Soyeon Yoon (Rice)
Saturday, May 18th
Buchanan A hallway on the 2nd floor
This study examines the nature of coercion, which has been used as theoretical explanation about the resolution of semantic incompatibility between a construction and a lexical item that occurs in it (Michaelis 2005), through empirical data derived from frequency, processing time, and acceptability judgments. I observed the co-occurrence of the ditransitive construction (DC), with various verbs that occur in it.
Based on the assumptions of the usage-based model (Langacker 1988, Kemmer and Barlow 2000), which relates semantic knowledge with frequency of usage, I expect that if a construction is semantically highly compatible with a given lexical item, their co-occurrence will be used with higher frequency, compared to cases of lower semantic compatibility. Therefore, if more coercion is involved, lower frequency is predicted. In addition, if coercion is understood as a psychological phenomenon, i.e. as a ‘resolution’ process during semantic interpretation, greater semantic incompatibility should require greater resolution and hence more processing time (Kemmer 2008). Acceptability judgments of sentences are also predicted to be the result of better or worse compatibility between linguistic elements.
To test this hypothesized correlation, first, for the linguistic knowledge about the degree of semantic compatibility, I set up five semantic compatibility categories, according to the degree that the verb implies ‘successful transfer of possession’ (Goldberg 1995): 1 for the most compatible (e.g. give) and 5 (e.g. stay) for the least.
To obtain the frequency pattern, I analyzed a part of BNC spoken data, containing 1,450,000 words. To examine the relative frequency of the verb usage in the DC, I adopted ‘collexeme analysis’ (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003) and ranked them based on ‘collostructional strength’ of each verb, 1 (give) as the most frequently associated with the DC and 49 (drop) as the least.
For the experiment, I selected 35 verbs considering semantic compatibility categories and the corpus analysis result, and then constructed 35 sentences where each verb was used as a main verb in the DC like (1).
(1) John cooked Jane the egg. (cook from Category2)
27 participants read the sentences in a self-paced reading task. The time to read the second NP (underlined in (1)) was recorded. After reading each sentence, the participants judged its acceptability on 5-point-scale.
Finally, each “verb-DC” co-occurrence was given semantic compatibility category score (SemCom), collostruction rank (ColloRank) resulting from the collexeme analysis, and processing time (ProcessingT) and acceptability judgment score (AcceptScore) resulting from the experiment. I correlated all these scores.
As Table 1 and the regression on AcceptScore (r2 = .33, p < .001) in (2) shows, all aspects were correlated with each other. This implies that when a verb and a construction are less compatible, their co-occurrence is expected to require more coercion, so it is used less frequently, processed with more effort, and judged less acceptable.
(2 ) y AccetScore = .79xSemCom + .03xColloRank + .001x ProcessingT – 2.87
(p <.001) (p < .001) (p < .05)
This study shows that coercion is not just a theoretical explanation of the resolution of semantic incompatibility but rather an actual psychological process involving processing effort. Moreover, it is correlated with language use (frequency and acceptability judgments).
(See the attached PDF for charts and references)
Robert F. Williams (Lawrence)
Friday, May 18th
Buchanan A201
Creativity is widely viewed as involving the combination of mental representations. Koestler (1964) claims that creative insights derive from the ‘bisociation’ of conceptual ‘matrices’. Fauconnier and Turner (1998, 2002) present a detailed account of ‘conceptual blending,’ a cognitive mechanism for combining content in distinct mental spaces to yield blended spaces with emergent structure. Among their examples is the Complex Numbers blend, which combines real numbers with two-dimensional space such that every number has a real part, an imaginary part, an angle, and a magnitude, making it possible to manipulate numbers geometrically. Recently, Thagard and Stewart (2011) have proposed ‘convolution’ as a neural mechanism through which two patterns of neural activity can be combined to produce a third pattern that is not the sum of the inputs. These advances bring us closer to understanding how the human mind can create what is, in the words of Boden (2004), ‘new, surprising, and valuable’.
Though many conceptual blends are clearly novel, we have as yet an incomplete picture of how novel blends emerge in human activity. To explore this topic, I compare two episodes of instruction in clock-reading that both involve the construction of blends. In the first, the speaker builds a conventional blend for telling time, while in the second, he builds a novel blend for telling time using a geometric input not normally associated with clock-reading. In both cases, he establishes cross-space mappings through a series of gestures coordinated with and construed by speech (as in Williams 2008), producing anchored blends that can be ‘run’ by manipulating the clock hands into configurations for particular times. The novel blend is new and surprising, but it is not especially valuable as a way to read time and so is quickly forgotten. These examples demonstrate a continuity between conventional and novel blends, showing how both arise through common conceptual mechanisms and are developed through gestural enactments that “make material patterns into representations” (Hutchins 2010: 434). The implication is that creativity is inherent in everyday cognition but noticed only when it produces blends that exhibit Boden’s three properties. The examples also question the exclusive focus on mental representations in theorizing about creativity, suggesting instead that embodied interaction with the material world—active perception, action, and enaction—plays a fundamental role in the emergence and propagation of novel insights.
References
Boden, M. A. (2004), The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2nd Ed. London: Routledge.
Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. (1998). Conceptual integration networks. Cognitive Science, 22(2): 133-187.
Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Hutchins, E. (2010). Enaction, imagination, and insight. In J. Stewart, O. Gapenne, & E. A. Di Paolo (eds.), Enaction: Towards a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science (pp. 425-450). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Koestler, A. (1964). The Act of Creation. New York: Macmillan.
Thagard, P., & Stewart, T.C. The AHA! experience: Creativity through emergent binding in neural networks. Cognitive Science, 35: 1-33
Williams, R. F. (2008). Gesture as a conceptual mapping tool. In A. Cienki & C. Müller (eds.), Metaphor and Gesture (pp. 55-92). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Eva Elisabeth Wehling (UCB)
Friday, May 18th
Buchanan A201
Research shows that pragmatic gestures often rely on the same embodied concepts that structure thought and language (McNeil 1992; Müller 2004; Sweetser 1998). Pragmatic gestures that serve to control discourse events have been noted (Kendon 1995, 2004; Calbris 1990), and the majority of pragmatic gesture research emphasizes communicative cooperation and inclusion (Bavelas et al. 1992, 1995; Kendon 1995, 2004; Müller 2004). This study proposes a differentiation between pragmatic gestures that are grounded in spatial and force-dynamic reasoning (Talmy 1981, 1988, 2000), and gestures that do not directly relate to embodied notions of force and space, such as manual citing gestures (inclusive-cooperative) and facial disapproval gestures (controlling).
Based on an analysis of 30 minutes audiovisual recordings of political debate, it is shown that gestures that are based on embodied notions of force and space are used more frequently to control a discourse event than those who are not (such as a disapproving facial gesture) as well as non-embodied ones (conventionalized gestures).
Control gestures that are based on embodied notions of space and force are used in both argumentative and conversational discourse. However, the handling of space and force displays clear differences between argument and conversation. The analysis of the data shows that amicable conversational control gestures that have been reported (Müller 2004; Bavelas et al. 1992, 1995; Özyürek 2002; Sweetser & Sizemore 2008; Ladewig 2011) make, depending on communicative context, between 14% and 20% of the control gestures used in argumentative discourse.
Therefore, a scalar typology of pragmatic gestures that organize speaker interaction on the basis of force dynamics and spatial reasoning is proposed.
(See the attached PDF for references)
Alexander R. Wahl (UCSB)
Saturday, May 19th
Buchanan A hallway on the 2nd floor.
Recent work in psycholinguistics has examined how language users possess “rich memory representations” of prior linguistic experiences (Bybee, 2010). These representations are considered to reflect the distributional regularities with which different words co-occur. A cooccurrence of particular words, or collocates, that is attested more frequently than would be expected by chance is said to exhibit greater attraction and thus greater cognitive entrenchment as a unit-like chunk, or collocation (Manning & Schütze, 1999). Recent corpus work has quantified how attracted to or repelled from each other collocates are via various association statistics. Researchers have also begun to search for comprehension- and production-based effects which provide psycholinguistic evidence that higher attraction or “stronger” collocations are indeed mentally represented as unit-like. Specifically, psycholinguistic studies have shown that syntactically earlier collocates prime later ones (Durrant and Doherty, 2010; Ellis et al., 2009), while corpus studies have shown that strong collocations exhibit patterns of phonological reduction characteristic of prefabricated wholes (Gregory et al., 1999).
However, to my knowledge no research has examined how prosodic boundaries interact with collocations to evidence their unitary nature. Specifically, it has been repeatedly shown that, in English, prosodic constituents do not split words (e.g., Shukla et al., 2006). Thus, if highstrength collocations are stored more or less like wholes analogous to how individual words are stored as wholes, then prosodic boundaries should be less likely to split them while being more likely to split low-strength collocations. I test this hypothesis here, drawing on data from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBC). The SBC is unique in that it is transcribed into intonation units (IU), a prosodic constituent that spans on average four words and is usually characterized by a single, coherent intonational contour (Chafe, 1994). I employ several popular measures of word attraction to quantify strength of adjacent two-word collocations (bigrams) both within and across IU boundaries. These measures include mutual information, the t-score, and log likelihood. In addition, I use Delta P; though rare, this measure is more psychologically realistic to the extent that it encodes directionality of association. The data show that, regardless of the association measure used, there are significant differences between the median bigram attractions within and between IUs (mutual information: med_within=3.28, med_between=1.70, p=<.001; the t-score: med_within=9.21 med_between=2.63 p=<.001; log likelihood: med_within=16.00, med_between=3.24, p=<.001). In addition, the new measure of Delta P brings out the difference between within- and between- IU bigrams well: med_within=.076, med_between=.023, p=<.001. Thus, IU boundary placement evidences the more entrenched nature of bigrams whose collocates are more highly attracted to each other in that such boundaries show a dispreference for splitting high-strength collocations, while instead being placed so as to split low-strength ones.
These findings demonstrate how the modeling of chunking and rich memory with corpora, using both established and new, more psychologically motivated association measures, can take prosody into account to provide for better resolution of these phenomena]. And since prosodic cues must play a central role in distributionally-based chunking of language (i.e., in children’s acquisition), such an inclusion of prosody in the analysis of chunking is an imperative.
References
Bybee, J. (2010). Language, Usage, and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chafe, W. L. (1994). Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Durrant, P. & Doherty, A. (2010). Are high-frequency collocations psychologically real? Investigating the thesis of collocational priming. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 6(2),
125-155.
Ellis, N. C., Frey, E. & Jalkanen, I. (2009). The psychological reality of collocation and semantic prosody. In U. Romer & R. Schulze (Eds.), Exploring the Lexis-Grammar Interface (pp. 89-114). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Gregory, M.L., Raymond, W.D., Bell, A., Fosler-Lussier, E. & Jurafsky, D. (1999). The effects of collocational strength and contextual predictability in lexical production. In Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago, Illinois.
Manning, C.D., Schütze, H. (1999). Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Shukla, M., Nespor, M. & Mehler, J. (2006). An interaction between prosody and statistics in the segmentation of fluent speech. Cognitive Psychology, 54, 1-32.
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Barbara Shaffer (New Mexico) & Terry Janzen (Manitoba)
Friday, May 18th
Buchanan A201
Inherent in the conceptual domain of epistemic modality is the potential for the speaker to express a level of commitment, from weak to strong, to the situation encoded by the proposition. On another axis, a modal construction may be either agent-oriented or speaker-oriented, and when speaker-oriented, the expression may range in the degree of overt or implied subjectivity. Evidential constructions, which share at least some characteristics with epistemic modal constructions, may also range along the dimension of subjectification/objectification.
Here, we are interested in the interplay of these features for both modals and evidentials in American Sign Language (ASL), and take an embodied view of the signeras- articulator’s production of both modal constructions and evidentials. Embodiment means more than just using the body in the articulation of a signed language. Taking the view of embodiment exemplified by Landau, O’Hearn and Hoffman (2010), we examine how the body’s “anchoring to the world” (2010:132) in large part determines how spatial representations are developed and, in fact, form the basis for the expression of both actual and abstract spatial relations. A signed language gives us particular insight into the exploration of these aspects of thought and expression because the signer does use her body, face and hands in the articulation of language. Crucially, this takes place within the space surrounding the signer, upon which conceptual space mappings occur with regularity.
In this study we look at two aspects of modal and evidential constructions in an attempt to better understand how signers embody speaker subjectivity. We first examine structural elements in the clauses where modals and evidentials appear, that is, the modal or evidential form, the existence of an overt agent whether first person or other, eye gaze, and spatial relations expressed within the clause, particularly as informed by viewing the hands as objects (Wilcox 2007) and the notion of body partitioning (Dudis 2004). From this we see evidence that links to the second aspect of this study, which is whether or not the degree to which the subjective stance of the signer can be correlated to some overt feature, or combinations of features of the construction. The study is corpus-based, with modal and evidential constructions taken from conversations between dyads in ASL and annotated in ELAN. Shaffer (2000, 2004, in press) and Shaffer and Janzen (in preparation) have begun to categorize modal verbs and evidential structures in ASL, but to date they have not investigated linguistic correlates among elements in these constructions altogether. The present study seeks to do just this, and thus give us a clearer understanding of what an embodied view of grammar in ASL can tell us about the human capacity to conceptualize subjectively construed relationships between the language user and the propositions she expresses, along with the development of linguistic structures that represent her views.
References
Dudis, Paul G. 2004. Body partitioning and Real-space blends. In: Cognitive Linguistics 15(2), 223–238.
Landau, Barbara, Kirsten O’Hearn, and James E. Hoffman. 2010. Tethering to the world, Coming undone. In Kelly S. Mix, Linda B. Smith, and Michael Gasser (Eds.), The Spatial Foundations of Language and Cognition. Oxford/New York: Oxford
University Press. 132-156.
Shaffer, Barbara. 2000. A Syntactic, Pragmatic Analysis of the Expression of Necessity and Possibility in American Sign Language. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of New Mexico.
Shaffer, Barbara. 2004. Information ordering and speaker subjectivity: Modality in ASL. Cognitive Linguistics, 15:2, 175–195.
Shaffer, Barbara. (2012). A Discourse analysis of evidentials in American Sign Language. In Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser (Eds.), Viewpoint in Language: A Multimodal Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
139-155.
Shaffer, Barbara and Terry Janzen. (In preparation). Mood and modality in American Sign Language. In Jan Nuyts & Johan van der Auwera (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Mood and Modality, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Xitlally Rivero Romero & Claudia Reyes Trigos (Tecnológico de Monterrey)
Friday, May 18th
Buchanan B213
This paper aims to analyze the relationship between metaphor and iconicity in the narratives of two Mexican writers: the short stories “Los inocentes”, by Inés Arredondo, and “Griselda”, by Amparo Dávila. The proposal builds on the idea that certain literary expressions have an iconic relationship with their meaning and, therefore, it is possible to make a metaphorical reading of the literary text as a single poetic form or as a single linguistic expression. This idea is supported, first, on Damaso Alonso’s proposals (1950) about Spanish poetry, and the Langacker cognitive grammar’s concept of linguistic expression (2008). Second, in the work of Masako Hiraga (2005) about the relationship between metaphor and iconicity.
Damaso Alonso says that in poetry, there is always a motivated link between signifier and signified (32), and nothing happens in poetry that also exists in the everyday speech (602, 603). He conceives signified and signifier as complex constructs within which we can distinguish, in the first, a series of partial meanings that encompass not only conceptual values but also affective values, and in the second, a series of partial significants. The “form”, then, is a complex built around motivated relationships between conceptual-affective complex and the phonetic complex. This form is not limited to one word, but can extend to the sentence or a text with a complete sense.
Similarly, Langacker says that every linguistic expression, no matter how complex it is, consists of three parts: a phonological structure, a semantic structure and a symbolic bidirectional relation that links and integrates these two structures in a single unit. The symbolic nature of the relations between the two structures does not exclude the possibility that the linguistic expression can show certain characteristics of the icons or even indexes. This is because linguistic expressions are not conclusively arbitrary, but depend on cognitive operations carried out by our mind to process, store, and use the amount of information we are exposed to each time.
Hiraga, meanwhile, proposed that in some literary texts takes place a formalconceptual integration when grammatical metaphors give meaning to form. This macro integration occurs from diagrammatic mapping of meaning towards the form, either through visual structures, sound structures or syntax structures.
Given the nature of the corpus, originally written in Spanish, we will focus on sound and syntactic structures that keeps a metaphorical relation with their meaning. The result of the macro-operation of conceptual and formal integration, according to Damaso Alonso and in line with Langacker, will be the poetic form, the literary text as a whole.
(See the attached PDF for references)
Jake Kurczek & Melissa Duff (Iowa)
Friday, May 18th
Buchanan B213
Creativity has long fascinated artists, philosophers and psychologists alike. More recently, the cognitive components and neural underpinnings of creativity have become of considerable interest in cognitive neuroscience. From a neuroscience perspective, creativity requires the rapid combination and recombination of existing mental representations to create novel ideas and ways of thinking. Most of the work linking creativity to the brain has focused on the frontal lobes. This work includes fMRI studies reporting greater activation of the prefrontal cortex in tasks involving creativity and observational reports that some patient groups with frontal lobe abnormality (autism; schizophrenia) have increased creative acumen. Another line of work points to the role of the hippocampus in creativity. The hippocampal system, through its interaction with neocortical storage sites, provides a relational database necessary for the creation, updating, and juxtaposition of mental representations. The flexible and novel use of these representations suggests a critical role for the hippocampus in creative thinking and hippocampal damage has been linked to disruptions in the creative and flexible use of language and in imagining future events.
In the present study we examined creative thinking in a group of patients with neurological damage to either the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) (N=6) or the hippocampus (HC) (N=5) and 11 demographically (e.g., age, sex, education) matched healthy comparison participants (NC). Each participant completed the Torrance Test of Creativity (TTCT), a nationally normed test that examines verbal and non-verbal creative thinking. Patients with HC damage were impaired on all tests (figural = 74.6, SD = 17.5; verbal = 57.0, SD = 8.33) of the TTCT compared to the NC group (figural = 102.1, SD = 11.6; verbal = 100.2, SD = 23.8) and impaired on the figural test compared to the vmPFC group (figural = 85.5, SD = 11.4; verbal = 94.5, SD = 14.9; see Figure 1). Patients with vmPFC damage did not score significantly different from the NC group. These results indicate the significant contribution of the hippocampus to creative thinking, while damage to the vmPFC alone is not sufficient to impair creative thinking. This work further contributes to our understanding of creative thinking and its instantiation in the mind and brain.
(See the attached PDF for figures)
Elizabeth Finnigan (Strathclyde)
Saturday, May 19th
Buchanan A hallway on the 2nd floor
I argue that narrative space is systematically constructed by demonstrating that there are core patterns of representation when the spatial categories of landscape, people and rooms are investigated. These patterns appear to eschew cultural and temporal boundaries and therefore, may illustrate cognitive governance at work. If these spatial patterns operate on a cognitive level then I provide a further argument for their manifestation: they are a cognitive aid for the contextual monitoring of a text. The patterns represent a templated form of information which aid in the mental representation of space.
Álvaro Corral (Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano)
Saturday, May 19th
Buchanan A201
How can we understand creative processes in the genesis and comprehension of the works of art? We will try to answer both questions with the help of Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002). The underlying hypothesis here is that the cognitive processes which are run by spectators of works of art seem to be similar to the cognitive processes of the artist, in order to mean what he wants to communicate to the public. In the particular case of Picasso´s Guernica (1937) we have the special coincidence that a series of more than forty sketches are available for us. After the Nazis bombed the small Spanish town of Guernica in April 1937, Picasso worked feverishly for a period of six weeks in a mural to protest against violence. In the sequence of the sketches, which are dated and numbered by Picasso himself, we can observe how the painter developed his movements forward and back to the stage of the final version. In his classical interpretation of this process Rudolf Arnheim (1962) proposed that the figures of the painting are characterized by different expressive attitudes. He speaks therefore of ‘characters’, ‘attitudes’ and ‘sentiments’. In his interpretation Arnheim tried to explain how abstract ‘sentiments’ could be attached to ‘characters’. When we look at the upright standing and forward seeing bull on the left of Guernica, we want to know how abstract sentiments of courage, pride and stability can be attached to the figure of the bull. With the help of the Conceptual Blending Theory we would be able to offer an alternative interpretation of this cognitive attachment of some ‘sentiments’ and abstract meanings to the figures depicted.
In order to demonstrate the sequence of this exclusively human cognitive process we will take the dominant figure of the bull and show how Picasso struggle with himself, as it is well documented by the sketches, in order to paint something more than a simple bull observing the devastating scene depicted on the canvas. During this creative process Picasso considered the possibility to show an anthropomorphic bull as it is known in one of his previous paintings (the Minotauromaquia of 1935). In other sketches of the bull Picasso shows clearly human-like characteristics or ‘sentiments’ which were cognitive ‘blended’ in the final version of the painting. It is interesting to observe that in this cognitive blending those anthropomorphic characteristics of the bull were put aside by Picasso in the painting, meanwhile their implicit reference to the ‘sentiments’ as courage, pride, stability remain attached to the final figure of the bull, as they are clearly explicit in the sketches too.
(See the attached PDF for figures)