On the Cognitive Statuses of Sasak Demonstratives

This study examines the cognitive statuses of the Givenness Hierarchy on Sasak demonstratives, particularly in Menu-Meni dialect of the Sasak language. This study is qualitative research in nature. The data were collected via the field-linguistic method by utilizing three techniques: elicitation, semi-structured interview and intuition. The results of the study revealed that Menu-Meni dialect implements the pronominal demonstrative for “activated” status and adnominal demonstratives are used for the status of “referential”, “uniquely identifiable”, and “familiar”. Beyond demonstratives, zero articles is applied in the status of “type identifiable” and the pronoun ie (it/she/he) is used in the status of “in focus”. Thus, demonstrative has a prominent role in most of the cognitive statuses in the Givenness Hierarchy theory.

Different Senses of ‘Referential’

There exist a range of different notions of referentiality in the literature. The cognitive status ‘referential’ on the Givenness Hierarchy means that the hearer can assign a unique representation to the speaker’s intended referent by the time the sentence is processed. This is distinct from definite referents, which are expected to be ‘uniquely identifiable’, a status that entails ‘referential’, on the basis of the definite noun phrase alone. In this chapter, it is argued that phrases that are ‘attributive’, as distinct from ‘referential’, in Donnellan’s 1966 sense are ‘referential’ in the Givenness Hierarchy sense, and are marked as such in languages that mark referentiality overtly via determiners or case marking. Furthermore, it is suggested that bare nominal phrases in languages that allow them are unspecified for referentiality, but that an implicature of non-referentiality for a bare nominal may be generated in languages that mark definiteness or referentiality morphologically.

Reference in Robotics

As robots become increasingly prevalent in our society, it becomes increasingly important to endow them with natural language capabilities, including the ability to both understand and generate so-called referring expressions. In recent work, we have sought to enable referring expression understanding capabilities by leveraging the Givenness Hierarchy (GH), which provides an elegant linguistic framework for reasoning about notions of reference in human discourse. This chapter first provides an overview of the GH and discusses previous GH-theoretic approaches to reference resolution. It then describes our own GH-theoretic approach, the GH-POWER algorithm, and suggests future refinements of our algorithm with respect to the theoretical commitments of the GH. Next, the chapter briefly surveys other prominent approaches to reference resolution in robotics, and discusses how these compare to our approach. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of possible directions for future work.

The Semantic Values of AÐE and LA in Ewe

Aɖe and la have multiple functions which are often realized by the position they occupy in various syntactic environments in Ewe, a Kwa language. Aɖe can function as an indefinite marker, a partitive marker or an indefinite pronoun. La can function as a definite marker, an agentive suffix, or a terminal particle. As a terminal particle, la occurs at the end of preposed adverbial phrases and nominal phrases, embedded relative clauses which are postposed to the nominal heads, and other dependent clauses in Ewe constructions. Using the Givenness Hierarchy, this study argues that regardless of the different syntactic environments in which these particles occur, each of them has a univocal value semantically: the use of aɖe and la encode the cognitive statuses ‘referential’ and ‘uniquely identifiable’ respectively in Ewe.Keywords: Particles, Indefiniteness, Definiteness, Referential, Uniquely Identifiable

On the occurrences of anaphoric bare NPs in Japanese

It is known that bare NPs can be interpreted as an indefinite description or a definite description in Japanese. A question arises as to whether a bare NP in Japanese can always obtain an intended anaphoric definite reading from the previous context. The present work attempts to answer this question. More specifically, we will explore the occurrences and nonoccurrences of anaphoric definite bare NPs in terms of the Givenness Hierarchy of

Reference and Accessibility from a Givenness Hierarchy Perspective

Most work on reference and discourse structure appeals, in some sense, to the notion of accessibility. While the term "accessibility" itself is rarely mentioned in research within Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski's Givenness Hierarchy (GH) framework, the GH has often been interpreted by others as an accessibility hierarchy. This paper aims to clarify the major claims and predictions of the GH theory, showing how it is fundamentally diff erent from other referential hierarchies in a number of ways, most importantly because cognitive statuses on the hierarchy are assumed to encode manner of accessibility, not degree of accessibility. The GH thus differs from the other referential hierarchies, not only in the kinds of facts it aims to predict and explain, but in the specific empirical predictions that can plausibly be derived from it regarding degree of accessibility, as measured by ease of processing.

Cognitive Principles in Robust Multimodal Interpretation

Multimodal conversational interfaces provide a natural means for users to communicate with computer systems through multiple modalities such as speech and gesture. To build effective multimodal interfaces, automated interpretation of user multimodal inputs is important. Inspired by the previous investigation on cognitive status in multimodal human machine interaction, we have developed a greedy algorithm for interpreting user referring expressions (i.e., multimodal reference resolution). This algorithm incorporates the cognitive principles of Conversational Implicature and Givenness Hierarchy and applies constraints from various sources (e.g., temporal, semantic, and contextual) to resolve references. Our empirical results have shown the advantage of this algorithm in efficiently resolving a variety of user references. Because of its simplicity and generality, this approach has the potential to improve the robustness of multimodal input interpretation.