Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language Conference

Mihailo Antovic (Niš, Serbia) & Austin Bennett (Case)

Thursday, May 17th
the Coach House, Green College – 6201 Cecil Green Park Road

In our present study, we investigate the conceptualization of basic musical relations in blind ten-year olds. The children were exposed to ten diametrically opposed musical stimuli (high and low tone, quick and slow succession of pitches, major and minor chord, etc) and asked to verbally describe what the first and what the second part was like. The antonym or antonym-like descriptions were then classified into higher-order conceptual categories. A preference for spatial relations was prevalent. While sighted children’s descriptions were generally more elaborate, the comparison of antonymic responses proper between the two groups reveals few, if any, differences. This might suggest (1) that the complex linguistic capacity developed by that age has helped blind children create concepts similar to those of their sighted peers, but also (2) that the abstract domain of music is primarily conceptualized through spatial, rather than visual, modality.

Download PDF

Radoslava Trnavac & Maite Taboada (SFU)

Sunday, May 20th
Buchanan A201

This paper investigates the distribution of backwards anaphora in nucleus/satellite coherence relations as defined within Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann & Thompson 1988). In most approaches backwards anaphora is claimed to require the dependency of the pronoun clause on the antecedent clause (Carden 1978, van Hoek 1997, among others). However, consider the following example from Bosch 1983/Ariel 1990:

(1) *He lied to me and John betrayed me.
(2) He lied to me, and John was my friend.

In sentence (1), the conjuncts are symmetrical, and for that reason backwards anaphora is blocked. However in (2), the antecedent seems to occur in the background clause, which goes against the requirement on the pronoun clause being the dependent one. The frequent explanation for sentences like (2) is that the backwards anaphora is possible because of a process of pragmatic subordination where the pronoun occurs in the pragmatically non-Dominant clause, while the antecedent forms part of the Dominant clause (see McCray 1980, Harris & Bates 2002). Contrary to this argument, Ariel (1990:158) suggests that dependency and pragmatic subordination are crucial when the antecedent is a New entity, but when the entities form part of the discourse already, as in (2), dependency is not needed at all. According to her, usual Accessibility parameters such as distance and high/low cohesion are determining factors for the acceptability of backwards anaphora. We explore both views (the “pragmatic subordination” approach and the “new versus continuous discourse referent” approach) within the context of coherence relations.

We take as initial position that discourse structure is parallel to syntactic structure, and adopt the proposal of Matthiessen & Thompson (1988), who argue for a direct mapping between subordinate/matrix clauses at the syntactic level and satellites/nuclei of coherence relations at the discourse level. We analyze text spans with third person singular pronouns (he, she, it) in terms of the nucleus/satellite distinction in four different corpora: the American National Corpus (Reppen et al. 2005), the RST Discourse Treebank (Carlson et al. 2002), the Broadcast News corpus (Alabiso et al. 1998) and the New York Times corpus (Sandhaus 2008). Based on the preliminary analysis of instances with cataphoric it, we suggest the following hypotheses: (i) Along the lines of Ariel (1990), we claim that pragmatic subordination is not a sufficient factor for the backwards anaphora „violations‟ since backwards anaphora appears within the nucleus (Dominant) relations; and (ii) contrary to what Ariel suggests, the correlation between dependency (high cohesion) and backwards anaphora as a New entity is not always a reliable factor for the detection of backwards anaphora, since many satellite relations contain instances of continuous discourse referents. However, our data suggests that Distance as Accessibility marker may give us a slightly different picture in nucleus/satellite relations – nucleus relations as unmarked for the position of the continuous discourse referent have more instances of further distance between the antecedent and anaphora which, at least partially, confirms the predictions of Accessibility Theory.

Download PDF

Gregory Mills (Stanford)

Saturday, May 19th
Buchanan B213

One of the most contentious debates in studies of language use in interaction concerns the explanatory role assigned to interlocutors’ intentions. In (post) Gricean cognitive/pragmatic models of meaning (e.g. Sperber and Wilson 1987, Searle 1979, Levinson 2006), intentions play the central role: intentions are a priori mental states determining a speaker’s utterance formulation. Similarly, for hearers, comprehension involves recognizing or inferring the speaker’s intentions. Successful communication is idealized as involving intentional transparency between speaker and hearer, and a key problem for these models is accounting for which structures (beliefs, codes, inferences) are shared or known to be shared by interlocutors (Kecskes and Mey 2008)

By contrast, empirical approaches which focus in the first instance on how language is used in dialogue present a more nuanced view of the role of intentions: for example, in a series of maze game experiments, Garrod et al (2004) found that explicit articulation of speaker intentions is much less effective than more tacit forms of communication via collaborative feedback (e.g.h esitations, disfluencies, partial repeats, clarifications and repair). Moreover, the basic findings of dialogue research show how this collaborative feedback, which frequently occurs during a speaker’s utterance, often leads to speakers adapting their own utterance mid-stream, resulting in joint productions which necessarily do not correspond to the original speaker’s own intention or goal (Goodwin, 1979). Under this view, intentions, plans, and beliefs are treated as joint construals (Clark, 1996) that are emergent from the interaction.

Despite this emphasis on how co-ordination in dialogue develops via feedback, there have been very few studies that directly address the role of feedback concerning intentions. In addition most psycholinguistic studies focus primarily on reference – ignoring how the broader task-level intentions might develop over the course of the interaction.

To address these issues we report a variant of the “maze task” (Garrod et al 1987, 2004), in which participants are required to collaboratively develop sequences of steps for solving the mazes. Participants communicate with each other using an experimental chat tool (Healey and Mills 2006), which interferes with the unfolding dialogue by inserting artificial clarification requests that appear, to participants as if they originate from each other. Two kinds of clarification request were introduced: (1) Artificial “Why?” questions to query the participants’ communicative intentions, (2) Fragment clarification requests (Healey et al 2003) that repeat a single word from the prior turn, querying the content of participants’ referential descriptions.

We show how over the course of the interaction, interlocutors change how they treat these two kinds of clarification request: “Why?” clarification requests querying higher level plans become easier to respond to as co-ordination develops, while for fragment clarification requests the converse is the case: they become harder to respond to as the task progresses. Further, we show how this differential pattern is not arrived at via explicit negotiation, but through the tacit turn-byturn feedback mechanisms of dialogue.

Download PDF

Jisup Hong (UCB)

Saturday, May 19th
Buchanan A hallway on the 2nd floor

Korean -taka, which is considered an “interruptive” or “transferentive” connective (Choi 1961, Lee 1993, Martin & Lee 1969), typically refers to a scenario in which the initial clause event has been discontinued in favor of the main clause event, as in (1). However, the connective also has a predictive conditional use, shown in (2), which is peculiar in requiring that both the protasis and apodosis be deemed undesirable by the speaker (Akatsuka & Sohn 1994). Thus, a predictive conditional with positive a↵ect cannot be expressed with -taka.

1. chelswu-ka      hakkyo-ey      ka-taka      cip-ey      tolawa-ss-ta
   Chelswu-NOM  school-LOC     go-TAKA    home-LOC return-PST-DEC
   “Chelswu returned home in the middle of going to school.”
2. wuntong     manhi     ha-taka      tachi-n-ta /  *kenkang   hayci-n-ta
   exercise     a.lot do-TAKA      injure-PRES-DEC   / healthy  become-PRES-DEC
   “If you exercise a lot, you’re going to get hurt / *you’re going to become healthy.”

This paper presents a cognitive-functional analysis of -taka that accounts for the negative a↵ect requirement on its predictive conditional use, as well as for a range of uses that express aspectual relations, such as temporal succession and temporal inclusion. The framework is a combination of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 2002) and Mental Spaces Theory (Fauconnier 1985), and specifically adopts Sanders et al. (2009)’s Basic Communicative Space Network, which distinguishes between volitional and non-volitional content domains. The conceptual model for -taka includes, in addition to aspectual relational constraints, the volitional involvement of an explicit subject of consciousness (SoC). When the main clause subject is agentive, as in (1), the sentence receives a volitional content reading in which an explicit SoC initiates a switch to the other activity. When the main clause subject is non-agentive, as in (3), a non-volitional content reading obtains in which the main clause event happens to the subject in the context of the initial clause event.

3.   chelswu-ka     hakkyo-ey    ka-taka     nemeci-ess-ta
Chelswu-NOM  school         go-TAKA    fall-PST-DEC
“Chelswu fell while on his way to school.”

When the non-volitional content use of -taka occurs in a predictive future context, an alternative future space is constructed, in the same way that predictive contexts can trigger conditional construals for English and and or constructions (Dancygier & Sweetser 2005). This alternative future space is set up as a volitional content space in which the explicit SoC is blended with the implicit SoC of the speaker. As shown in Figure 1, in the alternative space, the blended agentive subject, with the speaker’s volitionality, chooses to abandon the initial clause activity to engage in something else, thereby averting the occurrence of the main clause event. Consequently, -taka cannot be used as a positive a↵ect predictive conditional, because doing so would trigger the building of an alternative space in which the subject, with the speaker’s volitionality, deliberately switches away from the activity that leads to a positive outcome in the non-alternative space.

Download PDF

Tristan Davenport & Seana Coulson (UCSD)

Saturday, May 19th
Buchanan B213

Previous event-related potential (ERP) investigations of the role of causal inference in word processing have shown effects of causal relatedness limited to the N400 (Kuperberg, Paczynski & Ditman, 2011; Yang, Perfetti & Schmalhofer, 2007), suggesting the primary effect of causal relatedness is to modulate activation of a word’s meaning (Kutas & Federmeier, 2011). By contrast, Burkhardt (2007) reports P600 effects, suggesting that causal relatedness can influence later processes of memory updating and semantic integration. However, Burkhardt’s (2007) materials confounded lexical association and causal relatedness, clouding interpretation of their P600 effect. The present study seeks to clarify these issues by comparing the impact of lexical association and causal relatedness on word processing (Experiment 1), and by varying the time available for inferential activations to develop (Experiment 2).

In Experiment 1, EEG was recorded as native English speakers heard 160 short vignettes designed to promote a causal bridging inference. (e.g., “A stack of papers was sitting next to the open window. A moment later, the pages were fluttering into the yard.”) ERPs were timelocked to one of four visual probe words presented 400ms after the end of each vignette: CAUSAL PROBE related to the inferred cause (WIND), LEXICAL PROBE related to the vignette’s final word (GRASS), or one of two unrelated control conditions drawn from the causal and lexical probes for other vignettes (HUNTER, FLOOR). Relative to unrelated controls, causal probes elicited less negative N400, and more positive P600. Lexical probes elicited less negative N400 than unrelated controls, but similar amplitude in the P600 window. N400 priming effects were larger for causal than lexical probes, even though lexical probes were more associatively related to their entire associated vignettes, as assessed by Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer & Dumais, 1997). Whereas lexical priming effects were observed on ERP components related to semantic memory activation, causal effects were also evident in later stages of processing indexed by the P600 component. Contrary to some prior work, these ERP data indicate that causal relatedness affects both semantic memory activation and later stages of processing.

In Experiment 2, we manipulated the amount of processing time before the participant encountered the probe. Consequently, the interstimulus interval (ISI) between the end of the vignette and probe word presentation was either 0ms (short) or 400ms (long), and only the causal related (WIND) and control (HUNTER) probes were used. Larger relatedness effects were observed at the short ISI, for both the N400 and the P600. In the N400 window, ERPs to unrelated probes were larger at the short ISI, while ERPs to related probes did not significantly differ. In the P600 interval, ERPs to unrelated probes show a standing difference approximately the same size as that observed during the N400 window; related probes elicited a marginally larger P600 over parietal sites at the long than the short ISI. Thus increasing the amount of processing time had minimal impact on semantic activation processes (N400) initiated by causally related probes, but led to larger P600 associated with memory updating and semantic integration.

Download PDF