What Makes an Agent an Agent? Comparing the Semantic Properties of Instruments and Prototypical Agents in Subject Position

The article deals with the processes of formation of implicatures, or inferential knowledge, characteristic of a poetic text, based on phonosemantic connections that underlie paronymic attraction, pun and anagram. The study is based on the material of Russian poetry of the 20th century using the methods of linguistic and cognitive poetics, corpus, intertextual and cultural analysis. The author proceeds from the fact that phonosemantic correlations provide the addressee with a transition from direct perception of poetic reality, represented by the sound matter of linguistic signs, to its comprehension at the surface and deep levels. First, text fragments marked with paronymic attraction are singled out, then the correlations of attractants are subjected to semantic analysis, on the basis of which implicatures are derived that link “general” and “new” world knowledge and language competence. Implicatures are classified in the article according to their function in interpreting the text. The author identifies the implications of actualization (focusing attention on an object or situation and their attributes), semantic inference and indication of the subtext. Particular attention is paid to the implicit paronymic attraction that activates the “sound memory” of the word. The author comes to the conclusion that communicative (logically derived) implicatures in a poetic text are based on conventional ones (conditioned by “world knowledge” and language conventions) and are predetermined by the author of the text – by the created by him semantic, grammatical and pragmatic rules of utterance structuring. Paronymic attraction, highlighting objects in the relevant denotative space of the poetic text, is perceived as an individual nomination of the same “non-standard” denotation with the help of several formally correlated words of the standard language, thereby giving the key to the search for “new” in relation to “immediately given” and “given in context”.

Mandarin ordinal phrases demonstrate an ambiguity between a definite reading and an indefinite quantity reading, first observed by Tsai (2011). However, contra Tsai (2011)’s lexical-ambiguity view, this paper presents a compositionally unified semantic analysis of the ambiguity of Mandarin ordinal phrases. Specifically, the ambiguity of Mandarin ordinals under discussion is derived from the semantic application of type-shifting rules and the pragmatic restriction on the domain of the ordinal morpheme di (which is reminiscent of the in-situ approach to the ambiguity of superlatives), coupled with the semantic requirements of di; therefore, a unified semantics of the ordinal morpheme di is maintained under either reading. Furthermore, this paper suggests two important felicity conditions in general on the use of an ordinal phrase in discourse. Besides theoretical contributions, this paper also presents empirical discoveries showing that some generalizations in Tsai (2011) are not entirely correct. For instance, it is false that all ordinal phrases in Mandarin Chinese must denote a singular entity (contra Tsai 2011). Instead, the semantics of classifiers matters for the denotation of an ordinal phrase: a Mandarin ordinal phrase can denote a plural entity when a group classifier is used. Furthermore, the presence of measure classifiers or certain predicates such as sheng ‘give birth’ is not a reliable diagnostic for teasing apart the two readings; the role of contexts and world knowledge in determining the (un)availability of a given reading is identified and discussed. Finally, this paper illustrates how the proposed analysis explains three puzzling properties of Mandarin ordinal phrases: (a) why the indefinite quantity reading is missing in the subject position; (b) why the indefinite quantity reading is missing when the experiential aspect marker guo occurs; and (c) why an ordinal phrase with canonical sortal classifiers has to denote a singular entity.

The physiology of cognitive activity of the human body is considered: reflexes, instincts, brain afferentations. The afferent fields are laid in human ontogenesis, and their development goes along the path of narrowing the circle of afferentations, the allocation of the “leading” and the location of the others in the reserve fund. The vertex of the cognitive knowledge of the material world is conceptual principles and fundamental natural generalizings, which are polycerent functional brain systems. Cognitive subject activity has in its composition two components — the natural and the social, forming the inextricable unity of natural and social starts of the living mental process of self-regulation in all forms of the activity of the subject. At the highest stages of personality development, the mental still does not cease to be natural and does not become “purely” social. Proportion of natural and social, ensuring the fundamental role of the subject in their mental development, the child's brain receives in the womb. External impacts and influences are valid only indirectly through the internal conditions of the subject in accordance with the cognitive principle of determinism — “external (inter) only through the internal (intra)”. The most important property of a person is self-consciousness of itself in the system of other people and events of society, their activity and their development and self-development. There are two aspects of the manifestation of subjectivity in education: the formation of the subject and personal position of the individual in the development of the sociocultural world and determine its place in it. The subject position of the individual to the environment and people and the subject of the activities of the teachings and mastering (engineering) profession (general scientific and professional education engineer).

Article 5.Understanding the Lexicon. Meaning, Sense, and World Knowledge in Lexical Semantics was published on January 1, 1988 in the journal English and American Studies in German (volume 1988, issue 1).

This study is about the thematic structure of Mandarin verb neologism. It focuses on grasping the recent tendency of Mandarin verb neologisms by analyzing the theta role.<BR> The number of total data is 118, which were newly included in Modern Chinese Dictionary(7th edition). Mandarin verb neologisms have the highest percentages of ‘agent’ in the ‘monovalent verbs’ by classification based on semantic property. The second is ‘theme’, and the next is ‘sentient’. ‘Bivalent verbs’ has a high percentage of ‘agent’ in the subject position. The second is ‘theme’, and the next is ‘causer’. In the object position, ‘bivalent verbs’ has a high percentage of ‘patient’, the second is ‘result’, and the next is ‘range, relevant’, ect. Semi-bivalent verbs has a high percentage of ‘agent’, and the next is ‘sentient’ in the subject position. In the object position of preposition, it has a high percentage of ‘dative’, and the next is ‘target’ and ‘source’. In addition, we also analyzed the case of separable ‘Verb-Object’ verbs with objects.<BR> In conclusion, this paper analyzed the thematic role of neologism verbs and revealed the structural relationship of verbs.

In this paper we introduce a method for summarizing the meaning of two continual Vietnamese sentences manifesting a sequence of processes which belongs to one of three process types (according to Functional Grammar [26, 41]): the state of subject is changed, the position of subject is changed, and the state or position of the subject is affected by an agent. The sentence-generation method is performed in two main processes: (i) resolve anaphoric pronoun and represent the semantics of the source pair of sentences; (ii) determine the ordinal relationship of processes and generate new reduced Vietnamese sentence. To evaluate the quality of summarization, we compare our generated sentences with sentence fusions which generated using K. Filippova [31]’s method as well as an enhancement by F. Boudin and E. Morin [16]. Using ROUGE measures [6 - 9], the results show that our method’s summaries are more precise and natural in overall.

Machine-readable dictionaries have been regarded as a rich knowledge source from which various relations in lexical semantics can be effectively extracted. These semantic relations have been found useful for supporting a wide range of natural language processing tasks, from information retrieval to interpretation of noun sequences, and to resolution of prepositional phrase attachment. In this paper, we address issues related to problems in building a semantic hierarchy from machine-readable dictionaries: genus disambiguation, discovery of covert categories, and bilingual taxonomy. In addressing these issues, we will discuss the limiting factors in dictionary definitions and ways of eradicating these problems. We will also compare the taxonomy extracted in this way from a typical MRD and that of the WordNet. We argue that although the MRD-derived taxonomy is considerably flatter than the WordNet, it nevertheless provides a functional core for a variety of semantic relations and inferences which is vital in natural language processing.

The object of the analysis in the following paper are sentences with verbs for emotions (psychological verbs, Experiencer verbs) in the modern Bulgarian language. The main goal is to present the syntactic realization of arguments to the verb obicham (to love) as representative of the syntactic features of the verbs for positive emotions. The selective restrictions for the realization of the arguments are determined by lexical semantics and thematic structure of the predicates. For psychological verbs, the subject is marked with the thematic role Experiencer, and the complements are either Theme (Object of emotion) or Stimulus. The external complement of the transitive verb obicham (to love) is marked as Theme and represents object – specific, generic, as well as propositional one, to which the emotional relationship is directed. Observations show that in the subject position, in addition to nouns denoting animate objects, names of specific inanimate or abstract objects can also be used. Da-clauses are the main means for the realization of object complements to the verb obicham. In certain contexts, subordinate clauses with free relatives can also be used.

THE ROLE OF SEMANTICS IN AUTOMATIC SPEECH UNDERSTANDING

Successive Cyclicity in DPs: Evidence from Mongolian Nominalized Clauses

Some interpersonal verbs show a bias in the proportion of times their subject and object arguments are rementioned in a sample of explanations for the eventuality the verb describes. This bias is known as the implicit causality bias. Several studies have shown that readers and listeners rapidly use the implicit causality bias during pronoun resolution. Whether listeners also rapidly incorporate relevant contextual information during pronoun resolution, is an open question. In the current paper, we report two visual world eye-tracking studies intended to answer this question. Participants listened to stories that included implicit causality verbs followed by a “because” clause with an ambiguous pronoun in its subject position. During the story, the participants looked at a screen on which potential referents of the ambiguous pronoun were displayed. In Experiment 1, a simple main effect of implicit causality bias on looks toward the character that was congruent with the bias was found among items in one of the two discourse conditions. Discourse context, however, only affected looks for a subset of verbs and in the opposite direction of what was hypothesized. In Experiment 2, no main effects of IC Bias or discourse context were found, but there was a marginally significant interaction which was not hypothesized. In both experiments, discourse context influenced looks only for a subset of verbs and never in the predicted direction. The results favor an account in which the influence of lexical semantics is, at least initially, stronger than the influence of world knowledge and discourse context. Additional exploratory analyses suggested that eye movements already reveal remention biases at an early point in the sentence, whereas the causal potency of the subject argument is predicted by looks starting from the onset of the causal connective.

Understanding the lexicon: Meaning, sense and world knowledge in lexical semantics knowledge in lexical semantics. Ed. by Werner Hüllen and Rainer Schulze (review)

Understanding the Lexicon: Meaning, Sense and World Knowledge in Lexical Semantics

Reviews1 83 Diachronic Prototype Semantics: A Contribution to Historical Lexicology. Dirk Geeraerts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. viii + 207. $65.00. D1 iiachronic Prototype Semantics is a well-written and useful book. I caught myself reading it both as a lexical semanticist (concerned with prediction and the nature of lexical semantic representation) and as a lexicographer (concerned with accuracy over exhaustiveness and guides to lexical reconstruction, but unworried about prediction) . The tension between semantics and lexicography, it turns out, is part and parcel of Geeraerts's very approach because he has worked in historical lexicography, the source of his data, and lexicology, the source of his theory. Geeraerts's goal is to show the value of cognitive linguistics (Langacker 1987 and 1991; Lakoff 1987) in studying lexical-semantic change. The semanticist in me disagrees in principle with a number of his major claims, but overall I am struck by the book'sjudicious combination of old-school and newschool historical linguistics and by its terrific examples. Perhaps even more impressive is Geeraerts's courageous and instructive run at the prediction problem , a serious challenge to both historical and cognitive linguistics. The former is retrodictive at best, and the latter, while claiming predictive power, most often settles for description over explanation and marshals its evidence in retrospect (see, e.g., the grammaticalization "predictions" in Heine, CIaudi, and Hünnemeyer 1991). But then I think, "What difference does it make?" Dictionaries do not need to predict, and even historical linguistics has a dubious tie to this requirement. Still, the completeness of theory looms large, and I wonder, as does Geeraerts in chapters 4 and 5, if diachronic prototype lexical semantics can ever be an explanation in the canonical sense. Chapter 1, "Cognitive Semantics and Prototype Theory," outlines cognitive linguistics, which sees language as part of the general cognitive system and grounds linguistic categories in conceptual categories organized by fuzzy, prototype structure (see Taylor 1995). This research program translates into four parameters for historical lexical change from a semasiological (form to meaning) standpoint: extension vs. intension and non-equality vs. non-discreteness (see table, p. 184). This typology makes explicit the conditions of lexical change and settles certain debates. As to the latter, it shows that transient meanings surface not because they are somehow "there all the time" and fade in and out, but because they actually appear and disappear discretely as a consequence of structural changes in the referential range of a term. For example, verduisteren 'abduct' occurs in both 17th century and 20th century Dutch, apparently with no form filling the temporal hiatus between. This sort of information would be important for lexicography where decisions must be made about whether a form-meaning pair attested at two different times persists in the interval between the attestations. But then the semanticist's worries surface, and I wonder if a prototype view, where the structure of the lexical system is intrinsically continuous, with 184 Reviews Table PARAMETERS OF HISTORICAL LEXICAL CHANGE Meaning Effects —> Category Effects i Extension (set members) Intension (senses describing the coherence of set members) Non-Equality (core —» periphery; salience, and typicality) (1) changes in the referential range of terms, especially at the core (2) changes in the radial organization of senses Non-discreteness (fuzzy category boundaries, family resemblances, and lack of necessary and sufficient conditions) (3) changes at the edges of referential range, where boundary overlaps occur: appearance of transient meanings (4) changes via encyclopedic knowledge: meaningworld knowledge overlaps meanings scaling into each other, rather than discrete, with meanings carved off determinately from each other, is needed to get the same effects. For example , encyclopedic knowledge may influence the organization of senses not because semantic information scales into world knowledge, but because all languages have systematic tradeoffs between truth and implicature, both of which are discretely and modularly defined. The classic example here is but, which has the same truth conditions as and but differs from and on the pragmatic inference (implicature) it triggers about contrast with presumed information . The truth and implicature of but are quite distinct and do not scale into each other, as a model of continuous lexical meaning would have it. Clustered senses with ostensibly fuzzy interactions...

BOOK NOTICES 193 & Fodor, since, according to G, their theory has been particularly influential in psycholinguistics . Certain inadequacies with model-theoretic semantics are also pointed out, but it is not clear that they are inherent in this approach and could not be remedied by extending semantic and pragmatic theory within the model-theoretic framework. Since this thesis was published 6 years after it was written, a 20-page postscript has been added to cover recent theoretical and experimental work. There have been exciting developments in this area since 1981 . G discusses the work of Barbara J. Grosz, Candace L. Sidner, Bonnie Lynn Webber, Hans Kamp, Irene Heim, Jon Barwise & John Perry, and Philip JohnsonLaird , all of which is consistent with the ideas advanced by G. Perhaps the biggest omission is a formally precise account of mental models, but the experimental evidence should prove revealing to anyone interested in discourse representation . [Alex Franz, University of Pittsburgh.] Untersuchungen zum Russisch-niederdeutschen Gesprächsbuch des Tönnies Fenne, Pskov 1607: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Sprachgeschichte. By an Autorenkollektiv under the direction of Hans Joachim Gernentz . Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1988. Pp. 267. DM 42.00. The facsimile copy of the unique manuscript of a Russian-Low German conversation manual by one Tönnies Fenne, a late Hanseatic merchant in Pskov during the Russian 'Time of Troubles', was published in Copenhagen, 1961, as a first volume under the title Tönnies Fenne's Low German manual ofspoken Russian, Pskov 1607, edited by L. L. Hammerich, Roman Jakobson , and others. A second volume. Transliteration and translation, was published in 1970. Projected third and fourth volumes, analyzing the manuscript's Russian and Low German language materials respectively, have not appeared. Since the appearance of Transliteration and translation, Soviet Slavicists especially have studied the (Old) Russian texts of Tönnies Fenne's conversation manual. Publication of studies dealing with the manual and its (Middle) Low German texts, however, was to await the volume under review here, representing the efforts of an author-collective made up of East German Germanists at the University of Rostock and Latvian Germanists at the University of Riga. It should be noted particularly that the subtitle of the volume reflects the author-collective 's view that its 'investigations' are a contribution to the history of (modern) German— that is, High German, not Low German. In the first chapter (13-86) Hans Joachim Gernentz, Tamara Korol, and Irmtraud Rosler locate Tönnies Fenne's conversation manual in both its textual tradition and its historical setting of Hanseatic-Russian trade. In the relatively short second chapter (87-103), Ilga Brizna compares the manual's Low German and Russian personal common names. The third chapter (105-237) comprises three separate studies: Christa Prowatke on the conversation manual's Low German vowel spellings (105-47); Christa Kopplow on the function and form of its Low German clauses (149-92); and Reinhold Tippe on the formation of its Low German complex substantive stems (193-237). In a completely unrelated appendix (239-52), Kira Kalnina discusses the phonological form and semantic sphere of Middle Low German loanwords in Lettish. A bibliography (253-67) follows the appendix. I have never understood the notion, shared by the author-collective of this volume, that the history of Low German is an integral part of the history of High German. To put it simple-mindedly and tautologically, the history of Low German is the history of Low German and the history of High German is the history of High German. [B. J. Koekkoek, State University of New York at Buffalo.] Understanding the lexicon: Meaning, sense and world knowledge in lexical semantics. Ed. by Werner Hüllen and Rainer Schulze. (Linguistische Arbeiten, 210.) Tübingen : Niemeyer, 1988. Pp. viii, 445. DM 158.00. This collection of 'thirty-three papers read at a symposium on problems of lexical semantics at the University of Essen from November 19 to 21, 1987 ... provides readers,' the editors believe , 'with a representative sample of current investigations into the field' (1). The list of contributors (444-5) suggests, however, some limits on representation. Though all the papers but ...