Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
Decisions, Dynamics, and the Japanese Particle yo – Christopher Davis (2009)
Uses dynamic semantics to describe the behavior Japanese sentence final particle yo used with assertions, imperatives and questions. Argues that yo adds a presupposition that the post update context is one in which the addressee’s decision problem is solved. A separate tone morpheme which can be either falling or rising determines if the update contributed by the sentence content is meant to be monotonic or non-monotonic. Accounts for the use of falling town when the imperative is contrary to the addressee’s public intentions or if the assertion is contrary to the addressee’s public beliefs. Overall an interesting account that ties together dynamic semantics with contextual decision problems. The solution to questions leaves much to be desired. The questions are not normal in that they are either rhetorical or non-‘ka’ marked. They also do not have the same pattern of intonation as the assertions and the imperatives. More motivation is needed for the semantics given for falling and rising tone.
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Running Down Clock – Ramscar, Matlock & Dye (200?)
Series of experiments show influence of fictive motion on conceptions of time. Tries to link fictive, figurative and literal word use to joint underlying conception. Use of words in different ways causes the use of same background information and cognitive processes. DOES NOT explain why the words would be used in these ways in the first place. Studies could have used better control conditions and its not clear why co-occurrence frequency was used instead of Mutual Information. Results are striking none the less.
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Beyond the Sentence Given Hagoort & van Berkum (2007)
Argue against the two stage model of sentence comprehension where first literal semantic meaning is computed and then this information is interpreted with world knowledge, prior discourse and speaker information in favor of immediate unification of all information sources. Uses ERP and fMRI studies to show similar behavior for semantic, world knowledge, and discourse coherence violations. Primary evidence is increased activity in LIFG and Brodmann’s area 45 and increased and identical amplitude for N400 waves in anomalous cases. Strong argument for a unification based theory of interpretation where many types of information from different cognitive sources are available to comprehension and interpretation process.