We present an algorithm for simultaneously constructing both the syntax and semantics of a sentence using a Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG). This approach captures naturally and elegantly the interaction between pragmatic and syntactic constraints on descriptions in a sentence, and the inferential interactions between multiple descriptions in a sentence. At the same time, it exploits linguistically motivated, declarative specifications of the discourse functions of syntactic constructions to make contextually appropriate syntactic choices.

This paper presents a theory of the syntactic aspects of human sentence production. An important characteristic of unprepared speech is that overt pronunciation of a sentence can be initiated before the speaker has completely worked out the meaning content he or she is going to express in that sentence. Apparently, the speaker is able to build up a syntactically coherent utterance out of a series of syntactic fragments each rendering a new part of the meaning content. This incremental, left‐to‐right mode (...) of sentence production is the central capability of the proposed Incremental Procedural Grammar (IPG). Certain other properties of spontaneous speech, as derivable from speech errors, hesitations, self‐repairs, and language pathology, are accounted for as well.The psychological plausibility thus gained by the grammar appears compatible with a satisfactory level of linguistic plausibility in that sentences receive structural descriptions which are in line with current theories of grammar. More importantly, an explanation for the existence of configurational conditions on transformations and other linguistics rules is proposed.The basic design feature of IPG which gives rise to these psychologically and linguistically desirable properties, is the “Procedures + Stack” concept. Sentences are built not by a central constructing agency which overlooks the whole process but by a team of syntactic procedures (modules) which work—in parallel—on small parts of the sentence, have only a limited overview, and whose sole communication channel is a stack.IPG covers object complement constructions, interrogatives, and word order in main and subordinate clauses. It handles unbounded dependencies, crossserial dependencies and coordination phenomena such as gapping and conjunction reduction. It is also capable of generating self‐repairs and elliptical answers to questions. IPG has been implemented as an incremental Dutch sentence generator written in LISP. (shrink)

Proposition and sentence are two separate entities indicating their specific purposes, definitions and problems. A proposition is a logical entity. A proposition asserts that something is or not the case, any proposition may be affirmed or denied, all proportions are either true (1’s) or false (0’s). All proportions are sentences but all sentences are not propositions. Propositions are factual contains three terms: subject, predicate and copula and are always in indicative or declarative mood. While sentence is a grammatical (...) entity, a unit of language that expresses a complete thought; a sentence may express a proposition, but is distinct from the proposition it may be used to express: categories, declarative sentences, exclamatory, imperative and interrogative sentences. Not all sentences are propositions, propositions express sentence. Sentence is a proposition only in condition when it bears truth values i.e. true or false. We use English sentences governed by imprecise rule to state the precise rules of proposition. In logic we use sentence as logical entity having propositional function but grammatical sentences are different from logical sentences while the former are having only two divisions namely subject and predicate and may express wishes, orders, surprise or facts and also have multiple subjects and predicates and the latter must be in a propositional form which states quantity of the subject and the quality of the proposition and multiple subjects and multiple predicate make the proposition multiple. (shrink)

Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory about the innate linguistic knowledge that child language learners bring to the task of language acquisition. This chapter examines the findings of experimental research on children's knowledge of one principle of UG, called Principle C. It presents the defining properties of Principle C. The chapter reviews empirical evidence showing that children apply Principle C to a range of disparate‐looking phenomena. It also presents empirical findings that document children's assignment of hierarchical structure to strings (...) of words. The empirical evidence supports a conclusion – that child language learners access a level of linguistic representation in addition to the constituent structure that is formed using Merge. This additional component of the language apparatus is called Logical Form. The chapter looks at a string of words where Principle C applies at the level of Logical Form. Cleft sentences are one such case. (shrink)

This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in (...) Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences. (shrink)

This book argues that a basic grasp of philosophy and logic can produce written and spoken material that is both grammatically correct and powerful. The author analyses errors in grammar, word choice, phrasing and sentences that even the finest writers can fail to notice; concentrating on subtle missteps and errors that can make the difference between good and excellent prose. Each chapter addresses how common words and long-established grammatical rules are often misused or ignored altogether – including such (...) common words as ‘interesting’, ‘possible’, and ‘apparent’. By tackling language in this way, the author provides an illuminating and practical stylistic guide that will interest students and scholars of grammar and philosophy, as well as readers looking to improve their technical writing skills. (shrink)

Båve has argued that act-type theories of propositions entail unwanted ambiguity of sentences such as ‘Donald loves Joan’. King has argued that act-type theories of propositions entail an unwanted abundance of propositions. I reply that a version of the act-type theory can avoid these objections. The key idea is that grammar constrains the acts that can be performed by the utterance of a sentence. I present enough of the details of this version of the act-type theory to show (...) how it can be used to respond to Båve's and King's objections. I conclude that this is a promising way to develop the act-type theory of propositions. (shrink)

A method is described for inducing a type-logical grammar from a sample of bare sentence trees which are annotated by lambda terms, called term-labelled trees . Any type logic from a permitted class of multimodal logics may be specified for use with the procedure, which induces the lexicon of the grammar including the grammatical categories. A first stage of semantic bootstrapping is performed, which induces a general form lexicon from the sample of term-labelled trees using Fulop’s (J Log (...) Lang Inf 14(1):49–86, 2005) procedure. Next we present a two-stage procedure for performing distributional learning by unifying the lexical types that are initially discovered. The first structural unification algorithm in essence unifies the initial family of sets of types so that the resulting grammar will generate all term-labelled trees that follow the usage patterns evident from the learning sample. Further altering the lexical categories to generate a recursively extended language can be accomplished by a second unification. The combined unification algorithm is shown to yield a new type-logical lexicon that extends the learning sample to a possibly infinite (and possibly context-sensitive) language in a principled fashion. Finally, the complete learning strategy is analyzed from the perspective of algorithmic learning theory; the range of the procedure is shown to be a class of term-labelled tree languages which is finitely learnable from good examples (Lange et al in Algorithmic learning theory, Vol 872 of lecture notes in artificial intelligence, Springer, Berlin, pp 423–437), and so is identifiable in the limit as a corollary. (shrink)

There are in fact two questions to be discussed. Is the importance of a philosophical thesis relative to language? Is the validity of a philosophical thesis relative to language? The answer to both questions is "yes." It can be shown that two well-known philosophical theses--the logical distinction between numerals and adjectives drawn by Frege, and the distinction between tasks and achievements drawn by Ryle--are true but trivial when stated in Chinese. This is the program for the first part of this (...) paper. In the second part, I will try to show that Mrs. Daitz's statement "a sentence states, but its parts cannot state" and Strawson's grammatical criterion for the subject-predicate distinction are both invalidated by Chinese grammar. (shrink)

Is there a grammar of the name ‘God’? In an obvious and trivial sense there certainly is. This term, being a part of the English language, has to obey the grammatical rules of that language. So, for example, by consulting the relevant textbooks and dictionaries we can establish that ‘God’ is a noun, so it can function as the subject or predicate of simple categorical sentences, but it cannot, for example, function as a verb or a preposition.

Interesting observations and problems emerge as the author pursues a complete calculus of an adverbial logic. Author Bartsch establishes a total of 18 adverbial subcategories and proposes an equal number of logico-semantic basic constructions in a predicate logical notation to explain them. The logico-semantic basic constructions bring out certain aspects of adverbial semantics, insofar as they can be specified by predicate logical means. However, for a logical and linguistic analysis of adverbials to be complete, sentence semantic analysis - provided it (...) is carried out in a clear-cut manner with clear paraphrasing criteria, unambiguous notation and complete interpretation rules - must be supplemented by and combined with 'word semantics' and syntax in a more elaborate way. The topic of adverbial semantics is a complicated and rewarding field, and this book contains enough suggestions, challenging hypotheses and stimulating observations, so that anybody directly concerned with the study of adverbials will want to have a look. (shrink)

Why do speakers of all languages use different grammatical structures under different communicative circumstances to express the same idea? In this comprehensive study, Professor Lambrecht explores the relationship between the structure of sentences and the linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts in which they are used. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumptions about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions (...) and formal sentence structure is governed by rules and conventions of grammar, in a component called 'information structure'. Four independent but interrelated categories are analysed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus. (shrink)

A well‐established principle of language is that there is a preference for closely related words to be close together in the sentence. This can be expressed as a preference for dependency length minimization (DLM). In this study, we explore quantitatively the degree to which natural languages reflect DLM. We extract the dependencies from natural language text and reorder the words in such a way as to minimize dependency length. Comparing the original text with these optimal linearizations (and also with random (...) linearizations) reveals the degree to which natural language minimizes dependency length. Tests on English data show that English shows a strong effect of DLM, with dependency length much closer to optimal than to random; the optimal English grammar also has many specific features in common with English. In German, too, dependency length is significantly less than random, but the effect is much weaker than in English. We conclude by speculating about some possible reasons for this difference between English and German. (shrink)

Substitution and simple sentences -- Simple sentences and semantics -- Simple sentences and implicatures -- The enlightenment problem and a common assumption -- Abandoning (EOI) -- Beyond matching propositions -- App. A : extending the account -- App. B : belief reporting.

Wittgenstein is apparently contending that it is simply linguistic habit that gives us the impression that the question “who or what…?” fits the subject expression of the sentence. The logical conclusions in this chapter show that the strong reading of the proposed thesis developed here of a purely sound‐oriented character of the grammar of a single language (in this case, English) cannot be entirely right, and might not even be what Wittgenstein intended, because he only spoke of the sound (...) as one characteristic of the concept of a sentence. The author seeks a twofold understanding of the grammatical: on the one hand it should grasp sentences as whole units (not aggregates of the “singing from the score” type); on the other hand it should help us better understand the motivation for Wittgenstein's thesis that the grammatical concept of a sentence is oriented by (among other things) sound. (shrink)

Wittgenstein distinguishes two areas of what he calls the “use” of a word. First, there is the application of a word in the construction of a sentence, which he calls the “surface grammar.” Second, there is a usage that goes beyond the merely verbal part of language games, the rules governing which he terms “depth grammar.” These latter rules constitute what the preliminary work for the Investigations still referred to as “logical form.” To spell out Wittgenstein's analogy a (...) little, he must mean that, just as we are accustomed to saying the alphabet aloud in a certain way, so too are we familiar with the forms of expression of our language, for example with the subject predicate form. One became familiar with the forms in the course of originally learning how to use them ‐ that is, in learning certain ways of forming linguistic complexes at the level of content. (shrink)

Words have meaning. Sentences also have meaning, but their meaning is different in kind from any collection of the meanings of the words they contain. I discuss two puzzles related to this difference. The first is how the meanings of the parts of a sentence combine to give rise to a unified sentential meaning, as opposed to a mere collection of disparate meanings (UP1). The second is why the formal ontology of linguistic meaning changes when grammatical structure is built (...) up (UP2). For example, the meaning of a sentence is a proposition evaluable for truth and falsity. In contrast, a collection of the meanings of its parts does not constitute a proposition and is not evaluable for truth. These two puzzles are closely related, since change in formal ontology is the clearest sign of the unity of meaning. The most popular strategy for answering them is taking the meanings of the parts as abstractions from primitive sentence meanings. However, I argue that, given plausible psychological constraints, sentence meanings cannot be taken as explanatory primitives. Drawing on recent work in Generative Grammar and its philosophy, I suggest that the key to both unity questions is to distinguish strictly between lexical and grammatical meaning. The latter is irreducible and determines how lexical content is used in referential acts. I argue that these referential properties determine a formal ontology, which explains why and how formal ontology changes when grammatical structure is built up (UP2). As for UP1, I suggest that, strictly speaking, lexical meanings never combine. Instead, whenever grammar specifies a formal ontology for the lexical meanings entering a grammatical derivation, further lexical (or phrasal) meanings can only specify aspects of this recursive grammatical process. In this way, contemporary grammatical theory can be used to address old philosophical problems. (shrink)

This chapter explores parsing and grammar in children, with an emphasis on how children resolve sentences with ambiguous scope. It focuses on an ambiguity involving the universal quantifier every in subject position along with a negated main predicate, as in the sentence “Every horse didn’t jump over the fence.” One interpretation of this sentence is the “surface-scope” interpretation, which views the expression every horse as a reference to all the horses in the set; thus, each horse in the (...) set did not jump over the fence. Another interpretation is the “inverse-scope” interpretation, whereby some horses jumped over the fence while others did not. The chapter presents evidence suggesting that children tend to prefer the surface-scope interpretation and cannot obtain the inverse-scope interpretation. In other words, children systematically use the surface position of the relevant quantificational elements to determine scope relations. The chapter also discusses negation and quantified noun phrases, along with isomorphism. Finally, it discusses the implications of these findings for language development and sentence processing. (shrink)

The emphasis in the connectionist sentence‐processing literature on distributed representation and emergence of grammar from such systems can easily obscure the often close relations between connectionist and symbolist systems. This paper argues that the Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) models proposed by Jordan (1989) and Elman (1990) are more directly related to stochastic Part‐of‐Speech (POS) Taggers than to parsers or grammars as such, while auto‐associative memory models of the kind pioneered by Longuet–Higgins, Willshaw, Pollack and others may be useful for (...) grammar induction from a network‐based conceptual structure as well as for structure‐building. These observations suggest some interesting new directions for specifically connectionist sentence processing research, including more efficient representations for finite state machines, and acquisition devices based on a distinctively connectionist basis for grounded symbolist conceptual structure. (shrink)

In just a few years, children achieve a stable state of linguistic competence, making them effectively adults with respect to: understanding novel sentences, discerning relations of paraphrase and entailment, acceptability judgments, etc. One familiar account of the language acquisition process treats it as an induction problem of the sort that arises in any domain where the knowledge achieved is logically underdetermined by experience. This view highlights the cues that are available in the input to children, as well as childrens (...) skills in extracting relevant information and forming generalizations on the basis of the data they receive. Nativists, on the other hand, contend that language-learners project beyond their experience in ways that the input does not even suggest. Instead of viewing language acqusition as a special case of theory induction, nativists posit a Universal Grammar, with innately specified linguistic principles of grammar formation. The nature versus nurture debate continues, as various poverty of stimulus arguments are challenged or supported by developments in linguistic theory and by findings from psycholinguistic investigations of child language. In light of some recent challenges to nativism, we rehearse old poverty-of stimulus arguments, and supplement them by drawing on more recent work in linguistic theory and studies of child language. (shrink)

Any semantic theory is bound to presume some structure in the messages it analyses, and the success of the theory depends on getting this structure right. But discovering this structure is the business of grammar. Therefore grammar is a necessary preliminary to semantics. Semantic theories of conditionals vividly illustrate this. All presume a provably untenable ternary structure: antecedent, operator, consequent. And all can be shown committed as a result to a thoroughly unbelievable set of connections between sentences (...) and their informational burdens. Actually, a conditional has five immediate factors, none of them an antecedent or a consequent. (shrink)

 Language is a human instinct.   All societies have complex language, and everywhere the languages use the same kinds of grammatical machinery like nouns, verbs, auxiliaries, and agreement. All normal children develop language without conscious effort or formal lessons, and by the age of three they speak in  fluent  grammatical  sentences, outperforming the most sophisticated computers. Brain damage or congenital conditions can make a person a linguistic savant while severely retarded, or unable to speak (...) normally despite high intelligence. All this has led many scientists,  beginning with the linguist Noam Chomsky in the late 1950's, to conclude that there are specialized circuits in the human brain, and perhaps specialized genes, that create the gift of articulate speech.Â. (shrink)

This book fills a long standing need for a basic introduction to Cognitive Grammar that is current, authoritative, comprehensive, and approachable. It presents a synthesis that draws together and refines the descriptive and theoretical notions developed in this framework over the course of three decades. In a unified manner, it accommodates both the conceptual and the social-interactive basis of linguistic structure, as well as the need for both functional explanation and explicit structural description. Starting with the fundamentals, essential aspects (...) of the theory are systematically laid out with concrete illustrations and careful discussion of their rationale. Among the topics surveyed are conceptual semantics, grammatical classes, grammatical constructions, the lexicon-grammar continuum characterized as assemblies of symbolic structures, and the usage-based account of productivity, restrictions, and well-formedness. The theory's central claim - that grammar is inherently meaningful - is thereby shown to be viable. The framework is further elucidated through application to nominal structure, clause structure, and complex sentences. These are examined in broad perspective, with exemplification from English and numerous other languages. In line with the theory's general principles, they are discussed not only in terms of their structural characterization, but also their conceptual value and functional motivation. Other matters explored include discourse, the temporal dimension of language structure, and what grammar reveals about cognitive processes and the construction of our mental world. (shrink)

While rules and exemplars are usually viewed as opposites, this paper argues that they form end points of the same distribution. By representing both rules and exemplars as (partial) trees, we can take into account the fluid middle ground between the two extremes. This insight is the starting point for a new theory of language learning that is based on the following idea: If a language learner does not know which phrase‐structure trees should be assigned to initial sentences, s/he (...) allows (implicitly) for all possible trees and lets linguistic experience decide which is the “best” tree for each sentence. The best tree is obtained by maximizing “structural analogy” between a sentence and previous sentences, which is formalized by the most probable shortest combination of subtrees from all trees of previous sentences. Corpus‐based experiments with this model on the Penn Treebank and the Childes database indicate that it can learn both exemplar‐based and rule‐based aspects of language, ranging from phrasal verbs to auxiliary fronting. By having learned the syntactic structures of sentences, we have also learned the grammar implicit in these structures, which can in turn be used to produce new sentences. We show that our model mimicks children’s language development from item‐based constructions to abstract constructions, and that the model can simulate some of the errors made by children in producing complex questions. (shrink)

The acquisition of syntactic categories is a crucial step in the process of acquiring syntax. At this stage, before a full grammar is available, only surface cues are available to the learner. Previous computational models have demonstrated that local contexts are informative for syntactic categorization. However, local contexts are affected by sentence-level structure. In this paper, we add sentence type as an observed feature to a model of syntactic category acquisition, based on experimental evidence showing that pre-syntactic children are (...) able to distinguish sentence type using prosody and other cues. The model, a Bayesian Hidden Markov Model, allows for adding sentence type in a few different ways; we find that sentence type can aid syntactic category acquisition if it is used to characterize the differences in word order between sentence types. In these models, knowledge of sentence type permits similar gains to those found by extending the local context. (shrink)

Sentence comprehension - the way we process and understand spoken and written language - is a central and important area of research within psycholinguistics. This book explores the contribution of computational linguistics to the field, showing how computational models of sentence processing can help scientists in their investigation of human cognitive processes. It presents the leading computational model of retrieval processes in sentence processing, the Lewis and Vasishth cue-based retrieval mode, and develops a principled methodology for parameter estimation and model (...) comparison/evaluation using benchmark data, to enable researchers to test their own models of retrieval against the present model. It also provides readers with an overview of the last 20 years of research on the topic of retrieval processes in sentence comprehension, along with source code that allows researchers to extend the model and carry out new research. Comprehensive in its scope, this book is essential reading for researchers in cognitive science. (shrink)

According to Quine, the linguist qua grammarian does not know what he is talking about. The goal of this essay is to tell him. My aim is to provide an account of what the grammarian is saying of an expression when he says it is grammatical, or a noun phrase, or ambiguous, or the subject of a certain sentence. More generally, I want to give an account of the nature of a generative grammatical theory of a language – of the (...) data for such a theory, the relation between the theory and the data, and the relation between the theory and a speaker of the language. (shrink)

Whatever one may think of Schmidt’s intuition, it is still nothing but intuition, and the variety of syntactic structures which εἶναι admits of is neither articulated nor unified. Kahn, on the other hand, by the use of Transformational Grammar, is able to a large extent to generate in a regular way from a posited notion of "kernel sentence" all the Greek sentences in which εἶναι occurs. Kahn’s original plan was "to correlate every intuitive difference of meaning in the (...) use of εἰμί with a formal description of the corresponding sentence-type", but he admits that he cannot always do so. Whether this is a failure inherent in Transformational Grammar itself, or in the version Kahn uses, can for the moment be left aside. First, an example of the success and another of the failure of the technique, as Kahn practices it, are in order. Kahn formulates the rule for the recognition of periphrasis somewhat as follows: εἶναι is used periphrastically with the participle if and only if it is impossible to obtain two kernel sentences, one of which has a finite form of εἶναι and the other a finite form of the participle, but if two kernel sentences can be so obtained, the usage is not periphrastic. This rule is both simple and elegant; it will no doubt become in time a standard part of Greek grammar. The enchantment, however, which mathematical clarity can cast is best illustrated in the case of another construction. ἔστιν ὅστις... is not uncommon. It looks like the existential operator of modern logic, and the fact that it occurs far more often with οὐκ than without seems to be, linguistically, irrelevant. Now, Kahn asserts that, though he looked hard for examples, he could only find one in which the second clause has the copula, and he offers a proof as to why this should be the case. He is mistaken. Euripides has οὐκ ἔστι θνητῶν ὅστις ἕστ’ ἐλεύθερος, and Sophocles καὶ οὐδὲν τούτων ὅ τι μὴ Ζεύς, and there are several examples in just one passage of Plato’s Charmides. The Sophoclean example is important since it illustrates a double "zeroing" of εἶναι, and whereas for traditional grammar such nominal sentences are treated as primary, with the insertion of ἐστί as a secondary development, in Kahn’s use of Transformational Grammar no distinction between the presence or the absence of the verb can be allowed. For deep structure, the verb is always present, and it might be no more than an apparent paradox that a verb, whose primitive meaning is said to designate presence, can in its absence make its presence equally felt. Can a verb which is almost always eliminable be the word for reality and truth? Or is it because "being" is the only word that cannot be just a word that it can so easily be suppressed in speech? (shrink)

Could a computer be programmed to make moral judgments about cases of intentional harm and unreasonable risk that match those judgments people already make intuitively? If the human moral sense is an unconscious computational mechanism of some sort, as many cognitive scientists have suggested, then the answer should be yes. So too if the search for reflective equilibrium is a sound enterprise, since achieving this state of affairs requires demarcating a set of considered judgments, stating them as explanandum sentences, (...) and formulating a set of algorithms from which they can be derived. The same is true for theories that emphasize the role of emotions or heuristics in moral cognition, since they ultimately depend on intuitive appraisals of the stimulus that accomplish essentially the same tasks. Drawing on deontic logic, action theory, moral philosophy, and the common law of tort, particularly Terry's five-variable calculus of risk, I outline a formal model of moral grammar and intuitive jurisprudence along the foregoing lines, which defines the abstract properties of the relevant mapping and demonstrates their descriptive adequacy with respect to a range of common moral intuitions, which experimental studies have suggested may be universal or nearly so. Framing effects, protected values, and implications for the neuroscience of moral intuition are also discussed. (shrink)

Every pregroup grammar is shown to be strongly equivalent to one which uses basic types and left and right adjoints of basic types only. Therefore, a semantical interpretation is independent of the order of the associated logic. Lexical entries are read as expressions in a two sorted predicate logic with ∈ and functional symbols. The parsing of a sentence defines a substitution that combines the expressions associated to the individual words. The resulting variable free formula is the translation of (...) the sentence. It can be computed in time proportional to the parsing structure. Non-logical axioms are associated to certain words (relative pronouns, indefinite article, comparative determiners). Sample sentences are used to derive the characterizing formula of the DRS corresponding to the translation. (shrink)

We translate sentence generation from TAG grammars with semantic and pragmatic information into a planning problem by encoding the contribution of each word declaratively and explicitly. This allows us to exploit the performance of off-the-shelf planners. It also opens up new perspectives on referring expression generation and the relationship between language and action.

Agreement attraction is a cross-linguistic phenomenon where a verb occasionally agrees not with its subject, as required by grammar, but instead with an unrelated noun (“The key to the cabinets were…”). Despite the clear violation of grammatical rules, comprehenders often rate these sentences as acceptable. Contenders for explaining agreement attraction fall into two broad classes: Morphosyntactic accounts specifically designed to explain agreement attraction, and more general sentence processing models, such as the Lewis and Vasishth model, which explain attraction (...) as a consequence of how linguistic structure is stored and accessed in content-addressable memory. In the present research, we disambiguate between these two classes by testing a surprising prediction made by the Lewis and Vasishth model but not by the morphosyntactic accounts, namely, that attraction should not be limited to morphosyntax, but that semantic features of unrelated nouns equally induce attraction. A recent study by Cunnings and Sturt provided initial evidence that this may be the case. Here, we report three single-trial experiments in English that compared semantic and agreement attraction and tested whether and how the two interact. All three experiments showed strong semantically induced attraction effects closely mirroring agreement attraction effects. We complement these results with computational simulations which confirmed that the Lewis and Vasishth model can faithfully reproduce the observed results. In sum, our findings suggest that attraction is a more general phenomenon than is commonly believed, and therefore favor more general sentence processing models, such as the Lewis and Vasishth model. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: From the Synoptic View to the Album “I don't know my way about” The Problem of Grammar Essential Complexity The Practice of Language Hyper ‐ complexity.

Although Ordinary Language Philosophy is widely believed to have disappeared leaving scarcely a trace in this era of formal semantics, it is very much the formal semantics of ordinary language that dominates the scene. More common ground than one might have supposed proves thus to be available for the unreconstructed ordinary language philosopher, in the present volume, to enter into the thick of current discussion. The prevailing tone of the work is certainly much more formal than anything one recalls from (...) the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, and in its episodic fashion the central topics—e.g., reference, opacity, identity, propositions—are standard enough, though by the end an effort has been made to reinstate synonymy, analyticity, and even verificationism. On the specific side of grammar the nominalization of sentences receives extended attention, and it is in that connection that Bede Rundle queries the postulation of propositions as metaphysical objects for the so-called propositional attitudes. The deepest, most pervasive theme of the book turns out to be that of ontological commitment. In an uncharacteristic, refreshing moment of testiness Rundle confides that serious controversy as to whether there are or are not events "just cannot get going unless our ordinary language is supplanted... by the grandiose but ill-defined jargon of ‘ontology'." The focus of the work tends to be blurred owing to a tacit assimilation of Quine to the formal semanticists of ordinary language. If the Quinean framework of ontological commitment would seem to be almost ubiquitous today, the semantic emphasis on the ontological commitments of ordinary language renders the current fashion almost as alien to Quine as to the later Wittgenstein. Rundle is thus faced with a shifting target. His excellent anti-Fregean, quasi-nominalistic discussion of number brings out some of the difficulty. Sensitive to the difference between the nonreferential and referential uses of number words in ordinary language, Rundle argues that one can only go so far with the former. Accordingly, he will allow that "by ordinary standards there quite clearly are numbers", a thesis that neither Wittgenstein nor Quine—for very different reasons—would accept. At the outset of his book Rundle writes as follows, "We could look more favorably upon the pragmatic approach if there were room for a choice, if the analysis of the meaning of, say, sentences seemingly alluding to certain abstractions, left the question of existence undecided. There are reasons for thinking that this cannot be so, and the arguments to come will, I hope, bear out the general objection in particular cases." The discussion of number fails to connect with Quine who readily concedes ordinary language to the nominalist. It is only when one consults such items as sets, which Quine takes to have scarcely any footing in ordinary language, that his pragmatism comes properly into its own. Are the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory analytic or synthetic? Are they perhaps synthetic a priori? Shall we indeed accept them as true? It can hardly be supposed that pre-Quinean approaches, whether empiricist or rationalist, have proved very fruitful here. And what guidance can linguistic analysis provide? (shrink)