CONTROLLED AND NON-CONTROLLED SITUATIONS AND THEIR CONCEPTUALIZATION BY THE VERB FIND

Введение. Исследованы когнитивные основания лексической полисемии и описаны принципы организации системы значений многозначного слова. Актуальность исследования заключается в динамическом подходе к языковому значению как к способу и результату концептуализации структур знания. Объектом исследования являются конструкции с глаголом find типа Finally I found the wallet; He found a wallet on the road. Значение глагола find трактуется как когнитивный феномен, за которым стоит пропозициональная структура знания о ситуации обнаружения. Цель – выявить семантические и концептуальные характеристики прототипической когнитивной модели ситуации обнаружения и установить когнитивные факторы и механизмы, влияющие на концептуальную вариативность прототипической ситуации. Материал и методы. Использовались принципы и методы когнитивной семантики, в рамках которой значение понимается как концептуализация когнитивного взаимодействия человека с миром. Результаты и обсуждение. Выявлены параметры лексического значения глагола find, которые определяют основные механизмы образования производных значений и парадигму многозначности глагола. Обоснованы категориальные значения данного глагола. На основе признаков агентивность/неагентивность глагол find актуализирует в зависимости от когнитивного контекста либо таксономическую категорию действие с акцентом на результате, либо происшествие. Установлено, что изменение таксономической категории глагола find является механизмом семантической деривации производного неагентивного значения, посредством которого концептуализируется неконтролируемая ситуация обнаружения. Выявлены и описаны семантические, синтаксические, прагматические характеристики контролируемой и неконтролируемой ситуаций обнаружения. Когнитивно значимыми для концепта контролируемой ситуации обнаружения являются пресуппозиция поисковой деятельности и конкретно-референтный статус актантов. Концепт ситуации неконтролируемого обнаружения задает роль участника-каузатора в позиции синтаксического субъекта и активирует компонент «сопутствующая деятельность». Заключение. Результаты исследования обладают экпланаторным потенциалом для понимания когнитивных механизмов образования производных значений многозначного глагола, что вносит вклад в дальнейшее развитие концепции когнитивной семантики. Introduction. The theoretical background of the research is a set of principles and assumptions of cognitive linguistics to the study of the meaning of a linguistic form in the context of other cognitive structures. The theoretical perspective of the paper is to consider semantic shifts of the verb find. The goal of the research is to highlight cognitive mechanisms underlying alternative construal of the situations conceptualized by the verb find and reveal cognitive strategies of verbal semantic derivation. Material and methods. The research is based on the empirical data from available sources and corpora data. The study is conducted within the framework of cognitive semantics where language meaning is viewed as knowledge structure. Results and discussion. The paper considers the phenomenon of lexical polysemy from a cognitive perspective. Of particular concern is the issue of semantic extension of the polysemantic verb find. The study brings into focus such parameters of the verbal meaning as taxonomic category of the verb, semantic roles of the participants and their referential status. It is argued that the change of any parameter causes semantic shifts of the lexical meaning of the verb find. The paper discusses two taxonomic categories of the verb find “achievements” and “happenings”. The author comes to the conclusion that the semantic difference between the constructions like Finally he found the wallet and He found a coin in the dust lies in the semantic component “+control”/“–control”. The study highlights semantic and syntactic features of the controlled and non-controlled situations conceptualized by the agentive meaning and non-agentive meaning of the verb find. Conclusion. The results of the research reveal that the change of the taxonomic category of the verb is a cognitive mechanism of verbal semantic derivation. The results obtained may be helpful for further study of productive semantic derivation processes in the framework of cognitive semantics.

Similarity Judgments Predict N400 Amplitude Differences between Taxonomic Category Members and Thematic Associates

Human similarity judgments do not reliably conform to the predictions of leading theories of psychological similarity. Evidence from the triad similarity judgment task shows that people often identify thematic associates like DOG and BONE as more similar than taxonomic category members like DOG and CAT, even though thematic associates lack the type of featural or relational similarity that is foundational to theories of psychological similarity. This specific failure to predict human behavior has been addressed as a consequence of education and other individual differences, an artifact of the triad similarity judgment paradigm, or a shortcoming in psychological accounts of similarity. We investigated the judged similarity of semantically-related concepts (taxonomic category members and thematic associates) as it relates to other task-independent measures of semantic knowledge and access. Participants were assessed on reading and language ability, then event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected during a passive, sequential word reading task that presented pseudowords and taxonomically-related, thematically-related, and unrelated word sequences, and, finally, similarity judgments were collected with the classic two-alternative forced-choice triad task. The results uncovered a correspondence between ERP amplitude and triad-based similarity judgments---similarity judgment behavior reliably predicts ERP amplitude during passive word reading, absent of any instruction to consider similarity. It was also found that individual differences in reading and language ability independently predicted ERP amplitude. This evidence suggests that similarity judgments are driven by reliable patterns of thought that are not solely rooted in the interpretation of task goals or reading and language ability.

Polysemy and the Taxonomic Constraint: Children’s Representation of Words that Label Multiple Kinds

How do children resolve the problem of indeterminacy when learning a new word? By one account, children adopt a taxonomic assumption and expect the word to denote only members of a particular taxonomic category. According to one version of this constraint, young children should represent polysemous words that label multiple kinds—e.g., chicken, which labels an animal and its meat—as separate and unrelated words that each encode a single kind. Our studies provide evidence against this account: we show that four- and five-year-old children spontaneously expect that a word that has labeled one meaning of a familiar polysemous word will also label its other, taxonomically-different meaning. Further, we show that children’s taxonomic flexibility is importantly constrained—children do not expect a word to label thematically-related meanings (e.g., chicken and egg), or the unrelated meanings of homophones (e.g., bat[animal] and bat[baseball]). We argue that although children are initially guided by the taxonomic constraint when pairing word forms with meanings, they nonetheless relate the taxonomically-different meanings of polysemous words within lexical structure. Thus, for even young children, a single word can label multiple kinds.

“Religion, Religions, Religious” in America: Toward a Smithian Account of “Evangelicalism”

Jonathan Z. Smith’s essay “Religion, Religions, Religious” is a foundational essay in the study of “religion” as a taxonomic category. The essay itself makes three interrelated arguments that situate religion in Western intellectual history and argue that “religion” is a term scholars define to suit their own intellectual purposes. Though the essay, and Smith’s work overall, have had a major influence in religious studies, that influence has not reached deeply into the study of American religious history. Using Smith’s essay as a guide, this essay offers a brief application of his arguments in “Religion, Religions, Religious” to American religious history and, specifically, to the category “evangelicalism.”

The Role of Co-Occurrence Statistics in Developing Semantic Knowledge

The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated the contributions of readily observable environmental statistical regularities to semantic organization in childhood. Specifically, we investigated whether co-occurrence regularities with which entities or their labels more reliably occur together than with others: (1) Contribute to relations between concepts independently, and (2) Contribute to relations between concepts belonging to the same stable, taxonomic category. Using child-directed speech corpora to estimate reliable co-occurrences between labels for familiar items, we constructed triads consisting of a target, a related distractor, and an unrelated distractor in which targets and related distractors consistently co-occurred (e.g., sock-foot), belonged to the same taxonomic category (e.g., sock-coat), or both (e.g., sock-shoe). We used an implicit, eye-gaze measure of relations between concepts based on the degree to which children (N=72, age 4-7 years) looked at related versus unrelated distractors when asked to look for a target. The results indicated that co-occurrence both independently contributes to relations between concepts, and contributes to relations between concepts belonging to the same taxonomic category. These findings suggest that sensitivity to the regularity with which different entities co-occur in children’s environments shapes the organization of semantic knowledge during development. Implications for theoretical accounts and empirical investigations of semantic organization are discussed.

Apocryphal media: an archaeology of mediated paranormal presence

Technology does not just encompass tools for humans to master and use, but also cultural objects that play a role in one’s imagination of what is possible. Apocryphal media is a new taxonomic category within Media Archaeology that helps understand the impossible demands and expectations a user might make of a technology. Briefly, Apocryphal media are devices for which there exists an incongruity between the effects one expects the device to produce and what it actually produces. For example, there is an expectation that an electromagnetic field (EMF) reader can detect paranormal entities, but in fact, through the study of the discursive object, it only produces the effect of detecting paranormal entities. Starting with the most spectacular examples, this essay investigates the discursive structures surrounding the tools of paranormal investigation and the discourse surrounding their impossible effects.

Ethnobotanical Knowledge Studied in Pocharam Wildlife Sanctuary, Telangana, India

A survey was conducted in 31 fringe villages of Pocharam wildlife sanctuary, Telangana, India, during 2010 to 2012, in order to explore and document the ethnobotanical knowledge of Yerukulas and Lambadis communities. There was revealed the use of 173 Angiosperm species. The pattern of the plant use as per habitat (terrestrial/aquatic), habit (growth form), plant part (organ) and taxonomic category (families), nativity and occurrence (wild/cultivated) were established. Dicots contribute more than Monocots to the medicinal and ethnobotanical use. This might be due to the species strength in the region. When the plant use-data were analyzed, trees contributed with 68 uses, followed by herbs (51), climbers (32) and shrubs (22). Perhaps this was a reflection of the floristic composition and the prevailing Phanero-therophytic climate. Out of the 173 plant taxa that were noted as being utilized by the ethnic people in the sanctuary, the greatest number (154; 89.1%) were indigenous and wild. The introduced species were the crops under cultivation and planted. Although the local people use plants for various purposes, they largely serve medicinal scopes (83.24%) and for subsistence (21.96%).