Disfluencies, language comprehension, and Tree Adjoining Grammars

Disfluencies include editing terms such as uh and um as well as repeats and revisions. Little is known about how disfluencies are processed, and there has been next to no research focused on the way that disfluencies affect structure-building operations during comprehension. We review major findings from both computational linguistics and psycholinguistics, and then we summarize the results of our own work which centers on how the parser behaves when it encounters a disfluency. We describe some new research showing that information associated with misarticulated verbs lingers, and which adds to the large body of data on the critical influence of verb argument structures on sentence comprehension. The paper also presents a model of disfluency processing. The parser uses a Tree Adjoining Grammar to build phrase structure. In this approach, filled and unfilled pauses affect the timing of Substitution operations. Repairs and corrections are handled by a mechanism we term “Overlay,” which allows the parser to overwrite an undesired tree with the appropriate, correct tree. This model of disfluency processing highlights the need for the parser to sometimes coordinate the mechanisms that perform garden-path reanalysis with those that do disfluency repair. The research program as a whole demonstrates that it is possible to study disfluencies systematically and to learn how the parser handles filler material and mistakes. It also showcases the power of Tree Adjoining Grammars, a formalism developed by Aravind Joshi which has yielded results in many different areas of linguistics and cognitive science.     

Is Commercial Surrogacy Baby-selling?

ABSTRACT This essay considers a common objection to commercial surrogacy on the grounds that the child is treated as a commodity for sale by the surrogate and the commissioning couple. I analyse one prevalent argument for the view that commercial surrogacy is a kind of baby-selling, not service-selling. I conclude that this argument rests on an implausible interpretation of what the reproductive services are. I defend an alternative interpretation of typical surrogacy agreements. Furthermore, I argue that this interpretation fails to support the conclusion that the surrogate is primarily or exclusively selling a baby, rather than her reproductive services. My primary concern is to diagnose a conceptual error in an argument against surrogacy. However, the interpretation of surrogacy arrangements that is defended helps to shift the focus from the issue of whether or not the child is degraded to the issue of whether or not the surrogate degrades herself or is degraded by the commissioning couple.