On the Meaning of Words and Dinosaur Bones: Lexical Knowledge Without a Lexicon

Although for many years a sharp distinction has been made in language research between rules and words—with primary interest on rules—this distinction is now blurred in many theories. If anything, the focus of attention has shifted in recent years in favor of words. Results from many different areas of language research suggest that the lexicon is representationally rich, that it is the source of much productive behavior, and that lexically specific information plays a critical and early role in the interpretation of grammatical structure. But how much information can or should be placed in the lexicon? This is the question I address here. I review a set of studies whose results indicate that event knowledge plays a significant role in early stages of sentence processing and structural analysis. This poses a conundrum for traditional views of the lexicon. Either the lexicon must be expanded to include factors that do not plausibly seem to belong there; or else virtually all information about word meaning is removed, leaving the lexicon impoverished. I suggest a third alternative, which provides a way to account for lexical knowledge without a mental lexicon.     

Restricting grammatical complexity

Theories of natural language syntax often characterize grammatical knowledge as a form of abstract computation. This paper argues that such a characterization is correct, and that fundamental properties of grammar can and should be understood in terms of restrictions on the complexity of possible grammatical computation, when defined in terms of generative capacity. More specifically, the paper demonstrates that the computational restrictiveness imposed by Tree Adjoining Grammar provides important insights into the nature of human grammatical knowledge.     

The representation of grammatical categories in the brain

Language relies on the rule-based combination of words with different grammatical properties, such as nouns and verbs. Yet most research on the problem of word retrieval has focused on the production of concrete nouns, leaving open a crucial question: how is knowledge about different grammatical categories represented in the brain, and what components of the language production system make use of it? Drawing on evidence from neuropsychology, electrophysiology and neuroimaging, we argue that information about a word's grammatical category might be represented independently of its meaning at the levels of word form and morphological computation.     

Responsibility,Reactive Attitudes and Very General Facts of Human Nature

This paper defends P.F. Strawson's controversial ‘reversal move’, the view that the reactive attitudes determine what it means to be responsible. Many are critical of this account, arguing that it leads to the result that if we were to start to hold very young children responsible, they would be responsible. I argue that it is possible to read Strawson as providing a grammatical analysis of our moral responsibility language‐game by drawing two parallels between Strawson and Wittgenstein. This interpretation shows that the formulation of the problem associated with the ‘reversal move’ rests on a grammatical mistake.     

From simple associations to the building blocks of language: Modeling meaning in memory with the HAL model

This paper presents a theoretical approach of how simple, episodic associations are transduced into semantic and grammatical categorical knowledge. The approach is implemented in the hyperspace analogue to language (HAL) model of memory, which uses a simple global co-occurrence learning algorithm to encode the context in which words occur. This encoding is the basis for the formation of meaning representations in a high-dimensional context space. Results are presented, and the argument is made that this simple process can ultimately provide the language-comprehension system with semantic and grammatical information required in the comprehension process.     

Language Reflects “Core” Cognition: A New Theory About the Origin of Cross‐Linguistic Regularities

The underlying structures that are common to the world's languages bear an intriguing connection with early emerging forms of “core knowledge” (Spelke & Kinzler, 2007), which are frequently studied by infant researchers. In particular, grammatical systems often incorporate distinctions (e.g., the mass/count distinction) that reflect those made in core knowledge (e.g., the non‐verbal distinction between an object and a substance). Here, I argue that this connection occurs because non‐verbal core knowledge systematically biases processes of language evolution. This account potentially explains a wide range of cross‐linguistic grammatical phenomena that currently lack an adequate explanation. Second, I suggest that developmental researchers and cognitive scientists interested in (non‐verbal) knowledge representation can exploit this connection to language by using observations about cross‐linguistic grammatical tendencies to inspire hypotheses about core knowledge.     

Reenactment: an embodied cognition approach to meaning and linguistic content

A central finding in experimental research identified with embodied cognition (EC) is that understanding actions involves their embodied simulation, i.e., executing some processes involved in performing these actions. Extending these findings, I argue that reenactment??the overt embodied simulation of actions and practices, including especially communicative actions and practices, within utterances??makes it possible to forge an integrated EC-based account of linguistic meaning. In particular, I argue: (a) that remote entities can be referred to by reenacting actions performed with them; (b) that the use of grammatical constructions can be conceived of as the reenactment of linguistic action routines; (c) that complex enunciational structures (reported speech, irony, etc.) involve a separate level of reenactment, on which characters are presented as interacting with one another within the utterance; (d) that the segmentation of long utterances into shorter units involves the reenactment of brief audience interventions between units; and (e) that the overall meaning of an utterance can be stated in reenactment terms. The notion of reenactment provides a conceptual framework for accounting for aspects of language that are usually thought to be outside the reach of EC in an EC framework, thus supporting a view of meaning and linguistic content as thoroughly grounded in action and interaction.     

Frege on the psychological significance of definitions

Conclusion In contemporary work, the distinction between the proposition expressed by a sentence and its psychological significance is usually motivated by a familiar kind of counterfactual argument; and the discussion of these issues usually centers around the role of external factors in determining the meaning of our words. My primary goal in this paper has been to show that a similar, though not identical, distinction between two aspects of meaning can be developed entirely on the basis of considerations internal to language users — their cognitive limitations. To make this point, I have focused on symbols introduced through stipulative definitions. In a language containing such symbols, certain expressions and their definitional reductions will seem to differ in psychological significance for creatures with limited intellects, and so in any aspect of meaning that is supposed to correlate with psychological significance; but it seems also that there is some important aspect of meaning that they share.I have argued that a distinction in meaning like this — between sense and psychological significance — should be drawn even in the kind of languages of most concern to Frege, and that his failure to do so led to tensions in his thought. Of course, this observation only touches on the many issues involved in interpreting Frege's theory of definition more generally. I have not tried to describe here, for example, the ways in which the weak interpretation of fruitfulness might interact with the more robust interpretation mentioned earlier; I have only mentioned Frege's view on explicative definitions and the paradox of analysis, and failed even to mention either his treatment of contextual definition, or his peculiar objections to conditional definitions. I do want to emphasize, however, that the distinction drawn here is not simply a matter of Frege scholarship, but that it has some contemporary relevance as well. As we have seen, Frege's semantic goals often coincide with our own; and a number of contemporary writers are explicitly concerned, like Frege, to construct a semantic theory that is able to account for differences in meaning among logically equivalent expressions. Any such theorist should recognize a distinction like that drawn here between sense and psychological significance, and should avoid subjecting an account of one notion to constraints appropriate only for the other.     

Wittgenstein's Private Language Investigation

In this paper, I first review previous interpretations of Wittgenstein's remarks on private language, revealing their inadequacies, and then present my own interpretation. Basing mainly on Wittgenstein's notes for lectures on private sensations, I establish the following points: (i) ‘remembering the connection right’ means ‘reidentifying sensation‐types’; (ii) the reason for ‘no criterion of correctness’ is that nothing, especially no inner mechanisms nor external devices, can be utilised by the private speaker to tell whether some sensations are of one type or different types; and (iii) private names are not really names, private language is not really a language, therefore, private language is a grammatical illusion. My interpretation has the advantage of being able to reconcile Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, which is to dissolve philosophical problems by rearranging grammatical facts, with his actual philosophical practice, at least in the case of private language.     

It's Fascinating Research: The Cognition of Verbal Irony

ABSTRACT— Verbal irony is nonliteral language that makes salient a discrepancy between expectations and reality. For researchers who study verbal irony, a critical question is: How do we grasp the meaning of ironic language? The parallel-constraint-satisfaction approach holds promise as an answer to this question. By this account, multiple cues to ironic intent, such as tone of voice, incongruity, and knowledge of the speaker, are processed rapidly and in parallel and this information is coordinated with the utterance itself in order to construct a coherent interpretation that is the best fit for the activated information. Recently, research with individuals who struggle with irony comprehension (typically developing children, individuals with autism-spectrum disorder, individuals with brain injury) has provided new clues about the complex process by which ironic meaning is inferred.     

The Three Quines

This paper concerns Quine's stance on the issue of meaning normativity. I argue that three distinct and not obviously compatible positions on meaning normativity can be extracted from his philosophy of language - eliminative ]naturalism (Quine I), deflationary pragmatism (Quine II), and (restricted) strong normativism (Quine III) - which result from Quine's failure to separate adequately four different questions that surround the issue: the reality, source, sense, and scope of the normative dimension. In addition to the incompatibility of the views taken together, I argue on the basis of considerations due to Wittgenstein, Dummett, and Davidson that each view taken separately has self-standing problems. The first two fail to appreciate the ineliminability of the strong normativity of logic and so face a dilemma: they either smuggle it in illicitly, or insofar as they do not, fail to give an account of anything like a language. The third position's mixture of a universalism about logical concepts with a thorough-going relativism about non-logical concepts can be challenged once a distinction is drawn between the universalist and contextualist readings of strong normativity, a distinction inspired by Wittgenstein's distinction between grammatical and empirical judgements.     

On the Conceptual Foundations of Anti-Realism

The central premise of Michael Dummett's global argument for anti-realism is the thesis that a speaker's grasp of the meaning of a declarative, indexical-free sentence must be manifested in her uses of that sentence. This enigmatic thesis has been the subject of a great deal of discussion, and something of a consensus has emerged about its content and justification. The received view is that the manifestation thesis expresses a behaviorist and reductive theory of meaning, essentially in agreement with Quine's view of language, and motivated by worries about the epistemology of communication. In the present paper I begin by arguing that this standard interpretation of the manifestation thesis is neither particularly faithful to Dummett's writings nor philosophically compelling. I then continue by reconstructing, from Dummett's texts, an account of the manifestation thesis, and of its justification, that differ sharply from the received view. On my reading, the thesis is motivated not epistemologically, but conceptually. I argue that connections among our conceptions of meaning, assertion, and justification lead to a conclusion about the metaphysics of meaning: we cannot form a clearly coherent conception of how two speakers can attach different meanings to a sentence without at the same time differing in what they count as justifying assertions made with that sentence. I conclude with some suggestions about how Dummett's argument for global anti-realism should be understood, given my account of the manifestation thesis. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

No frills: Simple regularities in language can go a long way in the development of word knowledge

Recent years have seen a flourishing of Natural Language Processing models that can mimic many aspects of human language fluency. These models harness a simple, decades-old idea: It is possible to learn a lot about word meanings just from exposure to language, because words similar in meaning are used in language in similar ways. The successes of these models raise the intriguing possibility that exposure to word use in language also shapes the word knowledge that children amass during development. However, this possibility is strongly challenged by the fact that models use language input and learning mechanisms that may be unavailable to children. Across three studies, we found that unrealistically complex input and learning mechanisms are unnecessary. Instead, simple regularities of word use in children's language input that they have the capacity to learn can foster knowledge about word meanings. Thus, exposure to language may play a simple but powerful role in children's growing word knowledge. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/dT83dmMffnM .

Research Highlights

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) models can learn that words are similar in meaning from higher-order statistical regularities of word use.
• Unlike NLP models, infants and children may primarily learn only simple co-occurrences between words.
• We show that infants' and children's language input is rich in simple co-occurrence that can support learning similarities in meaning between words.
• We find that simple co-occurrences can explain infants' and children's knowledge that words are similar in meaning.

     

Language Learning in Wittgenstein and Davidson

In this paper, I discuss language learning in Wittgenstein and Davidson. Starting from a remark by Bakhurst, I hold that both Wittgenstein and Davidson’s philosophies of language contain responses to the problem of language learning, albeit of a different form. Following Williams, I hold that the concept of language learning can explain Wittgenstein’s approach to the normativity of meaning in the Philosophical Investigations. Turning to Davidson, I hold that language learning can, equally, explain Davidson’s theory of triangulation. I sketch an account of triangulation as Davidson’s response to the problem of the normativity of meaning and explain the role that language learning plays in this account.     

Processing a dynamic visual—Spatial language: Psycholinguistic studies of American Sign Language

American Sign Language (ASL) has evolved within a completely different biological medium, using the hands and face rather than the vocal tract and perceived by eye rather than by ear. The research reviewed in this article addresses the consequences of this different modality for language processing, linguistic structure, and spatial cognition. Language modality appears to affect aspects of lexical recognition and the nature of the grammatical form used for reference. Select aspects of nonlinguistic spatial cognition (visual imagery and face discrimination) appear to be enhanced in deaf and hearing ASL signers. It is hypothesized that this enhancement is due to experience with a visual-spatial language and is tied to specific linguistic processing requirements (interpretation of grammatical facial expression, perspective transformations, and the use of topographic classifiers). In addition, adult deaf signers differ in the age at which they were first exposed to ASL during childhood. The effect of late acquisition of language on linguistic processing is investigated in several studies. The results show selective effects of late exposure to ASL on language processing, independent of grammatical knowledge.This research was supported in part by National Institutes of Health grant HD-13249 awarded to Ursula Bellugi and Karen Emmorey, as well as NIH grants DC-00146, DC-00201, and HD-26022. I would like to thank and acknowledge Ursula Bellugi for her collaboration during much of the research described in this article.     

The evolution of relevance

With human language, the same utterance can have different meanings in different contexts. Nevertheless, listeners almost invariably converge upon the correct intended meaning. The classic Gricean explanation of how this is achieved posits the existence of four maxims of conversation, which speakers are assumed to follow. Armed with this knowledge, listeners are able to interpret utterances in a contextually sensible way. This account enjoys wide acceptance, but it has not gone unchallenged. Specifically, Relevance Theory offers an explicitly cognitive account of utterance interpretation that presents a radical challenge to the neo-Gricean paradigm. Evolutionary considerations are one way in which we can choose between competing theories. A simple game-theoretic model of the evolution of communication is presented, and it is used to derive a number of basic qualities that will be satisfied by all evolved communication systems. These qualities are observed to precisely predict the foundational principles of Relevance Theory. The model thus provides biological support for that enterprise in general, and for the plausibility of the cognitive mechanisms that it describes in particular.     

Language and know-how

I address the assumption that communicative interaction is made possible by knowledge of a language. I argue that this assumption as it is usually expressed depends on an unjustified reification of language, and on an unsatisfactory understanding of ‘knowledge’. I propose instead that communicative interaction is made possible by (Rylean) know-how and by the development of (Davidsonian) passing theories. We then come to see that our focus ought to be, not on propositional knowledge of a language which we internally represent, but on the practical application of know-how in our understanding and interpretation of others.     

Some attractions of verb agreement

In English, words like scissors are grammatically plural but conceptually singular, while words like suds are both grammatically and conceptually plural. Words like army can be construed plurally, despite being grammatically singular. To explore whether and how congruence between grammatical and conceptual number affected the production of subject-verb number agreement in English, we elicited sentence completions for complex subject noun phrases like The advertisement for the scissors. In these phrases, singular subject nouns were followed by distractor words whose grammatical and conceptual numbers varied. The incidence of plural attraction (the use of plural verbs after plural distractors) increased only when distractors were grammatically plural, and revealed no influence from the distractors' number meanings. Companion experiments in Dutch offered converging support for this account and suggested that similar agreement processes operate in that language. The findings argue for a component of agreement that is sensitive primarily to the grammatical reflections of number. Together with other results, the evidence indicates that the implementation of agreement in languages like English and Dutch involves separable processes of number marking and number morphing, in which number meaning plays different parts.     

Assertion,Complexity, and Sincerity

The target of this paper is the ‘simple’ knowledge account of assertion, according to which assertion is constituted by a single epistemic rule of the form ‘One must: assert p only if one knows p’ (where p is a proposition). My aim is to argue that those who are attracted to a knowledge account of assertion should prefer what I call the ‘complex’ knowledge account, according to which assertion is constituted by a system of rules all of which are, taken together, constitutive of assertion. One of those rules—which, following John Searle, I call the ‘preparatory condition’—is of the form ‘One must: assert p only if one knows p.’ All else being equal, simple accounts are preferable to complex accounts. I argue in this paper that all else isn't equal. While the simple knowledge account provides an elegant explanation of certain data, it is hard to see how to integrate the simple knowledge account into a more general theory of illocutionary acts. Because the complex knowledge account avoids this objection while explaining the same data as the simple knowledge account does, I conclude that the complex knowledge account is superior to the simple knowledge account.