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Abstract:
A standard view of comprehension holds that
syntactic processes build structured expressions and that
semantic processes assign an interpretation by combining lexical
representations according to their syntactic position.
Recent work in lexical semantics has challenged the latter view,
arguing that composition is context-sensitive: For example,
default interpretations of individual expressions can be modified
by other expressions through operations like "type shifting"
(Bach, 1986; Partee, 1992), and interactions between expressions
can introduce semantic structure not explicitly represented in
surface form (Jackendoff, 1997; Pustejovsky, 1995). We
present self-paced reading and eye-tracking studies that provide
behavioral evidence for these types of enriched composition, and
that provide insights into which aspects of enriched composition
cause processing difficulty.
McElree et al. (2001) found that people
experienced difficulty with "The author began the book", in
comparison to cases where "began" was replaced with "read" or
"wrote". The verb "begin" semantically requires an event,
but "the book" does not refer to an event. We interpreted
this as evidence for a processing cost associated with an
additional operation of semantically coercing "the book" into an
event interpretation (e.g., "writing the book"). In support
of this view, we present two recent experiments examining the
processing of event nominals. In both self-paced reading
and eye-tracking, we found no difficulty with "The boy started
the fight" versus "The boy saw the fight", where the default
interpretation of the nominals is as an event, though we did find
difficulty with "The boy started the puzzle" versus "The boy saw
the puzzle", where the default interpretation of the nominal is
as an entity but the verb "started" requires an event
interpretation.
Type shifting per se could be responsible for the
difficulty in processing structures like "began/started the
book". However, Frisson and Pickering (1999, submitted)
found that people experienced no difficulty processing metonymies
involving place-for-institution ("talked to the school"),
place-for-event ("protested during Vietnam"), and
producer-for-product ("read Dickens") type shifts, provided there
is a type of institution or well-known event or product
associated with the noun. These expressions do not,
however, require the generation of additional semantic structure
as expressions like "began the book" do, which are typically
interpreted as either "began to read the book" or "began to write
the book". We present an eye tracking study that contrasts
expressions like "The gentleman spotted/read/started Dickens
while waiting for a friend...", which indicates that difficulty
arises only in the "started" case where the interpretation
requires the generation of additional semantic structure.
References
Bach, E. (1986). The algebra of
events. Linguistics and Philosophy, 9, 5-16.
Frisson, S., & Pickering, M. J. (1999).
The processing of metonymy: Evidence from eye-movements.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition, 25, 1366-1383.
Jackendoff, R (1997). The architecture of
the language faculty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McElree, B., Traxler, M. J., Pickering, M. J.,
Jackendoff, R., & Seely, R. E. (2001). Coercion in
on-line semantic processing. Cognition, 78, B17-B25.
Partee, B. (1992). Syntactic categories and
semantic type. In M. Rosner & R. Johnson (Eds.),
Computational Linguistics and Formal Semantics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Pickering, M. J. & Frisson, S.
(submitted). Why reading Dickens is easy (and reading
Needham can be hard): Contrasting familiarity and figurativeness
in language comprehension.
Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The Generative
Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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