Concepts, Frames and Cascades in Semantics, Cognition and Ontology

• Author(s): Sebastian Löbner, Thomas Gamerschlag, Tobias Kalenscher, Markus Schrenk, Henk Zeevat

• Categories: Language Arts & Disciplines

• Type: Book
• -
• Published: 2021-05-28
• -
• Publisher: Springer Nature

This open access book presents novel theoretical, empirical and experimental work exploring the nature of mental representations that support natural language production and understanding, and other manifestations of cognition. One fundamental question raised in the text is whether requisite knowledge structures can be adequately modeled by means of a uniform representational format, and if so, what exactly is its nature. Frames are a key topic covered which have had a strong impact on the exploration of knowledge representations in artificial intelligence, psychology and linguistics; cascades are a novel development in frame theory. Other key subject areas explored are: concepts and categorization, the experimental investigation of mental representation, as well as cognitive analysis in semantics. This book is of interest to students, researchers, and professionals working on cognition in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.

The Fruits of Empirical Linguistics: Process

• Author(s): Sam Featherston, Susanne Winkler

• Categories: Computers

• Type: Book
• -
• Published: 2009
• -
• Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

Morphological Structure in Language Processing

• Author(s): R. Harald Baayen, Robert Schreuder

• Categories: Language Arts & Disciplines

• Type: Book
• -
• Published: 2011-07-20
• -
• Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

This volume brings together a series of studies of morphological processing in Germanic (English, German, Dutch), Romance (French, Italian), and Slavic (Polish, Serbian) languages. The question of how morphologically complex words are organized and processed in the mental lexicon is addressed from different theoretical perspectives (single and dual route models), for different modalities (auditory and visual comprehension, writing), and for language development. Experimental work is reported, as well as computational and statistical modeling. Thus, this volume provides a useful overview of the range of issues currently attracting reseach at the intersection of morphology and psycholinguistics.

Beyond Semantics and Pragmatics

• Author(s): Gerhard Preyer

• Categories: Philosophy

• Type: Book
• -
• Published: 2018-08-09
• -
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

The study of meaning in language embraces a diverse range of problems and methods. Philosophers think through the relationship between language and the world; linguists document speakers' knowledge of meaning; psychologists investigate the mechanisms of understanding and production. Up through the early 2000s, these investigations were generally compartmentalized: indeed, researchers often regarded both the subject-matter and the methods of other disciplines with skepticism. Since then, however, there has been a sea change in the field, enabling researchers increasingly to synthesize the perspectives of philosophy, linguistics and psychology and to energize all the fields with rich new intel...

Clitics in the wild

• Author(s): Zrinka Kolaković, Edyta Jurkiewicz-Rohrbacher , Björn Hansen, Dušica Filipović Đurđević, Nataša Fritz

• Categories: Language Arts & Disciplines

• Type: Book
• -
• Published: 2022
• -
• Publisher: Language Science Press

This collective monograph is the first data-oriented, empirical in-depth study of the system of clitics on Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. It fills the gap between the theoretical and normative literature by including solid data on variation found in dialects and spoken language and obtained from massive Web Corpora and speakers’ acceptability judgements. The authors investigate three primary sources of variation: inventory, placement and morphonological processes. A separate part of the book is dedicated to the phenomenon of clitic climbing, the major challenge for any syntactic theory. The theory of complexity serves as the explanation for the very diverse constraints on clitic climbing established in the empirical studies. It allows to construct a series of hierarchies where the factors relevant for predicting clitic climbing interact with each other. Thus, the study pushes our understanding of clitics away from fine-grained descriptions and syntactic generalisations towards a probabilistic modelling of syntax.