Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

What normative terms mean and why it matters for ethical theory

This paper investigates how inquiry into normative language can improve substantive normative theorizing. First I examine two dimensions along which normative language differs: “strength” and “subjectivity.” Next I show how greater sensitivity to these features of the meaning and use of normative language can illuminate debates about three issues in ethics: the coherence of moral dilemmas, the possibility of supererogatory acts, and the connection between making a normative judgment and being motivated to act accordingly. The paper concludes with several brief reflections on the theoretical utility of the distinction—at least so-called—between “normative” and “non-normative” language and judgment. Clarifying the language we use in normative conversation and theorizing can help us diagnose problems with bad arguments and formulate better motivated questions. This can lead to clearer answers and bring into relief new theoretical possibilities and avenues to explore

Iconicity in English and Spanish and its relation to lexical category and age of acquisition

Signed languages exhibit iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) across their vocabulary, and many non-Indo-European spoken languages feature sizable classes of iconic words known as ideophones. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English and Spanish are believed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments with English and two with Spanish, we asked native speakers to rate the iconicity of ~600 words from the English and Spanish MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories. We found that iconicity in the words of both languages varied in a theoretically meaningful way with lexical category. In both languages, adjectives were rated as more iconic than nouns and function words, and corresponding to typological differences between English and Spanish in verb semantics, English verbs were rated as relatively iconic compared to Spanish verbs. We also found that both languages exhibited a negative relationship between iconicity ratings and age of acquisition. Words learned earlier tended to be more iconic, suggesting that iconicity in early vocabulary may aid word learning. Altogether these findings show that iconicity is a graded quality that pervades vocabularies of even the most “arbitrary” spoken languages. The findings provide compelling evidence that iconicity is an important property of all languages, signed and spoken, including Indo-European languages

Husserl, Language and the Ontology of the Act

The ontology of language is concerned with the relations between uses of language, both overt and covert, and other entities, whether in the world or in the mind of the thinking subject. We attempt a first survey of the sorts of relations which might come into question for such an ontology, including: relations between referring uses of expressions and their objects, relations between the use of a (true) sentence and that in the world which makes it true, relations between mental acts on the one hand and underlying mental states (attitudes, beliefs), on the other, relations between my acts and states, associated uses of language and overt actions on my part and on the part of those other subjects with whom I communicate

Acquiring and Harnessing Verb Knowledge for Multilingual Natural Language Processing

Advances in representation learning have enabled natural language processing models to derive non-negligible linguistic information directly from text corpora in an unsupervised fashion. However, this signal is underused in downstream tasks, where they tend to fall back on superficial cues and heuristics to solve the problem at hand. Further progress relies on identifying and filling the gaps in linguistic knowledge captured in their parameters. The objective of this thesis is to address these challenges focusing on the issues of resource scarcity, interpretability, and lexical knowledge injection, with an emphasis on the category of verbs. To this end, I propose a novel paradigm for efficient acquisition of lexical knowledge leveraging native speakers’ intuitions about verb meaning to support development and downstream performance of NLP models across languages. First, I investigate the potential of acquiring semantic verb classes from non-experts through manual clustering. This subsequently informs the development of a two-phase semantic dataset creation methodology, which combines semantic clustering with fine-grained semantic similarity judgments collected through spatial arrangements of lexical stimuli. The method is tested on English and then applied to a typologically diverse sample of languages to produce the first large-scale multilingual verb dataset of this kind. I demonstrate its utility as a diagnostic tool by carrying out a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art NLP models, probing representation quality across languages and domains of verb meaning, and shedding light on their deficiencies. Subsequently, I directly address these shortcomings by injecting lexical knowledge into large pretrained language models. I demonstrate that external manually curated information about verbs’ lexical properties can support data-driven models in tasks where accurate verb processing is key. Moreover, I examine the potential of extending these benefits from resource-rich to resource-poor languages through translation-based transfer. The results emphasise the usefulness of human-generated lexical knowledge in supporting NLP models and suggest that time-efficient construction of lexicons similar to those developed in this work, especially in under-resourced languages, can play an important role in boosting their linguistic capacity.ESRC Doctoral Fellowship [ES/J500033/1], ERC Consolidator Grant LEXICAL [648909

Strict vs. flexible accomplishment predicates

textThe central issue of this study is how predicates in English and ASL represent the completeness of events. The standard view is that predicates which are composed of dynamic verbs with quantized arguments denote the reaching of a natural endpoint (Vendler (1957), Dowty (1979), Smith (1991), Verkuyl (1993), Krifka (1998)). A consequence of this view is that sentences with dynamic verbs and quantized arguments are false when they refer to non-completed events. For example, if John ate only half of a sandwich, the sentence John ate a sandwich is false as it applies to this event. Some researchers have questioned whether this standard view matches native speaker intuitions (Lin (2004), Smollett (2005)). It is my hypothesis that the lexical aspectual category of accomplishments (those which have an obligatory preparatory phase and a natural endpoint) can be subdivided into strict accomplishments, those that require event completion (endpoint inclusion) in their truth conditions and flexible accomplishments, those which do not. This study addresses the following questions. (1) Do dynamic verb/quantized argument predicates entail endpoint inclusion? (2) Is there an inference, as opposed to an entailment, of endpoint-inclusion in English and ASL? If so what is the nature of this inference? (3) Is there a conceptual property that underlies the membership of predicates in the hypothesized class of flexible accomplishments? Three experiments were conducted in the course of this study to address these questions. The data gathered were analyzed in the light of the standard aspectuality literature. The following conclusions were reached: (1) The endpoint-inclusion inference in English is a conversational implicature, not an entailment. (2) Events which consist of iterated “minimal events” (Rothstein, 2004) are flexible accomplishments; however, not all flexible accomplishments consist of iterated minimal events. (4) ASL dynamic verb/quantized argument predicates lack the endpoint-inclusion inference due to their explicit iconic reference to minimal events. (5) The endpoint-inclusion inference of flexible accomplishments in English is due to a basic inference that the action of the verb in dynamic verb/quantized argument predicates covers/affects the whole extent of an object/path/scale, but specific world knowledge in the form of stereotypicality features outranks this inference.Linguistic

Can structural priming answer the important questions about language? A commentary on Branigan and Pickering "An experimental approach to linguistic representation"

While structural priming makes a valuable contribution to psycholinguistics, it does not allow direct observation of representation, nor escape “source ambiguity.” Structural priming taps into implicit memory representations and processes that may differ from what is used online. We question whether implicit memory for language can and should be equated with linguistic representation or with language processing

Grounding the Linking Competence in Culture and Nature. How Action and Perception Shape the Syntax-Semantics Relationship

Part I of the book presents my basic assumptions about the syntax-semantics relationship as a competence of language users and compares them with those of the two paradigms that presently account for most theoretical linguistic projects, studies, and publications. I refer to them as Chomskyan Linguistics and Cognitive-Functional Linguistics. I will show that these approaches do not provide the means to accommodate the sociocultural origins of the “linking” competence, creating the need for an alternative approach. While considering these two approaches (sections 2.1 and 2.3), an alternative proposal will be sketched in section 2.2, using the notion of “research programme”. Thus, part I deals mainly with questions of the philosophy of science. Nevertheless, the model underlying the research programme gives structure to the procedure followed throughout the rest of the book, since it identifies the undertaking as multidisciplinary, following from the central roles of perception and action/attribution. This means that approaching the competence of relating form to content as characterized above requires looking into these sub-competences first, since the former draws upon the latter. Part I concludes with the formulation of an action-theoretic vocabulary and taxonomy (section 2.4). This vocabulary serves as the guideline for how to talk about the subject-matter of each of these disciplines. Part II and chapter 3 then deal with the sub-competences that have been identified as underlying linguistic competence. They concern the use of perception, identification/categorization, conceptualization, action, attribution, and the use of linguistic symbols. Section 3.1 in part II deals with perception. In particular, two crucial properties of perception will be discussed: that it consists of a bottom-up part and a top-down part, and that the output of perception is underspecified in the sense that what we perceive is not informative with respect to actional, i.e., socially relevant matters. The sections on perception to some degree anticipate the characterization of conceptualization in section 3.2 because the latter will be reconstructed as simulated perception. The property of underspecification is thus sustained in conceptualization, too. If utterances encode concepts and concepts are underspecified with respect to those matters that are most important for everyday interaction, one wonders how verbal interaction can (actually) be successful. Here is where action competence and attribution come into play (the non-conceptual contents referred to above). I will show that native speakers act and cognize according to particular socio-cognitive parameters, on the basis of which they make socially relevant attributions. These in turn specify what was underspecified about concepts beforehand. In other words, actional knowledge including attribution must complement concepts in order to count as the semantics underlying linguistic utterances. Sections 3.3 and 3.4 develop a descriptive means for semantic contents. I present the inherent structural organization of concepts and demonstrate how the spatial and temporal aspects of conceptualization can be systematically related to the syntactic structures underlying utterances. In particular, I will argue that conceptualization is organized by means of trajector-landmark configurations which can quite regularly be related to parts of speech in syntactic constructions using the notion of diagrammatic iconicity. Given a diagrammatic mapping and conceptualization as simulated perception the utterance thus becomes something like an instruction to simulate a perception. In part III, section 4.1 deals with the question of what the formal constituents of utterances/constructions contribute to the building of a concept from an utterance. In this context a theory of the German dative is presented, based on the theoretical notions developed throughout this work. Section 4.2 sketches the non-formal properties that reduce the remaining underspecification. In this context one of the most fundamental cognitive properties of language users is uncovered, namely their need to find the cause of any event they are cognizing about. I will then outline the consequences of this property for language production and comprehension. Section 4.3 lists the most important linking schemas for German on the basis of the most important constructions, i.e., motivated conceptualization-syntactic construction mappings, and then describes in a step-by-step manner how – from the utterance-as-instruction-for-conceptualization perspective – such an instruction is obeyed, and how such an instruction is built up from the perception of an event, respectively. The last section, 4.4, is dedicated to a discussion of some of the most famous and most puzzling linguistic phenomena which theoretical linguists traditionally deal with. In discussing the formal aspects of the linguistic competence, examples from German are used

Can humain association norm evaluate latent semantic analysis?

This paper presents the comparison of word association norm created by a psycholinguistic experiment to association lists generated by algorithms operating on text corpora. We compare lists generated by Church and Hanks algorithm and lists generated by LSA algorithm. An argument is presented on how those automatically generated lists reflect real semantic relations