Psychological Influences on Referent Choice*

This article discusses the psychological influences on referent selection. The nature of contemporary work environments, ones characterized by instability and uncertainty, may create increased needs on the part of individuals for comparative information. Individuals use social comparisons for managing both uncertainty and environmental change, and for making critical decisions about one\u27s job. Most literature on referent selection can be categorized along two basic schema: identification of the types of referents that exist and examination of the outcomes that result from referent selection. Studies have identified a multitude of potential referents, primarily drawn from the outcomes being examined, including pay referents, referents linked with one\u27s occupation, education, age and job, and referents derived from an employee\u27s social network

Annotating honorifics denoting social ranking of referents

This paper proposes an annotating scheme that encodes honorifics (respectful words). Honorifics are used extensively in Japanese, reflecting the social relationship (e.g. social ranks and age) of the referents. This referential information is vital for resolving zero pronouns and improving machine translation outputs. Annotating honorifics is a complex task that involves identifying a predicate with honorifics, assigning ranks to referents of the predicate, calibrating the ranks, and connecting referents with their predicates

Annotating honorifics denoting social ranking of referents

This paper proposes an annotating scheme that encodes honorifics (respectful words). Honorifics are used extensively in Japanese, reflecting the social relationship (e.g. social ranks and age) of the referents. This referential information is vital for resolving zero pronouns and improving machine translation outputs. Annotating honorifics is a complex task that involves identifying a predicate with honorifics, assigning ranks to referents of the predicate, calibrating the ranks, and connecting referents with their predicates

Measuring the Selection of Pay Referents: A Methodological Analysis of the Questions on Pay Referents in the 2008 and 2009 SOEP Pretest Modules

Income comparisons are among the key mechanisms used to explain satisfaction and happiness, among other outcomes. Yet progress on the questions of who people use as social referents and whether differential selection patterns exist can only be made based on valid and reliable measures of pay referents included in large-scale population surveys. The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) is pursuing this task through two questions on pay referents introduced in the 2008 and 2009 pretest modules of the SOEP. This paper analyses the quality of the two questions on pay referents in the 2008 module and discusses potential for improvement through modifications of the questions in the 2009 module. The paper concludes that the difficulties in answering questions on pay referents were not completely overcome in the 2009 pretest. To provide more solid evidence on potential biases in response behavior, the paper suggests the inclusion of reliable instruments for measuring personal dispositions.income comparisons, relative income, reference groups, SOEP

Time Referents in the Regiment of Princes

Humanitie

Epistemic NP Modifiers

The paper considers participles such as "unknown", "identified" and "unspecified", which in sentences such as "Solange is staying in an unknown hotel" have readings equivalent to an indirect question "Solange is staying in a hotel, and it is not known which hotel it is." We discuss phenomena including disambiguation of quantifier scope and a restriction on the set of determiners which allow the reading in question. Epistemic modifiers are analyzed in a DRT framework with file (information state) discourse referents. The proposed semantics uses a predication on files and discourse referents which is related to recent developments in dynamic modal predicate calculus. It is argued that a compositional DRT semantics must employ a semantic type of discourse referents, as opposed to just a type of individuals. A connection is developed between the scope effects of epistemic modifiers and the scope-disambiguating effect of "a certain".Comment: Final pre-publication version, 27 pages, Postscript. Final version appears in the proceedings of SALT VI

Young children's referent selection is guided by novelty for both words and actions

Young children are biased to select novel, name-unknown objects as referents of novel labels (e.g., Markman, 1990) and similarly favour novel, action-unknown objects as referents of novel actions (Riggs, Mather, Hyde & Simpson, 2015). What process underlies these common behaviors? In the case of word learning, children may be driven by a novelty bias favouring novel objects as referents (Horst, Samuelson, Kucker & McMurray, 2011). Our study investigates this bias further by investigating whether novelty also affects children’s selection of novel objects when a new action is given. In a pre-exposure session, 40, three- and four-year-olds were shown eight novel objects for one minute. In subsequent referent selection trials children were shown two pre-exposed and one super-novel object and heard either a novel name or saw a novel action. The super-novel object was selected significantly more that the pre-exposed objects on both word and action trials. Our data add to the growing literature suggesting that an endogenous attentional bias to novelty plays a role in children’s referent selection and demonstrates further parallels between word and action learning