Underspecified Meaning Research Articles

The time-course of contextual modulation for underspecified meaning

AbstractSentences like (1) “The singer began the album”are ambiguous between an agentive reading (The singer began recording/playing/etc. the album) and a constitutive reading (The singer’s song was the first track). The ambiguity is rooted in the meaning specification of the aspectual-verb class, which demands its complement be construed as a structured individual along a dimension (e.g., spatial, informational, eventive). In (1), the complement can be construed as a set of eventualities (eventive) or musical content (informational). Processing aspectual-verb sentences is shown to involve (a) exhaustive lexical-function retrieval and (b) construal of multiple dimension-specific structured individuals, leading to multiple compositions with agentive and constitutive readings. The ultimate interpretation depends on the biased dimensions in context. Our eye-tracking study comparing sentences in different contexts (agentive vs. constitutive-biasing) shows not only the aspectual-verb composition effect, previously reported for the agentive readings, but also a comparable processing profile for the constitutive readings, a novel finding supporting the unified linguistic analysis and processing implementation of the two readings. Regardless of reading, the composition effect is observable even after the complement has been retrieved, indicating that the fundamental lexico-semantic compositional processes must take place before context can serve as a constraining force.

When imprecision is a good thing, or how imprecise concepts facilitate integration in biology

Contrary to the common-sense view and positivist aspirations, scientific concepts are often imprecise. Many of these concepts are ambiguous, vague, or have an under-specified meaning (Gillon 1990). In this paper, I discuss how imprecise concepts promote integration in biology and thus benefit science. Previous discussions of this issue focus on the concepts of molecular gene and evolutionary novelty (Brigandt in Synthese 177:19–40, 2010; Fox Keller in The century of the gene, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2000; Love in Philos Sci 75:874–886, 2008; Waters in Philos Sci 61:163–185, 1994). The concept of molecular gene helps biologists integrate explanatory practices, while the notion of evolutionary novelty helps them integrate research questions into an interdisciplinary problem (Brigandt and Love in J Exp Zool Part B Mol Dev Evol 318:417–427, 2012; Waters, in: Galavotti, Dieks, Gonzalez, Hartmann, Uebel, Weber (eds) New directions in the philosophy of science, Springer, Dordrecht, 2014). In what follows, I compare molecular gene and evolutionary novelty to another imprecise concept, namely biological lineage. This concept promotes two other types of scientific integration: it helps biologists integrate theoretical principles and methodologies into different areas of biology. The concept of biological lineage facilitates these types of integration because it is broad and under-specified in ways that the concepts of molecular gene and evolutionary novelty are not. Hence, I use the concept of biological lineage as a case study to reveal types of integration that have been overlooked by philosophers. This case study also shows that even very imprecise concepts can be beneficial to scientific practice.

Applying Sen’sCapabilities Approachto the Delivery of Positive Youth Justice

Since 2000 the Welsh Government’s (WG) policy has been to provide rights and entitlements to all children in Wales. However, this is not fully implemented partly due to an underspecified meaning of ‘children first’ and ‘well-being’ and their role in relation to ‘justice’. We propose that clarity could be achieved through a novel exploitation of Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to achieving social justice. This would require the identification and mitigation of socio-structural barriers which undermine the ability of a child to live a positive life, a life where they can meet their full potential without harm to themselves or others.

Subject animacy and underspecified meaning: The conceptual and cortical underpinnings

Abstract We examine the distinction between animacy, a conceptual property, and agency, a conceptual and linguistic property involved in semantic role assignment. Are these two notions—agency and animacy—interchangeable in the mind/brain of the comprehender or are they distinct yet correlated? If the latter, does brain behavior show sensitivity to this distinction? Through a self-paced reading and an fMRI experiment we investigate the comprehension of sentences containing aspectual verbs (e.g., begin, finish) in composition with animate vs. inanimate-denoting subjects (e.g., The noblewoman/prologue began the book). Aspectual-verb sentences are ambiguous independently of subject denotation: whereas sentences with inanimate subjects engender a constitutive/subpart reading along one of multiple possible dimensions (e.g., the spatial vs. informational construal of the book), sentences with animate-denoting subjects can also engender a constitutive/subpart reading along one of several possible dimensions, (The story about) the noblewoman began the book (informational dimension), in addition to the agentive reading along the eventive dimension, The noblewoman began (doing something with) the book. So, both animate and inanimate subject-denotations can license the construal of the complement as a structured individual along mutually-exclusive conceptual dimensions (spatial, informational, eventive, etc.). During real-time comprehension such a situation calls for ambiguity resolution, and therefore computational cost, to settle on one interpretation. Therein lies the relevance of this construction: the final reading of the sentence depends on whether or not the subject can be interpreted as agentive independent of animacy. Results show that controlling for animacy, all aspectual-verb sentences (1) engender longer reading times, consistent with shared increased compositional cost and (2) exhibit overlapping cortical activity: left angular gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus, consistent with the distinction between concept composition on the one hand, and ambiguity resolution processes on the other. This converging behavioral and neurological pattern thus suggests that sentence interpretation need not be determined by perception of animacy per se but by a more fundamental conceptual parameter that has, as by-product, agency but that more locally results from the control relationship between two participants of the situation denoted by the sentence. Finally, (3) sentences with animate-denoting subjects (> inanimate-subject counterparts) additionally recruited the posterior cortex; an activation pattern consistent with the construal of animate-denoting individuals as “default” controllers in the agentive reading. This suggests in turn a de-coupling of animacy and agency such that the former is an entity-level attribution that supports but does not determine an eventive interpretation, and the latter is the output of a control asymmetry evaluation in an eventive representation connecting two otherwise independent entities. Altogether, the findings are consistent with a neurocognitive model of sentence semantic comprehension whereby meaning construal and composition are carried out within a parametrized conceptual space that is only secondarily modulated by independent conceptual factors such as animacy.

The Ability of EFL Students to Differentiate between Homonymy and Polysemy

The majority of content words do not have a single meaning for each; rather they associate to a number of senses. When these senses are semantically incompatible in non-neutral contexts, they are then homonymous; otherwise, they are polysemous where polysemous words have an underspecified meaning that encompasses their different senses. To reliably differentiate between these two lexical relations helps very much in the improvement of the retrieval process. In this orientation, this paper highlights the concepts of homonymy and polysemy, as they constitute one of the central issues in semantics and the psychology of word meaning. This paper also has a survey of the different approaches to homonymy and polysemy. These approaches tackle the two phenomena from different perspectives; however, they all aim to display the way such semantic relations are stored, processed, and resolved. Accordingly, a test is applied to the 4th year students of the Departments of English of three colleges (College of Education, College of education for Women (Tikrit University) and college of Education Samara University) and the results show that the students' ability to differentiate between polysemy and homonymy is weak. The reason behind this weakness is the students' shortage in having a widespread storage of vocabulary in relation to these semantic relations; as well as their concentration on the words that are heavily used (common) neglecting the fact that these words may associate to other meanings. In this respect, the researchers suggest that more attention should be paid to these lexical relations for better retrieval processes, better understanding of the basis according to which the lexicographers design word entries, and for better understanding of the mental processing system in accordance with these relations.

Concrete processing of action metaphors: Evidence from ERP

The timing of sensory-motor activation during the comprehension of action verbs used in a metaphorical sense is not well understood. In the present Event Related Potential (ERP) study, participants read verbs in metaphoric (The church bent the rules), literal-concrete (The bodyguard bent the rod), and literal-abstract (The church altered the rules) conditions. The literal concreteness effect, obtained by subtracting the abstract from the concrete, was revealed as an N400, frontally distributed. A metaphoric effect, obtained in the metaphor-abstract contrast, was a widespread N400, and included the frontal response seen in the literal concreteness effect. Another metaphoric effect, obtained in the metaphor-concrete contrast, was a posterior N400. Further time window analyses showed that the literal concreteness effect primarily came from 200 to 300 ms, the metaphoric-concrete effect primarily came from 200 to 400 ms, and the metaphoric-abstract effect was significant throughout 200–500 ms. These results suggest that a concrete but underspecified meaning consistent with metaphoric and literal readings, was activated early and was sustained throughout the 200–500 ms window. We concluded that the metaphoric sense is based in concrete action semantics, even if these senses are underspecified.

Les forces et les faiblesses de l'indéfini n'importe qui

<titre>R&#233;sum&#233;</titre> Cet article pr&#233;sente une analyse s&#233;mantique de n&#8217;importe qui en fran&#231;ais. Sa s&#233;mantique est structur&#233;e par une organisation ternaire. La valeur abstraite caract&#233;risant le signe agit comme principe de production et de compr&#233;hension des emplois conventionnels et cr&#233;atifs. La mise en &#339;uvre de ce principe s&#8217;op&#232;re &#224; partir d&#8217;indicateurs contextuels discrets. R&#233;sultent de cette interaction les interpr&#233;tations contextuelles. De sorte que la lecture &#171;&#160;existentielle&#160;&#187; de n&#8217;importe qui d&#233;rive de ce qu&#8217;une valeur de v&#233;ridicit&#233; s&#8217;applique &#224; la s&#233;lection arbitraire d&#8217;une occurrence qualitativement marqu&#233;e de l&#8217;ensemble des anim&#233;s humains. La production des lectures &#224; partir de l&#8217;enrichissement contextuel de sens sous-sp&#233;cifi&#233;s semble pouvoir pr&#233;tendre constituer une approche explicative des polys&#232;mes grammaticaux. C&#8217;est non point n&#8217;importe qui m&#234;me qui a valeur forte, mais son interpr&#233;tation existentielle qualitative. Ce qu&#8217;entend illustrer cet article est l&#8217;int&#233;r&#234;t de parcourir les chemins de traverse entre approches logicistes et approches aformelles.

Questioning to Resolve Decision Problems

Why do we ask questions? Because we want tohave some information. But why this particular kind ofinformation? Because only information of this particularkind is helpful to resolve the decision problemthat the agent faces. In this paper I argue thatquestions are asked because their answers help toresolve the questioner's decision problem, and that thisassumption helps us to interpret interrogativesentences. Interrogative sentences are claimed to have asemantically underspecified meaning and thisunderspecification is resolved by means of the decisionproblem.

Obtaining a Figurative Interpretation of a Word: Support for Underspecification

Based on the results from a number of eye-tracking experiments, Frisson and Pickering (1999) and Pickering and Frisson (2001) proposed a model for the on-line processing of words with semantically related senses. According to this model, only the underspecified, schematic meaning of a word with multiple senses is activated initially. This underspecified meaning encompasses all related senses that are established in someone's lexicon. Once this underspecified meaning has been used to assign a semantic value, it can be followed by a homing-in stage in which context is used to arrive at the contextually appropriate sense. This article discusses the implications of the underspecification model with respect to the processing of figurative language and asserts that this model gives a better account of how incremental semantic processing can proceed smoothly and flexibly. In conclusion, the model is related to the linguistic distinctions of polysemy and monosemy, and it is argued that, at this moment in time, there is no compelling evidence to postulate more than one underspecified meaning.

Processing ambiguous verbs: evidence from eye movements.

In 2 eye-tracking experiments, participants read verbs that had 2 (unrelated) meanings or 2 (related) senses in contexts that disambiguated before or after the verb, to the dominant or subordinate interpretation. A 3rd experiment used unambiguous verbs. The results indicated that the language processor used information about context in the early stages of resolving meaning ambiguities but only during integration for sense ambiguities. Effects of preference were delayed for both types of verbs. The results contrast with findings concerning the processing of nouns (e.g., K. Rayner & S. A. Duffy, 1986). For meaning ambiguities, the authors argue that delays in resolution allow both meanings to reach a high level of activation, thus reducing effects of frequency. For sense ambiguities, the authors argue that the processor does not access multiple senses but activates one underspecified meaning and uses context to home in on the appropriate sense.