From motion perception to Bob Dylan.: A Cognitivist attentional semantics of directionals

Directionals like from New York, through the tunnel, into the dark represent a major class of spatial expressions, typically associated with locomotion (verbs). Semantically, many of their aspects are notoriously difficult to characterize, among them their characteristics (classification, typology), their relation to locatives (e. g. in New York, in the tunnel, in the dark), and their composition with verbs (especially in non-locomotion contexts). Cognitively, there is a big theoretical gap to fill between aspects of low-level motion perception and the conception of static situations in terms of non-actual (loco)motion. This paper first critically discusses Zwarts’ explicit formal account of directionals, then introduces a Cognitivist attentional semantics and finally applies the Cognitivist approach to directionals. It will be shown that attention-based conceptual representations are necessary components in directional semantics and explanatory for the mentioned aspects.Directionals like from New York, through the tunnel, into the dark represent a major class of spatial expressions, typically associated with locomotion (verbs). Semantically, many of their aspects are notoriously difficult to characterize, among them their characteristics (classification, typology), their relation to locatives (e. g. in New York, in the tunnel, in the dark), and their composition with verbs (especially in non-locomotion contexts). Cognitively, there is a big theoretical gap to fill between aspects of low-level motion perception and the conception of static situations in terms of non-actual (loco)motion. This paper first critically discusses Zwarts’ explicit formal account of directionals, then introduces a Cognitivist attentional semantics and finally applies the Cognitivist approach to directionals. It will be shown that attention-based conceptual representations are necessary components in directional semantics and explanatory for the mentioned aspects

Quantification: the view from natural language generation

Finanziert aus dem Open-Access-Publikationsfonds der Universität Siegen für ZeitschriftenartikelQuantification is one of the central topics in language and computation, and the interplay ofcollectivity, distributivity, cumulativity, and plurality is at the heart of the semantics ofquantification expressions. However, its aspects are usually discussed piecemeal,distributed, and only from an interpretative perspective with selected linguistic examples,often blurring the overall picture. In this article, quantification phenomena are investigatedfrom the perspective of natural language generation. Starting with a small-scale, but realisticscenario, the necessary steps toward generating quantifier expressions for a perceivedsituation are explained. Together with the automatically generated descriptions of thescenario, the observations made are shown to present new insights into the interplay,and the semantics of quantification expressions and plurals, in general. The results highlightthe importance of taking different points of view in thefield of language and computation