5,115 research outputs found

    Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective

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    The electrophysiology of language comprehension has long been dominated by research on syntactic and semantic integration. However, to understand expressions like "he did it" or "the little girl", combining word meanings in accordance with semantic and syntactic constraints is not enough--readers and listeners also need to work out what or who is being referred to. We review our event-related brain potential research on the processes involved in establishing reference, and present a new experiment in which we examine when and how the implicit causality associated with specific interpersonal verbs affects the interpretation of a referentially ambiguous pronoun. The evidence suggests that upon encountering a singular noun or pronoun, readers and listeners immediately inspect their situation model for a suitable discourse entity, such that they can discriminate between having too many, too few, or exactly the right number of referents within at most half a second. Furthermore, our implicit causality findings indicate that a fragment like "David praised Linda because..." can immediately foreground a particular referent, to the extent that a subsequent "he" is at least initially construed as a syntactic error. In all, our brain potential findings suggest that referential processing is highly incremental, and not necessarily contingent upon the syntax. In addition, they demonstrate that we can use ERPs to relatively selectively keep track of how readers and listeners establish reference

    Pronominalization and expectations for re-mention:Modeling coreference in contexts with three referents

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    The relationship between pronoun production and pronoun interpretation has been proposed to follow Bayesian principles, combining a comprehender’s expectation about which referent will be mentioned next and their estimate of how likely it is that a potential referent will be re-mentioned using a pronoun. The Bayesian Model has received support from studies in several languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Catalan, German), but tested contexts have been limited to two event participants, whereas natural language discourse often involves contexts with more than two event participants. In this study, we conducted three story continuation experiments to assess how the Bayesian Model performs in more complex contexts. Our results show that even in contexts with three event participants, comprehenders can behave rationally when interpreting pronouns, but that they appear to require sufficient context to build up a coherent representation of the situation to do so. In addition to testing the basic claim of the Bayesian Model (Weak Bayes), we test the central prediction of the Strong form of the hypothesis: that the two components of the model (next-mention expectations and choice of referring expression) are influenced by dissociated sets of factors. In a model comparison, Experiments 2 and 3 confirm the closest fit from the Bayesian Model, which supports Weak Bayes, and none of our experiments find evidence that the predictability of a referent affects pronominalization rates, which corroborates Strong Bayes. Finally, we test whether the rate of pronominalization is sensitive to factors related to ambiguity and argument/adjunct status of referents; we find that participants vary their production of pronouns most strongly based on the grammatical role of the antecedent (subject or not), with a smaller effect from the presence/absence of a gender-matched competitor and no effect from the syntactic position of this competing referent

    Attempto Controlled English (ACE)

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    Attempto Controlled English (ACE) allows domain specialists to interactively formulate requirements specifications in domain concepts. ACE can be accurately and efficiently processed by a computer, but is expressive enough to allow natural usage. The Attempto system translates specification texts in ACE into discourse representation structures and optionally into Prolog. Translated specification texts are incrementally added to a knowledge base. This knowledge base can be queried in ACE for verification, and it can be executed for simulation, prototyping and validation of the specification.Comment: 13 pages, compressed, uuencoded Postscript, to be presented at CLAW 96, The First International Workshop on Controlled Language Applications, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 26-27 March 199

    Heavy Hero or Digital Dummy? Multimodal Player–Avatar Relations in Final Fantasy 7

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    This article analyses the player-avatar relation in Final Fantasy 7, drawing on multimodality theory to analyse textual structures both in the game and in the discourse of player-interviews and fan writing. It argues that the avatar is a two-part structure, partly designed in conventional narrative terms as a protagonist of popular narrative, and partly as a vehicle for interactive game-play. The former structure is replete with the traditions and designs of Japanese popular narrative, oral formulaic narrative and contemporary superhero narratives; and is presented to the player as an offer act – a declarative narrative statement. The latter is a construct of evolving attributes and economies characteristic of roleplaying games; and is presented to the player as a demand act – a rule-based command. Though these two functions separate out in the grammar of player and fan discourse, it is their integration which provides the pleasure of gameplay and narrative engagement

    The causes and consequences explicit in verbs

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    Interpretation of a pronoun in one clause can be systematically affected by the verb in the previous clause. Compare Archibald angered Bartholomew because he … (he = Archibald) with Archibald criticised Bartholomew because he … (he = Bartholomew). While it is clear that meaning plays a critical role, it is unclear whether that meaning is directly encoded in the verb or, alternatively, inferred from world knowledge. We report evidence favouring the former account. We elicited pronoun biases for 502 verbs from seven Levin verb classes in two discourse contexts (implicit causality and implicit consequentiality), showing that in both contexts, verb class reliably predicts pronoun bias. These results confirm and extend recent findings about implicit causality and represent the first such study for implicit consequentiality. We discuss these findings in the context of recent work in semantics, and also develop a new, probabilistic generative account of pronoun interpretation.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Grant 5F32HD072748)National Science Foundation (U.S.). Graduate Research Fellowshi

    The Effect of Thematic Roles on Pronoun Use and Frequency of Reference Continuation

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    Goal and source thematic roles have been shown to influence pronoun resolution, an effect that has been linked to the reader’s tendency to focus on the consequences of the event (Stevenson, Crawley, & Kleinman, 1994). Using a story continuation ex-periment, I show that speakers also tend to use pronouns more often for goal entities than source entities. Furthermore, the experiment and a corpus analysis reveal that speakers tend to refer more frequently to goal entities than source entities overall. I use the parallel findings about pronoun use and frequency of reference continuation to argue that referent accessibility is influenced by the comprehender’s estimate of the likelihood that a referent will be continued in the discourse. Pronoun comprehension has been argued to be influenced by the accessibility of potential referents in the discourse representation, which is driven by a number of factors (see Arnold, 1998, for a review). One such factor that has received atten-tion is the thematic roles of discourse referents (e.g., Garnham, Traxler, Oakhill

    Implicit Causality Biases Influence Relative Clause Attachment

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    •  Do comprehenders bring expectations from the discourse level to bear on the resolution of syntactic ambiguity? •  Do these expectations impact online processing? Problem: As comprehenders combine words to form a sentence, they must also combine clauses and sentences to form a coherent discourse. Is the resolution of local syntactic ambiguity sensitive to the process of inferring a coherent discourse? Proposal: Bring together 3 observations about the pragmatic functions of relative clauses (RCs) and the biases associated with implicit causality (IC) verbs, and test whether these types of factors influence the resolution of local structural ambiguity in relative clause attachment: (i) John detests/babysits the children of the musician who… Results: An off-line sentence-completion study and an on-line self-paced reading study examined comprehenders ' expectations for high/low RC attachments following IC and non-IC verbs. In both studies, IC verbs shifted readers ' attachment preferences from low to high. In the completion study, most high-attaching RCs following IC verbs encoded explanations of the matrix-clause event. These results suggest that comprehenders use pragmatic cues mid-sentence t

    SEMANTIC ANALYSIS ON THE TRANSLATION OF SURAH AL-FATH (TAKEN FROM T.B IRVING’S ENGLISH TRANSLATION)

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    ABSTRACT In the process of communication with other person, there will be many possibilities of misunderstanding and misinterpreting of the meaning from the language we use. So that, understanding meaning is very crucial. In linguistics, we can explore our knowledge about meaning by studying semantics. This study is focused on analyzing the English translation of surah Al-Fath by T.B. Irving by using semantic theory. This study is conducted using descriptive qualitative method because the data are in the forms of sentences or words of surah Al-Fath. The result of this study shows three kinds of meaning involved in this surah namely lexical, sentential and discoursal meaning. KEYWORDS: semantics, lexical, sentential and discoursal meaning, surah al-Fat

    Revisiting the Meaning of Leadership

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    During the past fifty years, organizational scholarship on leadership has shifted from a focus on the significance of leadership for meaning-making to the significance of leadership for economic performance. This shift has been problematic for two reasons. First, it has given rise to numerous conceptual difficulties that now plague the study of leadership. Second, there is now comparatively little attention to the question of how individuals find meaning in the economic sphere even though this question should arguably be one of the most important questions for organizational scholarship. This chapter discusses several reasons for the shift, arguing that one of the most important has been the lack of a clear definition and operationalization of meaningful economic activity. As a first step to redressing this shift, we offer a definition and operationalization of meaningful action, and we propose a typology of executive behaviors as a foundation for a systematic exploration of the meaning-making capacity of leaders. We conclude with a discussion of the relationship between the capacity of leaders to infuse meaning and the capacity of leaders to impact on performance
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