Incremental interpretation at verbs: restricting the domain of subsequent reference

Participants' eye movements were recorded as they inspected a semi-realistic visual scene showing a boy, a cake, and various distractor objects. Whilst viewing this scene, they heard sentences such as 'the boy will move the cake' or 'the boy will eat the cake'. The cake was the only edible object portrayed in the scene. In each of two experiments, the onset of saccadic eye movements to the target object (the cake) was significantly later in the move condition than in the eat condition; saccades to the target were launched after the onset of the spoken word cake in the move condition, but before its onset in the eat condition. The results suggest that information at the verb can be used to restrict the domain within the context to which subsequent reference will be made by the (as yet unencountered) post-verbal grammatical object. The data support a hypothesis in which sentence processing is driven by the predictive relationships between verbs, their syntactic arguments, and the real-world contexts in which they occur.     

Learning individual talkers' structural preferences

Listeners are often capable of adjusting to the variability contained in individual talkers' (speakers') speech. The vast majority of findings on talker adaptation are concerned with learning the contingency between phonological characteristics and talker identity. In contrast, the present study investigates representations at a more abstract level - the contingency between syntactic attachment style and talker identity. In a 'visual-world' experiment, participants were exposed to semi-realistic scenes depicting several objects (e.g., an adult man, a young girl, a motorbike, a carousel, and other objects) accompanied by a spoken sentence with a structurally ambiguous relative clause (e.g., 'The uncle of the girl who will ride the motorbike/carousel is from France.' In the context of the scene, 'motorbike' suggested the uncle as the agent of the riding, whereas 'carousel' suggested the girl as the agent). For half the experimental items, one version of the sentence was read by one talker, who always uttered sentences that resolved, pragmatically, to the high attachment (the uncle as the agent), and the other by another talker, who always uttered sentences resolving to the low attachment (the girl as the agent). For the other half of the experimental items, both versions were read by a third talker who produced both high and low attachments. It was found that, after exposure to these stimuli, and for new sentences not heard previously, participants learnt to anticipate the 'appropriate' attachment depending on talker identity (with no attachment preference for the talker who produced both attachment types). The data suggest that listeners can learn the relationship between talker identity and abstract, structural, properties of their speech, and that syntactic attachment decisions in comprehension can reflect sensitivity to talker-specific syntactic style.     

Gentzen-Type Methods for Bilattice Negation

A general Gentzen-style framework for handling both bilattice (or strong) negation and usual negation is introduced based on the characterization of negation by a modal-like operator. This framework is regarded as an extension, generalization or re- finement of not only bilattice logics and logics with strong negation, but also traditional logics including classical logic LK, classical modal logic S4 and classical linear logic CL. Cut-elimination theorems are proved for a variety of proposed sequent calculi including CLS (a conservative extension of CL) and CLS_cw (a conservative extension of some bilattice logics, LK and S4). Completeness theorems are given for these calculi with respect to phase semantics, for SLK (a conservative extension and fragment of LK and CLS_cw, respectively) with respect to a classical-like semantics, and for SS4 (a conservative extension and fragment of S4 and CLScw, respectively) with respect to a Kripke-type semantics. The proposed framework allows for an embedding of the proposed calculi into LK, S4 and CL.     

Completeness and Cut-Elimination for First-Order Ideal Paraconsistent Four-Valued Logic

Studia Logica - In this study, we prove the completeness and cut-elimination theorems for a first-order extension F4CC of Arieli, Avron, and Zamansky’s ideal paraconsistent four-valued logic...     

Knowing what, where, and when: Event comprehension in language processing

We investigated the retrieval of location information, and the deployment of attention to these locations, following (described) event-related location changes. In two visual world experiments, listeners viewed arrays with containers like a bowl, jar, pan, and jug, while hearing sentences like “The boy will pour the sweetcorn from the bowl into the jar, and he will pour the gravy from the pan into the jug. And then, he will taste the sweetcorn”. At the discourse-final “sweetcorn”, listeners fixated context-relevant “Target” containers most (jar). Crucially, we also observed two forms of competition: listeners fixated containers that were not directly referred to but associated with “sweetcorn” (bowl), and containers that played the same role as Targets (goals of moving events; jug), more than distractors (pan). These results suggest that event-related location changes are encoded across representations that compete for comprehenders’ attention, such that listeners retrieve, and fixate, locations that are not referred to in the unfolding language, but related to them via object or role information.     

Relative Clause Attachment: Nondeterminism in Japanese Parsing

Like many other languages, Japanese is ambiguous about the potential attachment sites of a relative clause which appears alongside a complex noun phrase. One important class of parsing theories (nondeterministic accounts) predicts that the relative clause will initially be attached to the first available host and later assigned to an alternative site, following the intervention of certain discourse processes. An alternative (deterministic) account maintains that the preliminary attachment site remains unchanged throughout the course of processing the sentence. The results of a questionnaire and a self-paced reading study with Japanese materials of this kind provided evidence of phased attachment first to one noun host and then to another. It is argued that these results are compatible only with nondeterministic accounts of parsing.     

Correction to: Kripke-Completeness and Cut-elimination Theorems for Intuitionistic Paradefinite Logics With and Without Quasi-Explosion

Journal of Philosophical Logic - The original version of this article unfortunately contains several errors introduced by the typesetter during the publishing process. It has been corrected.     

Normal Modal Substructural Logics with Strong Negation

We introduce modal propositional substructural logics with strong negation, and prove the completeness theorems (with respect to Kripke models) for these logics.     

Kripke-Completeness and Cut-elimination Theorems for Intuitionistic Paradefinite Logics With and Without Quasi-Explosion

Journal of Philosophical Logic - Two intuitionistic paradefinite logics N4C and N4C+ are introduced as Gentzen-type sequent calculi. These logics are regarded as a combination of Nelson’s...