Luthra, Peraza-Santiago, Beeson, Saltzman, Crinnion, and Magnuson (2021) present data from the lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation paradigm that they claim provides conclusive evidence in favor of top-down processing in speech perception. We argue here that this evidence does not support that conclusion. The findings are open to alternative explanations, and we give data in support of one of them (that there is an acoustic confound in the materials). Lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation thus remains elusive, while prior data from (...) the paradigm instead challenge the idea that there is top-down processing in online speech recognition. (shrink)

This study investigates the child‐directed speech (CDS) of four Russian‐, six German, and six English‐speaking mothers to their 2‐year‐old children. Typologically Russian has considerably less restricted word order than either German or English, with German showing more word‐order variants than English. This could lead to the prediction that the lexical restrictiveness previously found in the initial strings of English CDS by Cameron‐Faulkner, Lieven, and Tomasello (2003) would not be found in Russian or German CDS. However, despite differences between the three (...) corpora that clearly derive from typological differences between the languages, the most significant finding of this study is a high degree of lexical restrictiveness at the beginnings of CDS utterances in all three languages. (shrink)

Lexical ambiguity is pervasive in language, and the nature of the representations of an ambiguous word's multiple meanings is yet to be fully understood. With a special focus on Chinese characters, the present study first established that native speaker's perception about a character's number of meanings was heavily influenced by the availability of its distinct word formations, while whether these meanings would be perceived to be closely related was driven by further conceptual analysis. These notions were operationalized as two computed (...) metrics, which assessed the degree of dispersion across individual word formations and the degree of propinquity across clusters of word formations, respectively, in a distributional semantic space. The observed correlations between the computed and the perceived metrics indicated that the utility of word formations to tap into meaning representations of Chinese characters was indeed cognitively plausible. The results have demonstrated the extent to which distributional semantics could inform about meaning representations of Chinese characters, which has theoretical implications for the representation of ambiguous words more generally. (shrink)

The present study investigated whether humans are more likely to trust people who are coordinated with them. We examined a well-known type of linguistic coordination, lexical entrainment, typically involving the elaboration of “conceptual pacts,” or partner-specific agreements on how to conceptualize objects. In two experiments, we manipulated lexical entrainment in a referential communication task and measured the effect of this manipulation on epistemic and practical trust. Our results showed that participants were more likely to trust a coordinated partner than an (...) uncoordinated one, but only when the latter broke previously established conceptual pacts. (shrink)

An NP-hardness proof for non-local Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammar (MCTAG) by Rambow and Satta (1st International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammers 1992 ), based on Dahlhaus and Warmuth (in J Comput Syst Sci 33:456–472, 1986 ), is extended to some linguistically relevant restrictions of that formalism. It is found that there are NP-hard grammars among non-local MCTAGs even if any or all of the following restrictions are imposed: (i) lexicalization: every tree in the grammar contains a terminal; (ii) dominance (...) links: every tree set contains at most two trees, and in every such tree set, there is a link between the foot node of one tree and the root node of the other tree, indicating that the former node must dominate the latter in the derived tree. This is the version of MCTAG proposed in Becker et al. (Proceedings of the 5th conference of the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 1991 ) to account for German long-distance scrambling. This result restricts the field of possible candidates for an extension of Tree Adjoining Grammar that would be both mildly context-sensitive and linguistically adequate. (shrink)

Lexical alignment, a communication phenomenon where conversational partners adapt their word choices to become more similar, plays an important role in the development of language and social communication skills. While this has been studied extensively in the conversations of preschool‐aged children and their parents in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) communities, research in other pediatric populations is sparse. This study makes significant expansions on the existing literature by focusing on alignment in naturalistic conversations of school‐aged children from a (...) non‐WEIRD population across multiple conversational tasks and with different types of adult partners. Typically developing children aged 5 to 8 years (n = 45) engaged in four semi‐structured conversations that differed by task (problem‐solving vs. play‐based) and by partner (parent vs. university student), resulting in a corpus of 180 conversations. Lexical alignment scores were calculated and compared to sham conversations, representing alignment occurring at the level of chance. Both children and adults coordinated their conversational utterances by re‐using or aligning each other's word choices. This alignment behavior persisted across conversational tasks and partners, although the degree of alignment was moderated by the conversational context. These findings suggest that lexical alignment is a robust phenomenon in conversations between school‐age children and adults. Furthermore, this study extends lexical alignment findings to a non‐WEIRD culture, suggesting that alignment may be a coordination strategy employed by adults and children across diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. (shrink)

Lexical Semantics is about the meaning of words. Although obviously a central concern of linguistics, the semantic behaviour of words has been unduly neglected in the current literature, which has tended to emphasize sentential semantics and its relation to formal systems of logic. In this textbook D. A. Cruse establishes in a principled and disciplined way the descriptive and generalizable facts about lexical relations that any formal theory of semantics will have to encompass. Among the topics covered in depth are (...) idiomaticity, lexical ambiguity, synonymy, hierarchical relations such as hyponymy and meronymy, and various types of oppositeness. Syntagmatic relations are also treated in some detail. The discussions are richly illustrated by examples drawn almost entirely from English. Although a familiarity with traditional grammar is assumed, readers with no technical linguistic background will find the exposition always accessible. All readers with an interest in semantics will find in this original text not only essential background but a stimulating new perspective on the field. (shrink)

We reply to McQueen's commentary by comparing the parsimony of his account of relevant data and the computational model he favors with the explanation and model we favor. His account requires multiple independent explanations and mechanisms. Ours requires one: lexical feedback.

In a 2010 paper Daley argues, contra Fodor, that several syntactically simple predicates express structured concepts. Daley develops his theory of structured concepts within Tichý’s Transparent Intensional Logic . I rectify various misconceptions of Daley’s concerning TIL. I then develop within TIL an improved theory of how structured concepts are structured and how syntactically simple predicates are related to structured concepts.

It is well known that languages differ in how they encode motion. Languages such as English use verbs that communicate the manner of motion (e.g., climb, float), while languages such as Greek often encode the path of motion in verbs (e.g., advance, exit). In two studies with English- and Greek-speaking adults and 5-year-olds, we ask how such lexical constraints are used in combination with structural cues in hypothesizing meanings for novel motion verbs cross-linguistically. We show that lexicalization biases affect (...) the interpretations of motion verbs in both young children and adults across different languages; furthermore, their scope of application is larger than previously thought, since they also extend to the domain of caused motion events. Crucially, we find that the language-specific effects of such biases interact with universal mappings between syntactic structure and semantic content. Finally, we demonstrate that the combined effects of lexical and structural cues shift non-linguistic biases observed during event categorization: even though speakers of English and Greek share non-linguistic preferences in categorizing spontaneous and caused motion, they focus on different components of motion events when building hypotheses about the meaning of novel motion verbs. (shrink)

Developmental stuttering is a widely discussed speech fluency disorder. Research on its mechanism has focused on an atypical interface between the planning (PLAN) and execution (EX) processes, known collectively as the EXPLAN model. However, it remains unclear how this atypical interface influences people who stutter. A straightforward assumption is that stuttering speakers adopt a smaller scope of speech planning, whereas a defect in word retrieval can be confounding. To shed light on this issue, we took the semantic blocking effect as (...) an index to examine lexical planning in word and phrase production. In Experiment 1, for word production, pictures from the same semantic category were combined to form homogeneous blocks, and pictures from different categories were combined to form heterogeneous blocks. A typical effect of semantic blocking showing longer naming latencies for homogeneous blocks than heterogeneous ones was observed for both stuttering and fluent speakers. However, this effect was smaller for stuttering speakers, when it was subject to lexical defects in stuttering. In Experiment 2, for a conjoined noun phrase production task, the pictures referring to the first noun were manipulated into homogeneous and heterogeneous conditions. The semantic blocking effect was also much smaller for stuttering speakers, indicating a smaller scope of lexical planning. Therefore, the results provided more evidence in support of the EXPLAN model and indicated that a smaller scope of lexical planning rather than lexical defects causes the atypical interface for stuttering. Moreover, a comparison between these two tasks showed that the study findings have implications for syntactic defects in stuttering. (shrink)

Lexical ambiguity—the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses—is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word's meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of words (...) with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine‐grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure. (shrink)

Sounds like h-nmm, hh-aaaah, hn-hn, unkay, nyeah, ummum, uuh, um-hm-uh-hm, um and uh-huh occur frequently in American English conversation but have thus far escaped systematic study. This article reports a study of both the forms and functions of such tokens in a corpus of American English conversations. These sounds appear not to be lexical, in that they are productively generated rather than finite in number, and in that the sound–meaning mapping is compositional rather than arbitrary. This implies that English bears (...) within it a small specialized sub-language which follows different rules from the language as a whole. The functions supported by this sub-language complement those of main-channel English; they include low-overhead control of turn-taking, negotiation of agreement, signaling of recognition and comprehension, management of interpersonal relations such as control and affiliation, and the expression of emotion, attitude, and affect. (shrink)

Lexical innovations (e.g., zero-derivations coined on the fly by a speaker) seem to bear semantic content. Yet, such expressions cannot bear semantic content as a function of the conventions of meaning in force in the language, since they are not part of its lexicon. This is in tension with the commonplace view that the semantic content of lexical expressions is constituted by linguistic conventions. The conventionalist has two immediate ways out of the tension. The first is to preserve the conventionalist (...) assumption and deny that lexical innovations bear semantic content. The second is to dynamicize the conventionalist assumption, that is, argue that presentations of unattested expressions trigger an augmentation of the standing semantic resources of the language and instantiate content as a result of this underlying update. Building on a comparison with the production of novel onomatopoeic words, iconic pseudowords and pro-speech gestures, the paper argues that the issue is best addressed by suspending the conventionalist assumption, and describes the metasemantic implications of the claim. (shrink)

The influx of religious activities and religious discourse on the Internet has made it pertinent to examine the fundamental roles of language in the expression, presentation, understanding, and advancement of any set of religious beliefs and practices. One main aspect of online religious activities that continues to arrest the attention of scholars is the uniqueness of language used by religious practitioners. For instance, new linguistic strategies and devices have emerged as a result of bending language to suit trends on a (...) new medium. The emergence of the Information Communication Technology in the twenty-first century has also resulted in the manifestation of computer-mediated communication, with its attendant pervasive new forms of language and practices. Nigerian Pentecostal churches have used the Internet, especially the social media such as Facebook and Twitter, in propagating their doctrines. This study identifies emerging lexical trends in the way six Nigerian Pentecostal churches use language in extending their practices on the new media and submits that such innovations are leading up to the birth of a new cyber-variety of Nigerian English. (shrink)

In most computational ontologies, information inheritance is based on the taxonomic relation is_a. A given type inherits from other type only if the latter subsumes the former. We assume, however, that inheritance can be related, not only to the taxonomic relation, but also to the meronymic relationship between parts and wholes. The main aim of this paper is to organise upper-level ontologies associated with lexical information by taking into account part-whole subsumption. As we consider that parts may subsume wholes under (...) specific conditions, ontologies can be defined in terms of systems in which wholes inherit information from its parts. In this article, we describe how part-whole subsumption and, then, meronymic inheritance can be used to deal with type mismatch and metonymic interpretation of polysemous nouns. For this purpose, we attempt to merge old assumptions from both formal ontology and lexical semantics into a homogeneous framework. (shrink)

A comprehensive measure of organizational culture was developed using a lexical approach, a method typically employed within the study of personality. 1761 adjectives were narrowed down and factor analyzed, which resulted in the identification of a nine factor solution to organizational culture, including the dimensions of: Innovative, Dominant, Pace, Friendly, Prestigious, Trendy, Corporate Social Responsibility, Traditional, and Diverse. Comprised of 135 adjectives most frequently used in describing organizational culture by current employees of several hundred organizations, the Lexical Organizational Culture Scale (...) (LOCS) was found to predict employee commitment, job satisfaction, job search behaviors, and subjective fit better than earlier scales of organizational culture. The study demonstrates that organizational culture measured using a lexical approach such as LOCS was a significant improvement to measuring Organizational Culture using traditional anthropomorphic measures of organizational culture. Scales for each of the nine factors identified in the lexical study are developed and validated. (shrink)

One of the central issues in modern linguistics has been the relationship between syntax and semantics. Within the framework of generative grammar, established by Chomsky in the early 1960s, it has been assumed that syntax is distinct from, and independent of, semantics. This premise has been challenged recently by Chomsky himself; he now proposes semantics, and in particular thematic roles, as the basis for generating syntactic structures. Yael Ravin argues that thematic roles are not valid semantic entities, and that syntax (...) and semantics are indeed autonomous and independent of one another. She advocates a Decompositional approach to lexical semantics, in the spirit of Katz's semantic theory. In the course of her argument she discusses theoretical issues such as indeterminacy and ambiguity, lexical configuration rules, and lexical projection, and analyses the semantic content of event concepts such as causation, action, and change. (shrink)

Lexical and morphological knowledge of school-aged children are correlated with each other, and are often difficult to distinguish. One reason for this might be that many tasks currently used to assess morphological knowledge require children to inflect or derive real words in the language, thus recruiting their vocabulary knowledge. The current study investigated the possible separability of lexical and morphological knowledge using two complementary approaches. First, we examined the correlations between vocabulary and four morphological tasks tapping different aspects of morphological (...) processing and awareness, and using either real-word or pseudo-word stimuli. Thus, we tested the hypothesis that different morphological tasks recruit lexical knowledge to various degrees. Second, we compared the Hebrew vocabulary and morphological knowledge of 5th grade language minority speaking children to that of their native speaking peers. This comparison allows us to ask whether reduced exposure to the societal language might differentially influence vocabulary and morphological knowledge. The results demonstrate that indeed different morphological tasks rely on lexical knowledge to varying degrees. In addition, language minority students had significantly lower performance in vocabulary and in morphological tasks that recruited vocabulary knowledge to a greater extent. In contrast, both groups performed similarly in abstract morphological tasks with a lower vocabulary load. These results demonstrate that lexical and morphological knowledge may rely on partially separable learning mechanisms, and highlight the importance of distinguishing between these two linguistic components. (shrink)

How does a child rapidly acquire and develop a structured mental organization for the vast number of words in the first years of life? How does a bilingual individual deal with the even more complicated task of learning and organizing two lexicons? It is only until recently have we started to examine the lexicon as a dynamical system with regard to its acquisition, representation, and organization. In this article, I outline a proposal based on our research that takes the dynamical (...) approach to the lexicon, and I discuss how this proposal can be applied to account for lexical organization, structural representation, and competition within and between languages. In particular, I provide computational evidence based on the DevLex model, a self‐organizing neural network model, and neuroimaging evidence based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, to illustrate how children and adults learn and represent the lexicon in their first and second languages. In the computational research, our goal has been to identify, through linguistically and developmentally realistic models, detailed cognitive mechanisms underlying the dynamic self‐organizing processes in monolingual and bilingual lexical development; in the neuroimaging research, our goal has been to identify the neural substrates that subserve lexical organization and competition in the monolingual and the bilingual brain. In both cases, our findings lead to a better understanding of the interactive dynamics involved in the acquisition and representation of one or multiple languages. (shrink)

Grammatical categories of English expressions are shown to differ with regard to the freedom we have in semantically interpreting their lexical (= syntactically simplest) expressions. Section 1 reviews the categories of expression we consider. Section 2 empirically supports that certain of these categories are lexically free, a notion we formally define, in the sense that anything which is denotable by a complex expression in the category is available as a denotation for lexical expressions in the category. Other categories are shown (...) to be not lexically free. Thus for those categories the interpretation of lexical expressions is inherently constrained compared to the interpretation of the full class of expressions in the category. (shrink)

This paper will introduce “lexical silencing” as a new linguistic phenomenon, i.e., positive statements about something are made more difficult to express when the only (or the predominant) word for it in a language is a negative word. A good example is the term “political correctness,” which carries negative connotations in English but has no easy alternative to replace it. Suppose a supporter attempts to explicitly endorse it by saying something like “Political correctness should be a fundamental value of the (...) society.” Positive statements like this sound somewhat weird and even self-defeating to the hearers, and are therefore difficult to be expressed in the public discourse. Moreover, I will identify at least two linguistic mechanisms of lexical silencing: First, slurs can make it difficult to say something positive about a group because slurs provide the illocutionary force of derogation, which conflicts with forces like praising. Second, what I call “loaded words” (e.g., “political correctness”) are not explicitly derogatory like slurs, but they can achieve similar effects by producing perlocutionary effects on the psycho-linguistic process of hearers. This paper will also discuss the various sources of lexical silencing and possible strategies for mitigating them. (shrink)

We revisit a typological puzzle due to Horn (Doctoral Dissertation, UCLA, 1972) regarding the lexicalization of logical operators: in instantiations of the traditional square of opposition across categories and languages, the O corner, corresponding to ‘nand’ (= not and), ‘nevery’ (= not every), etc., is never lexicalized. We discuss Horn’s proposal, which involves the interaction of two economy conditions, one that relies on scalar implicatures and one that relies on markedness. We observe that in order to express markedness and (...) to account for a bigger typological puzzle, namely the absence of lexicalizations of ‘XOR’ (= exclusive or), ‘all-or-none’, and many other imaginable logical operators, one must restrict the basic lexicalizable elements to a small set of primitives. We suggest that an ordering based perspective, following Keenan and Faltz (Boolean semantics for natural language, 1985), makes the stipulated primitives that we arrive at more natural. We also propose a modification to Horn’s proposal, based on recent work on implicatures, in which only the implicature condition is operative and in which markedness is part of the definition of the alternatives for scalar implicatures rather than an independent condition. (shrink)

Lexical semantics has become a major research area within computational linguistics, drawing from psycholinguistics, knowledge representation, computer algorithms and architecture. Research programmes whose goal is the definition of large lexicons are asking what the appropriate representation structure is for different facets of lexical information. Among these facets, semantic information is probably the most complex and the least explored.Computational Lexical Semantics is one of the first volumes to provide models for the creation of various kinds of computerised lexicons for the automatic (...) treatment of natural language, with applications to machine translation, automatic indexing, and database front-ends, knowledge extraction, among other things. It focuses on semantic issues, as seen by linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists. Besides describing academic research, it also covers ongoing industrial projects. (shrink)

Establishing phonologically robust lexical representations in a second language is challenging, and even more so for words containing phones in phonological contrasts that are not part of the native language. This study presents a series of additional analyses of lexical decision data assessing the phonolexical encoding of English /ε/ and /æ/ by German learners of English in order to examine the influence of lexical frequency, phonological neighborhood density and the acoustics of the particular vowels on learners’ ability to reject nonwords (...) differing from real words in the confusable L2 phones only. Results showed that both the lexical properties of the target items and the acoustics of the critical vowels affected nonword rejection, albeit differently for items with /æ/ → [ε] and /ε/ → [æ] mispronunciations: For the former, lower lexical frequencies and higher neighborhood densities led to more accurate performance. For the latter, it was only the acoustics of the vowel that had a significant impact on learners’ accuracy. This suggests that the encoding of /ε/ and /æ/ may not only be asymmetric in that /ε/ is generally more robustly represented in the lexicon than /æ/, as previously reported, but also in the way in which this encoding takes place. Mainly, the encoding of /æ/ appears to be more dependent on the characteristics of the L2 vocabulary and on one’s experience with the L2 than that of its more dominant counterpart. (shrink)

This study aims to resolve contradictory conclusions on the relative importance of lexical and syntactic knowledge in second language (L2) listening with evidence from academic English. It was hypothesized that when lexical and syntactic knowledge is measured in auditory receptive tasks contextualized in natural discourse, the measures will be more relevant to L2 listening, so that both lexical and syntactic knowledge will have unique contributions to L2 listening. To test this hypothesis, a quantitative study was designed, in which lexical and (...) syntactic knowledge was measured via partial dictation, an auditory receptive task contextualized in a discourse context. Academic English listening was measured via a retired IELTS listening test. A group of 258 college-level native Chinese learners of English completed these tasks. Pearson correlations showed that both lexical and syntactic measures correlated strongly with English listening ( r = 0.77 and r = 0.67 respectively). Hierarchical regression analyses showed that both measures jointly explained 62% of the variance in the listening score and that each measure had its unique contribution. These results demonstrated the importance of considering construct representation substantially and using measures that well reflect constructs in practical research. (shrink)

This dissertation formulates, defends, and exemplifies a semantic approach that I call Cognitive Decompositionism. Cognitive Decompositionism is one version of lexical decompositionism, which holds that the meaning of lexical items are decomposable into component parts. Decompositionism comes in different varieties that can be characterized in terms of four binary parameters. First, Natural Decompositionism contrasts with Artful Decompositionism. The former views components as word-like, the latter views components more abstractly. Second, Convenient Decompositionism claims that components are merely convenient fictions, while Real (...) Decompositionism claims that components are psychologically real. Third, Truth-conditional Decompositionism contrasts with various non-truth-conditional theories, in particular with Quantum Semantics. And fourth, Holistic Decompositionism assumes that decompositions are circular, as opposed to Atomistic Decompositionism, which assumes that some primitive basis ultimately underlies semantic components. Cognitive Decompositionism is the conjunction of the following theses: decomposition is Artful , Psychologically Real , Quantum , and Atomistic . As I substantiate these claims, I will be responding to the anti-decompositionist theories of Fodor, Davidson, and Quine. (shrink)

Saffran, Newport, and Aslin (1996a) found that human infants are sensitive to statistical regularities corresponding to lexical units when hearing an artificial spoken language. Two sorts of segmentation strategies have been proposed to account for this early word‐segmentation ability: bracketing strategies, in which infants are assumed to insert boundaries into continuous speech, and clustering strategies, in which infants are assumed to group certain speech sequences together into units (Swingley, 2005). In the present study, we test the predictions of two computational (...) models instantiating each of these strategies i.e., Serial Recurrent Networks: Elman, 1990; and Parser: Perruchet & Vinter, 1998 in an experiment where we compare the lexical and sublexical recognition performance of adults after hearing 2 or 10 min of an artificial spoken language. The results are consistent with Parser’s predictions and the clustering approach, showing that performance on words is better than performance on part‐words only after 10 min. This result suggests that word segmentation abilities are not merely due to stronger associations between sublexical units but to the emergence of stronger lexical representations during the development of speech perception processes. (shrink)

The results of two experiments provide the first direct demonstration that subjects can process a word lexically despite concurrently being engaged in decoding a task cue telling them which of two tasks to perform. These results, taken together with others, point to qualitative differences between the mind‘s ability to engage in lexical versus sublexical processing during the time they are engaged with other tasks. The emerging picture is one in which some form of resource plays little role during lexical processing (...) whereas the need for some form of resource during sublexical processing serves to bottleneck performance. (shrink)

What are the effects of word-by-word predictability on sentence processing times during the natural reading of a text? Although information complexity metrics such as surprisal and entropy reduction have been useful in addressing this question, these metrics tend to be estimated using computational language models, which require some degree of commitment to a particular theory of language processing. Taking a different approach, this study implemented a large-scale cumulative cloze task to collect word-by-word predictability data for 40 passages and compute surprisal (...) and entropy reduction values in a theory-neutral manner. A separate group of participants read the same texts while their eye movements were recorded. Results showed that increases in surprisal and entropy reduction were both associated with increases in reading times. Furthermore, these effects did not depend on the global difficulty of the text. The findings suggest that surprisal and entropy reduction independently contribute to variation in reading times, as these metrics seem to capture different aspects of lexical predictability. (shrink)

The ideal introduction for students of semantics, Lexical Meaning fills the gap left by more general semantics textbooks, providing the teacher and the student with insights into word meaning beyond the traditional overviews of lexical relations. The book explores the relationship between word meanings and syntax and semantics more generally. It provides a balanced overview of the main theoretical approaches, along with a lucid explanation of their relative strengths and weaknesses. After covering the main topics in lexical meaning, such as (...) polysemy and sense relations, the textbook surveys the types of meanings represented by different word classes. It explains abstract concepts in clear language, using a wide range of examples, and includes linguistic puzzles in each chapter to encourage the student to practise using the concepts. 'Adopt-a-Word' exercises give students the chance to research a particular word, building a portfolio of specialist work on a single word. (shrink)

A long-standing question in cognitive science is how high-level knowledge is integrated with sensory input. For example, listeners can leverage lexical knowledge to interpret an ambiguous speech sound, but do such effects reflect direct top-down influences on perception or merely postperceptual biases? A critical test case in the domain of spoken word recognition is lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation (LCfC). Previous LCfC studies have shown that a lexically restored context phoneme (e.g., /s/ in Christma#) can alter the perceived place of (...) articulation of a subsequent target phoneme (e.g., the initial phoneme of a stimulus from a tapes-capes continuum), consistent with the influence of an unambiguous context phoneme in the same position. Because this phoneme-to-phoneme compensation for coarticulation is considered sublexical, scientists agree that evidence for LCfC would constitute strong support for top–down interaction. However, results from previous LCfC studies have been inconsistent, and positive effects have often been small. Here, we conducted extensive piloting of stimuli prior to testing for LCfC. Specifically, we ensured that context items elicited robust phoneme restoration (e.g., that the final phoneme of Christma# was reliably identified as /s/) and that unambiguous context-final segments (e.g., a clear /s/ at the end of Christmas) drove reliable compensation for coarticulation for a subsequent target phoneme. We observed robust LCfC in a well-powered, preregistered experiment with these pretested items (N = 40) as well as in a direct replication study (N = 40). These results provide strong evidence in favor of computational models of spoken word recognition that include top–down feedback. (shrink)

Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as a new paradigm for gaining insights into the mechanisms by which children may accomplish these feats. Unfortunately, many of these models assume a computational complexity and linguistic knowledge (...) likely to be beyond the abilities of developing young children. This article shows that, using simple statistical procedures, significant correlations exist between the beginnings and endings of a word and its lexical category in English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. Therefore, phonetic information can contribute to individuating higher level structural properties of these languages. This article also presents a simple 2‐layer connectionist model that, once trained with an initial small sample of words labeled for lexical category, can infer the lexical category of a large proportion of novel words using only word‐edge phonological information, namely the first and last phoneme of a word. The results suggest that simple procedures combined with phonetic information perceptually available to children provide solid scaffolding for emerging lexical categories in language development. (shrink)

This paper investigates the semantics of derived statives, deverbal adjectives that fail to entail there to have been a preceding (temporal) event of the kind named by the verb they are derived from, e.g. darkened in a darkened portion of skin. Building on Gawron’s (The lexical semantics of extent verbs, San Diego State University, ms, 2009) recent observations regarding the semantics of extent uses of change of state verbs (e.g., Kim’s skin darkens between the knee and the calf) and Kennedy (...) and Levin’s (Adjectives and adverbs: syntax, semantics and disclosure, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008) theory of change, it is shown, contrary to previous analyses, that a fully compositional semantic analysis is possible, and thus that there is no argument from derived statives for word formation differing from semantic composition above the word level in requiring deletion operations, as in Dubinsky and Simango’s (Language 72:749–781, 1996) analysis. Further, such an analysis, by contrast with previous ones, both compositional (Jackson in Resultatives, derived statives, lexical semantic structure, Doctoral dissertation, UCLA, 2005b; Condoravdi and Deo in Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL 18), Seoul, 2008 and non-compositional (Dubinsky and Simango 1996), correctly predicts, as shown by a range of arguments, that the meaning of the derived stative contains the meaning of the verb it is derived from and that it therefore contrasts fundamentally with morphologically simple adjectives in the kind of meaning that it has. (shrink)

The present study analyzed the vocabulary profile of the News on the Web corpus, which contained 12 billion words from online newspapers and magazines in 20 countries to determine the vocabulary knowledge needed to reasonably understand online newspaper and magazine articles. The results showed that, in general, knowledge of the most frequent 4,000 word families in the British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English wordlist plus proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds and acronyms was necessary to gain 95% coverage for (...) the NOW corpus. However, when it came to the 98% coverage, online newspaper and magazine articles from different countries had relatively distinct lexical demands. In-depth analyses were carried out and the findings offered comprehensive insights into the issue. Implications for teaching and learning were also provided. (shrink)

Previous research on the INTRODUCTORY IT PATTERN unveiled various lexical and grammatical aspects of its use as a grammatical stance device, including the range of the most frequently used adjectival and verbal stance lexemes, associated stance meanings, the most frequent sub-patterns, and the distinct uses in various contextual settings of the pattern. However, the stance meanings of the pattern, which are deeply rooted in the associated lexical resources, are still understudied. This study explores the meanings of the INTRODUCTORY IT PATTERN (...) by referring to the stance meanings of the pattern associated with the adjectival and verbal lexemes that are statistically attracted to the pattern. The research samples were extracted from the British component of the International Corpus of English. The samples were manually annotated for different stance types and a collexeme analysis was performed to identify the full range of stance lexemes statistically associated with the INTRODUCTORY IT PATTERN. The results show that both adjectival and verbal collexemes are statistically and functionally significant for the delivery of discrete stance types/subtypes. Adjectival collexemes are frequently deployed for all four stance types: Epistemic stance, Evaluation stance, Dynamic stance, and Deontic stance, while verbal collexemes are valuable lexical resources for the Epistemic stance, as their use entails modalized evidentiality, pointing to epistemic judgment of the writer-speaker toward events/propositions. Close examination of the use of adjectival and verbal collexemes identified three fundamental meanings of the INTRODUCTORY IT PATTERN. First, the pattern is inherently evaluative as it tends to attract more lexemes with evaluative meanings and associates evaluative meanings with superficially non-evaluative lexemes. Second, it features a scalarized expression of diversified stance types/subtypes, thus, especially reflective of the scalarized semantic feature of stance expression. Third, it connotates an overwhelmingly positive likelihood judgment. The article concludes by discussing the limitations of this study. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Donald Davidson :3–17, 1984, The philosophical grounds of rationality, 1986, Midwest Stud Philos 16:1–12, 1991) developed a powerful argument against the claim that linguistic conventions provide any explanatory purchase on an account of linguistic meaning and communication. This argument, as I shall develop it, turns on cases of what I call lexical innovation: cases in which a speaker uses a sentence containing a novel expression-meaning pair, but nevertheless successfully communicates her intended meaning to her audience. (...) I will argue that cases of lexical innovation motivate a dynamic conception of linguistic conventions according to which background linguistic conventions may be rapidly expanded to incorporate new word meanings or shifted to revise the meanings of words already in circulation. I argue that this dynamic account of conventions both resolves the problem raised by cases of lexical innovation and that it does so in a way that is preferable to those who—like Davidson—deny important explanatory roles for linguistic conventions. (shrink)

Some theories of practical reasons incorporate a lexical priority structure, according to which some practical reasons have infinitely greater weight than others. This includes absolute deontological theories and axiological theories that take some goods to be categorically superior to others. These theories face problems involving cases in which there is a non-extreme probability that a given reason applies. In view of such cases, lexical-priority theories are in danger of becoming irrelevant to decision-making, becoming absurdly demanding, or generating paradoxical cases in (...) which each of a pair of actions is permissible yet the pair is impermissible. (shrink)

Lexical views in population axiology can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without violating Transitivity or Separability. However, they imply a dilemma: either some good life is better than any number of slightly worse lives, or else the ‘at least as good as’ relation on populations is radically incomplete. In this paper, I argue that Archimedean views face an analogous dilemma. I thus conclude that the lexical dilemma gives us little reason to prefer Archimedean views. Even if we give up on lexicality, (...) problems of the same kind remain. (shrink)

Lexical Semantics in Ancient Egyptian. Edited by Eitan Grossman; Stéphane Polis; and Jean Winand. Lingua Aegyptia Studia Monographica, vol. 9. Hamburg: Widmaier Verlag, 2012. Pp. vi + 486. €69.

Lexical Semantics for Terminology: An introduction explores the interconnections between lexical semantics and terminology. More specifically, it shows how principles borrowed from lexico-semantic frameworks and methodologies derived from them can help understand terms and describe them in resources. It also explains how lexical analysis complements perspectives entirely focused on knowledge. Issues such as term identification, meaning, polysemy, relations between terms, and equivalence are discussed thoroughly and illustrated with various examples taken from different fields of knowledge. This book is intended for (...) readers who are interested in words and need to handle specialized terms as part of their activities, i.e. terminologists, translators, lexicographers, corpus linguists. A background in terminology or lexical semantics is not required since all notions are defined and explained. This book should complement other textbooks on terminology that do not focus on lexical semantics per se. (shrink)

These are central to the accounts of lexical representation and meaning construction developed, giving rise to the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive ...

The article is devoted to the study of the etymology and semantic connotations of Sanskrit terms: sat, bhāva, sambhava, bhavitṛ, bhavya, bhavat, bhūti, bhūta, sarvabhūta, bhavaka, sattva, sattā, saṃvṛtti, jāstāmātā sampatti, vartamāna, āvitta, āvinna as lexical representatives of the conceptosphere of being in the Sanskrit-English dictionary of Monier-Williams. The method of conceptual analysis is implemented based on the assumption of the determining influence of language culture on the content and nature of philosophical creativity. This study is only the first stage (...) of the project to reveal the way of interpreting "being" in the history of Indian philosophy. The key semantic connotations of this concept in the Monier-Williams English-Sanskrit dictionary are revealed. The semantic connection of the concept of "being" with the concepts: "life" and "time" is defined. In this context, "to live" is to be "someone" in order to embrace "one's place" and play "one's role" that can provide "possession" for "subsistence", and the relationship between "being" and "time" is the concreteness of the existing event that is happening or has happened and belonging to the future that is about to happen. Although we do not trace a transparent connection between the concepts of "being" and "space" in Sanskrit, there are reasons to believe that the first of all, the etymology of the terms of our chosen conceptosphere clearly presents the interpretation of being as a long and a spatially defined location. Noticeable is the fact that the connection between the interpretation of the concept of "being" in Sanskrit and the ethical concept of "good" and aesthetic "beauty" we trace only in terms derived from as and bhū, and at the same time only the terms sat and bhava can be translated as "truth", and the meaning of "essence" we find only in the translation of the terms sat and sattva. This explains the fact why the term sat is considered as close as possible to the "Western" interpretation of the concept of "being". It has been suggested that the polysemy of lexical representatives of the concept of being in Sanskrit and the complexity and variability of the grammar compliance of this language can be interpreted as an obstacle to the extreme problematization of this concept. (shrink)

The paper investigates the interaction of lexical and constructional meaning in valency coercion processing, and the effect of (in)compatibility between verb and construction for its successful resolution (Perek, Florent & Martin Hilpert. 2014. Constructional tolerance: Cross-linguistic differences in the acceptability of non-conventional uses of constructions. Constructions and Frames 6(2). 266–304; Yoon, Soyeon. 2019. Coercion and language change: A usage-based approach. Linguistic Research 36(1). 111–139). We present an online experiment on valency coercion (the first one on Italian), by means of a (...) semantic priming protocol inspired by Johnson, Matt A. & Adele E. Goldberg. 2013. Evidence for automatic accessing of constructional meaning: Jabberwocky sentences prime associated verbs. Language & Cognitive Processes 28(10). 1439–1452. We test priming effects with a lexical decision task which presents different target verbs preceded by coercion instances of four Italian argument structure constructions, which serve as primes. Three types of verbs serve as target: lexical associate (LA), construction associate (CA), and unrelated (U) verbs. LAs are semantically similar to the main verb of the prime sentence, whereas CAs are prototypical verbs associated to the prime construction. U verbs serve as a mean of comparison for the two categories of interest. Results confirm that processing of valency coercion requires an integration of both lexical and constructional semantics. Moreover, compatibility is also found to influence coercion resolution. Specifically, constructional priming is primary and independent from compatibility. A secondary priming effect for LA verbs is also found, which suggests a contribution of lexical semantics in coercion resolution – especially for low-compatibility coercion coinages. (shrink)

Legal translation between English and Arabic is under researched. However, the growing need for it, due to immigration and asylum seeking, among other reasons, necessitates the importance of more research. The asymmetry between English and Arabic poses many difficulties for legal translators, be they linguistic-based, culture-specific or system-based. The aim of this research is to discuss ways of translating lexical items between English and Arabic. In this current discussion I will present, exemplify and analyse the common difficult areas of translating (...) English/Arabic legal texts and suggest ways of dealing with them. These areas involve culture-specific and system-based terms, archaic terms, specialised terms and doublets and triplets. With this aim in mind, the paper answers the following research questions: 1.What are the common difficulties of translating legal texts between English and Arabic? 2.What are the common lexical difficulties between English and Arabic legal texts? 3.What are the procedures of translating lexical legal terms between English and Arabic? The paper concludes that translating the above-mentioned lexical terms requires expertise, professional training, robust knowledge of the linguistic and legal systems of languages, as well as up-to-date electronic dictionaries and well-defined parallel corpora. (shrink)

This paper presents a simple and versatile tree-rewriting lexicalized grammar formalism, TAGLET, that provides an effective scaffold for introducing advanced topics in a survey course on natural language processing (NLP). Students who implement a strong competence TAGLET parser and generator simultaneously get experience with central computer science ideas and develop an effective starting point for their own subsequent projects in data-intensive and interactive NLP.