Understanding Language: Compositionality and Discourse Processing
CHAPTER 6: Compositionality:
The concept that there are fixed rules for combining units of language in terms of their form that result in fixed meaning relationships between the words that are joined together.
Constituent:
A syntactic category consisting of a word or (more often) a group of words (e.g., noun phrase, prepositional phrase) that clump together and function as a single unit within a sentence.
Intransitive Verbs:
Verbs that take a subject but no object, such as (Joe) sneezes or (Keesha) laughs.
Noun Phrase (NP):
An abstract, higher-order syntactic category that can consist of a single word or of many words, but in which the main syntactic element is a noun, pronoun, or proper name.
Prepositional Phrase (PP):
A syntactic constituent, or higher-order category, that in English, consists of a preposition (e.g., in, under, before) followed by a noun phrase (NP).
Semantic Bootstrapping Hypothesis:
The idea that children come equipped with innate expectations of certain grammatical categories, as well as built-in mappings between key concept types and grammatical categories.
Telegraphic Speech:
Speech that preserves the correct order of words in sentences, but drops many of the small function words such as the, did, or to.
Transitive Verbs:
Verbs that take both a subject and an object.
Verb Islands:
Hypothetical syntactic frames that are particular to specific verbs, and that specify (1) whether that verb can combine with nouns to its left or right and/or (2) the roles that the co-occurring nouns can play in an event (for example, the do-er, the thing that is acted upon, and so on).
CHAPTER 10: Accommodation:
The process of updating a mental model to include information that is presupposed by a speaker, as evident by his use of specific presupposition-triggering expressions.
Antecedent:
A pronoun’s referent or referential match; that is, the expression (usually a proper name or a descriptive noun or noun phrase) that refers to the same person or entity as the pronoun.
Bridging Inference:
An inference that connects some of the content in a sentence with previous material in the text, or with information encoded in the mental model.
Elaborative Inference:
Refers to inferences that are not required in order to make a discourse coherent, but that enrich the meanings of sentences to include material that’s not explicitly encoded on the linguistic content of the sentence.
Explanation-Based View of Discourse Processing:
Theoretical account of discourse processing that emphasizes the active role of the reader as engaged in goal-driven processes of interpretation. The meaning that a reader constructs us assumed to be informed by her particular goals, and her attempts to construct a coherent representation that will explain why certain entities and actions are mentioned in a text.
Focus Constructions:
Syntactic structures that have the effect of putting special emphasis or focus on certain elements within the sentence.
Implicit Causality:
Expectations about the probable cause/effect structure of events denoted by particular verbs.
It-Cleft Sentence:
A type of focus construction in which a single clause has been split into two, typically with the form “It is/was X that/who Y.” The element corresponding to X in this frame is focused. For example, in the sentence It was Sam who left Fred, the focus is on Sam.
Memory-Driven Account of Discourse Processing:
Theoretical approach to discourse processing that emphasizes the role of passive, automatic memory-based processes, in which the integration of incoming discourse information is accomplished by activating existing representations in memory.
Mental Models:
Also known as situation models. Refers to detailed conceptual representation of the real-world situation that a sentence evokes.
Predictive Inference:
A type of elaborative inference that involves making predictions about the likely outcome of a sentence.
Presupposition:
An implicit assumption that is signaled by specific linguistic expressions, and whose existence or truth is taken for granted as background information.
Proposition:
The core meaning of a sentence as expressed by its linguistic content. This core meaning captures the real-world event or the situation that would have to occur in order for that sentence to be judged to be true.
Repeated-Name Penalty:
The finding that under some circumstances, it takes longer to read a sentence in which a highly salient referent is referred to by a full noun phrase (NP) rather than by a pronoun.
Reverse Cohesion Effect:
Readers retain more information from a text in which the coherence relations between sentences is not made explicit and must be inferred by the reader.
Wh-Cleft Sentence:
A type of focus construction in which one clause has been divided into two, with the first clause introduced by a wh-element.