English speakers (in)ability to explicitly recognize agent and patient categories

Adults represent events in terms of abstract participant roles (e.g., when Edith eats chocolate, Edith is an agent and thechocolate is a patient) (Rissman & Majid, 2019). English, however, lacks commonly-known labels for these roles, whichmay make the distinction less accessible to people. We presented 42 English-speakers with 24 pictures of an agent actingon a patient (e.g., one person kicking another). A red dot marked the agent in half the pictures and marked the patientin the other half. We asked participants to sort the pictures into two piles using whatever criteria they liked. After threeopportunities to sort the pictures, only 55% of participants sorted into agent/patient piles. When the remaining 45% weregiven the agent/patient piles, only half were able to explain the basis for the sort. This suggests a disconnect betweenthe robustness of agent/patient categories in implicit processing and the availability of this seemingly basic distinction toexplicit reasoning

Instrumental with, locatum with and the argument/adjunct distinction

The objects of the proposition 'with', as in 'I cut the bread with a knife' and 'I covered the ground with a blanket', have received conflicting analyses as to whether they are arguments or adjuncts of the verb. Utilizing a variety of semantic and syntactic diagnostics of argumenthood, I argue that the first kind of participant, an instrument, is an adjunct/modifier and the second kind of participant, what I call a locatum, is an argument/complement of the verbal head

Instrumental with and use: modality and implicature

I present an analysis of the instrumental elements with and use, as in Betty cut the cake with a knife. A variety of evidence indicates that with and use do not make the same semantic contribution, casting doubt on the theory that these elements introduce the thematic role Instrument. For use, I adopt the analysis in Rissman (to appear): use expresses modal, goal-related content. For with, a modal reading may be implicated but is not entailed, explaining a variety of contrasts between with and use. The implications of this analysis for a theory of thematic roles is discussed

Thematic roles : Core knowledge or linguistic construct?

The status of thematic roles such as Agent and Patient in cognitive science is highly controversial: To some they are universal components of core knowledge, to others they are scholarly fictions without psychological reality. We address this debate by posing two critical questions: to what extent do humans represent events in terms of abstract role categories, and to what extent are these categories shaped by universal cognitive biases? We review a range of literature that contributes answers to these questions: psycholinguistic and event cognition experiments with adults, children, and infants; typological studies grounded in cross-linguistic data; and studies of emerging sign languages. We pose these questions for a variety of roles and find that the answers depend on the role. For Agents and Patients, there is strong evidence for abstract role categories and a universal bias to distinguish the two roles. For Goals and Recipients, we find clear evidence for abstraction but mixed evidence as to whether there is a bias to encode Goals and Recipients as part of one or two distinct categories. Finally, we discuss the Instrumental role and do not find clear evidence for either abstraction or universal biases to structure instrumental categories

Mapping hand to world; Development of iconic representation in gesture andhomesign

In both gesture and sign, objects and events can be represented by reproducing some of their features iconically.Iconic gestures do not typically appear until well into children’s second year of life, suggesting that the cognitive and/or com-municative resources required are not trivial. Here we investigate how manual iconicity develops in two different communica-tive systems. Using longitudinal video corpora, we compare the emergence of manual iconicity in 52 hearing children learninga spoken language (co-speech gesture) to a deaf child creating a manual communication system (homesign). We focus on theshape of the hand, asking how handshape use changes between age 1 and 5, and how handshape choice relates to semanticcontent. We find broadly similar patterns of handshape development in co-speech gesture and homesign. This suggests that thecognitive building blocks underlying children’s ability to iconically map forms to meanings are shared across vastly differentcommunicative systems

Superordinates - linguistic conventions

Stimuli, data files, figures, model syntax, and supplementary materials associated with: Rissman, L., Liu, Q., & Lupyan, G. (in press). Gaps in the lexicon restrict communication. Open Mind

Instrumental with and use: modality and implicature

I present an analysis of the instrumental elements with and use, as in Betty cut the cake with a knife. A variety of evidence indicates that with and use do not make the same semantic contribution, casting doubt on the theory that these elements introduce the thematic role Instrument. For use, I adopt the analysis in Rissman (to appear): use expresses modal, goal-related content. For with, a modal reading may be implicated but is not entailed, explaining a variety of contrasts between with and use. The implications of this analysis for a theory of thematic roles is discussed

Measuring Meaning: Alignment and Misalignment Across Indices of Verb Semantics

Developing accurate models of word meaning requires good empirical evidence about what words mean. I investigate how English verbs encode relationships between event participants, focusing on how verbs encode instruments (e.g., does slice specify that a tool must be used for slicing?). I compared two commonly used indices of verb meaning: linguistic judgments and sentence completions. Although these two indices were moderately correlated for a small sample of verbs, they were only weakly correlated when a larger sample of verbs was tested. These results indicate that the particular context of a task can strongly influence how meaning affects behavior. Dominant models of verb meaning fail to fully account for the results (either a logical entailment model or a cue-based model)