Theory Of Lexical Representation Research Articles

The role of the cognitive model profile in knowledge representation and meaning construction: the case of the lexical item Europe

The paper addresses the role of the cognitive model profile, one of the fundamental constructs in LCCM Theory (a.k.a. access semantics), in meaning construction and knowledge representation with respect to the concept of Europe. The study is based on a corpus of news articles retrieved from the Guardian from May 2004 through December 2009 (approximately 930,000 words) and focuses on the lexical item Europe (over 4000 corpus occurrences). The study takes its theoretical underpinnings from LCCM Theory, a theory of lexical representation and semantic composition, which delineates the roles the linguistic and the conceptual systems play in meaning construction (e.g., Evans 2009, 2013).The paper documents the immense semantic potential of the lexical item Europe as manifest in the Guardian’s discourse under analysis. In terms of knowledge representation, to account for the coherent body of multimodal knowledge which the lexical item Europe affords access to, its cognitive model profiles relevant to its two lexical concepts are constructed. As far as the role of the cognitive model profile in meaning construction is concerned, the study demonstrates how the context, specifically the co-text, determines the activation of a respective portion of the cognitive model profile of the lexical item Europe.

The preservation of verb subcategory knowledge in a spoken language comprehension deficit

Patient WBN has a lexical-semantic deficit resulting in impaired performance on language comprehension tasks that require access to verb meanings in both single-word and sentence contexts. However, WBN shows no such comprehension impairment with respect to lexical syntax. Specifically, he performs without error on comprehension tasks that rely on knowledge of lexical-specific verb subcategory requirements. This performance pattern supports theories of lexical representation and processing in which lexical syntactic information may be encoded and retrieved independently from lexical semantic information.

Mediated priming in the cerebral hemispheres

The present experiment investigates hemispheric differences in mediated priming. Theories of lexical representation have argued for an asymmetrical coding between the right and left hemispheres ( Beeman, 1998), claiming that the right hemisphere is more diffusely represented compared to the left hemisphere. Thus, the right hemisphere activates a larger semantic field compared to the left hemisphere. Mediated (two-step) priming is an ideal task to examine this representational claim, because of the distant nature of the prime-target pairs. Results showed no difference in the magnitude of priming (both mediated and direct) between the right and left hemispheres. These results suggest that the lexical representation of the two hemispheres is equivalent, not asymmetrical as Beeman suggests.

The use of lexical and syntactic information in language production: Evidence from the priming of noun-phrase structure

Theories of lexical representation in production provide sophisticated accounts of the way in which information is activated during lexical access (e.g., Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999), but there has been little attempt to account for the way in which the structure of the lexical entry affects the formulation processes that underlie the production of complex expressions. This paper first outlines such an account, and then reports three experiments that investigated the priming of noun-phrase structure in dialogue. Experiment 1 showed that speakers used a complex noun phrase containing a relative clause (e.g., “the square that’s red”) more often after hearing a syntactically similar noun phrase than after hearing a simple noun phrase, and that this effect was enhanced when the head noun (“square”) was repeated. Experiment 2 showed an enhanced priming effect when prime and target contained semantically related nouns (e.g., “goat” and “sheep”). Experiment 3 showed no enhanced effect when prime and target bore a close phonological relationship (e.g., “ship” and “sheep”). These results provide support for our account, and suggest that syntactic encoding may be unaffected by phonological feedback.

Derived nominalizations in -ee: a Role and Reference Grammar based semantic analysis

The main aim of this article is to provide an explanation accounting for the production of English derived nouns in -ee. In line with Barker (1998), I will argue that analyses based on the syntactic argument structure of the verbal base are unsatisfactory, and that the conditions for this derivational process must be searched for within semantics. My intention is to explore the semantic factors that might be taken to be pre-eminent in the different sets of verbs taking the suffix using the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) framework. It will be shown that a semantic analysis based on a theory of lexical representation like RRG is relevant to account for the formation of derived nouns in -ee in English.I gratefully acknowledge comments and suggestions from Robert Van Valin, Lachlan Mackenzie, and two anonymous readers of a previous version of this paper.