita Eerland ◽  
Todd R. Ferretti ◽  
Joseph P. Magliano
Keyword(s):  
Human Cognition ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Event Duration ◽  
Event Segmentation ◽  
Imperfective Aspect ◽  
Structure Information ◽  
Tense And Aspect ◽  
Grammatical Aspect ◽  
Segmentation Task ◽  
Narrative Event

Time is central to human cognition, both in terms of how we understand the world and the events that unfold around us as well as how we communicate about those events. As such, language has morphological systems, such as temporal adverbs, tense, and aspect to convey the passage of time. The current study explored the role of one such temporal marker, grammatical aspect, and its impact on how we understand the temporal boundaries between events conveyed in narratives. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants read stories that contained a target event that was either conveyed with a perfective (e.g., watched a movie) or imperfective aspect (e.g., was watching a movie) and engaged in an event segmentation task. Events described in the perfective aspect were more often perceived as event boundaries than events in the imperfective aspect, however, event duration (long vs. short) did not impact this relationship in Experiment 2. Experiment 3 demonstrated that readers were sensitive to grammatical aspect and event duration in the context of a story continuation task. Overall this study demonstrates that grammatical aspect interacts with world knowledge to convey event structure information that influences how people interpret the end and beginning of events.

scholarly journals syntax-semantics interface for tense and aspect in French

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivier Bonami
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Wide Scope ◽  
Semantic Representations ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Tense And Aspect

This paper proposes an HPSG account of the French tense and aspect system, focussing on the analysis of the passé simple (simple past) and imparfait (imperfective) tenses and their interaction with aspectually sensitive adjuncts. Starting from de Swart's (1998) analysis of the semantics of tense and aspect, I show that while the proposed semantic representations are appropriate,  the analysis of implicit aspectual operators as coercion operators is inadequate. The proposed HPSG analysis relies on Minimal Recursion Semantics to relate standard syntactic structures with de Swart-style semantic representations. The analysis has two crucial features: first, it assumes that the semantic contribution of tense  originates in the verb's semantic representation, despite the fact that tense can get wide scope over other semantic elements. Second, it allows the occurrence of implicit aspectual operators to be controlled by the verb's inflectional class, which accounts for their peculiar distribution.

scholarly journals On the nature of the lexicon: The status of rich lexical meanings

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 865-891
Author(s):  
LOTTE HOGEWEG ◽  
AGUSTIN VICENTE
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Semantic Representations ◽  
Structured Representations ◽  
The Status ◽  
Truth Conditional

Both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics there is some debate about how rich or thin lexico-semantic representations are. Traditionally, in formal semantics but also in philosophy of language as well as in cognitive pragmatics, lexical meanings have been thought to be simple stable denotations or functions. In this paper, we present and discuss a number of interpretational phenomena of which the analysis proposed in the literature makes crucial use of rich meanings. The phenomena in question are cases where the assignment of truth-conditional contents to utterances seems to follow rules that do not operate on simple stable denotations or any other kind of ‘thin’ meanings but where composition takes rich structured representations as input. We also discuss problems for such accounts, which are mostly based on the inability of extant rich meanings accounts to explain many other interpretational phenomena, and we discuss the solutions that have been proposed to solve them. Furthermore, we address the discussion whether the informationally rich meanings are part of semantics, and more specifically part of the lexicon, or whether this information should be ascribed to more general world knowledge.

scholarly journals Translation Divergences in Chinese–English Machine Translation: An Empirical Investigation

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dun Deng ◽  
Nianwen Xue
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Semantic Representations ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Word Alignments ◽  
Quantitative Results ◽  
Parse Trees ◽  
Syntactic Annotation ◽  
Chinese And English

In this article, we conduct an empirical investigation of translation divergences between Chinese and English relying on a parallel treebank. To do this, we first devise a hierarchical alignment scheme where Chinese and English parse trees are aligned in a way that eliminates conflicts and redundancies between word alignments and syntactic parses to prevent the generation of spurious translation divergences. Using this Hierarchically Aligned Chinese–English Parallel Treebank (HACEPT), we are able to semi-automatically identify and categorize the translation divergences between the two languages and quantify each type of translation divergence. Our results show that the translation divergences are much broader than described in previous studies that are largely based on anecdotal evidence and linguistic knowledge. The distribution of the translation divergences also shows that some high-profile translation divergences that motivate previous research are actually very rare in our data, whereas other translation divergences that have previously received little attention actually exist in large quantities. We also show that HACEPT allows the extraction of syntax-based translation rules, most of which are expressive enough to capture the translation divergences, and point out that the syntactic annotation in existing treebanks is not optimal for extracting such translation rules. We also discuss the implications of our study for attempts to bridge translation divergences by devising shared semantic representations across languages. Our quantitative results lend further support to the observation that although it is possible to bridge some translation divergences with semantic representations, other translation divergences are open-ended, thus building a semantic representation that captures all possible translation divergences may be impractical.

scholarly journals Speaking of shape: The effects of language-specific encoding on semantic representations

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Perniss ◽  
David Vinson ◽  
Frank Seifart ◽  
Gabriella Vigliocco
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Classification System ◽  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Shape Features ◽  
Semantic Representations ◽  
Classifier System ◽  
Linguistic Patterns ◽  
Central Interest ◽  
Nominal Classification ◽  
Discourse Frequency

AbstractThe question of whether different linguistic patterns differentially influence semantic and conceptual representations is of central interest in cognitive science. In this paper, we investigate whether the regular encoding of shape within a nominal classification system leads to an increased salience of shape in speakers' semantic representations by comparing English, (Amazonian) Spanish, and Bora, a shape-based classifier language spoken in the Amazonian regions of Columbia and Peru. Crucially, in displaying obligatory use, pervasiveness in grammar, high discourse frequency, and phonological variability of forms corresponding to particular shape features, the Bora classifier system differs in important ways from those in previous studies investigating effects of nominal classification, thereby allowing better control of factors that may have influenced previous findings. In addition, the inclusion of Spanish monolinguals living in the Bora village allowed control for the possibility that differences found between English and Bora speakers may be attributed to their very different living environments. We found that shape is more salient in the semantic representation of objects for speakers of Bora, which systematically encodes shape, than for speakers of English and Spanish, which do not. Our results are consistent with assumptions that semantic representations are shaped and modulated by our specific linguistic experiences.

scholarly journals READING SPEED LEVEL AND COMPREHENSION IN SECOND LANGUAGE READING

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
M Sayid Wijaya
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Word Recognition ◽  
Alternative Hypothesis ◽  
Rank Order ◽  
Reading Speed ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Speed Test ◽  
Normal Speed ◽  
Reading Text ◽  
Speed Level

Fluent readers are characterized by their ability in comprehending reading text flawlessly. They need no such a significant delay to process either word recognition or world knowledge while putting some efforts to get the gist of the text. Thus, their reading speed would increase by the time their word recognition skill improved. This also implicates their reading comprehension as well since they are skillful enough to relate what they know about the text with the text itself. However, that condition happened differently to students who joined Reading for General Purposes class. Some students who read in normal speed varied in their reading comprehension score. Students’ reading speed level must have yielded the approximate score to their speed level, moderate score. This occurrence leaded the writer to investigate if there is any correlation between students’ reading speed level and their reading comprehension. Thus, correlational research design was deployed in this research. Sample of this research were students who joined writer’s Reading for General Purposes class, 74 students. The data were collected by using tests, reading speed test and reading comprehension. After collecting the data, the writer analyzed them by using Spearman’s Rank Order Correlation to test the hypothesis. Since the result of Spearman’s rho value Sig. = .608 > α = .05, alternative hypothesis was not accepted which meant that there was no correlation between students’ reading speed level and their reading comprehension.

scholarly journals Structures à subordonnée comparative en français

2008 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-61
Author(s):  
Catherine Fuchs ◽  
Nathalie Fournier ◽  
Pierre Le Goffic
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Subordinate Clause ◽  
Semantic Representations ◽  
Matrix Clause ◽  
Qualitative Comparison ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
The Matrix

This article deals with syntactic and semantic representation of comparative structures in French. We propose an analysis of quantitative comparatives (plus, moins, aussi … que) and qualitative comparatives (comme) which highlights their common properties as well as their specificities. The first section (§ 1) offers a syntactic typology of matrix clause structures and (comparative) subordinate clause structures. The following sections consider the various aspects of semantic representations, as related to syntactic structures : we successively deal with (§ 2.) the type of parameter, (§ 3.) the type of differential constituant in the subordinate clause, (§ 4.) the type of parallel constituant in the matrix clause (with restitution of ellipses and anaphora), (§ 5.) the type of compared terms, by contrasting quantitative comparisons and qualitative comparison, and (§ 6.) the type of comparison, accounting for prototypical structures as well as for pragmatic effects induced by certain configurations.

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