Ambiguity in Our Technical Society

The spiritual situation at the turn of the millennium can be interpreted through Paul Tillich's appropriation of modernity, by analysis of the determinative structures and decisive trends of our age. The methods and organization of industry determine modern society. Spiritually, this situation results in the proliferation of means without ends, the objectification of natural structures, and the reduction of persons to things. Extrapolating from Tillich's analysis, the spiritual situation at the turn of the millennium can be understood as a quasi-religious struggle between the movements of liberal individualism and multiculturalism, both of which lose the sense of ambiguity. The communitarian movement and related interpretations remain the minority voice offering a mediating position.     

Effects of NP type on the resolution of word-order ambiguities

Locally ambiguous NP₁ NP₂ V clauses in Dutch are preferably assigned a subject-object rather than an object-subject interpretation, presumably on the basis of structurally based principles such as the Active-Filler Strategy. The present study investigates whether this preference can be affected by a nonconfigurational factor, namely the nature of NP₂. The type of an NP (indefinite NPs, full definite NPs, pronouns) conveys information about the discourse status of the NP referent, which, in turn, is associated with a specific syntactic position. More specifically, pronouns are used to refer to given, salient entities in the discourse (topics); and NPs with such referents are generally encoded in subject position. A self-paced reading experiment shows that NP₁ NP₂ V relative clauses are preferably interpreted as subject-object when NP₂ is a full definite NP (e.g., de vrouwen the women), but not when NP₂ is the second person pronoun jullie (you-PL). This suggests that the structural bias for a subject-first order is not as strong as has been previously assumed, but is influenced by discourse information encoded in the NPs. Implications for parsing models are discussed.     

中文句子中双音节兼类词句法分析历程初探

以既可用作名词,又可用作动词的汉语双音节兼类词为材料,采用移动窗口范式,考察了汉语句子中名词倾向性高和低两类兼类词句法分析的详细历程。结果发现,两类兼类词与各自的控制词之间,均未出现阅读时间上的显著差异,因此并不支持延迟模型所提出的兼类词句法角色延迟指派的观点。实验还发现,名词倾向性高的兼类词引起了更大的加工困难。此外,即便是名词倾向性低的兼类词,被试也仍为其指派名词的句法角色。花园路径模型和制约满意理论均不能单独和完整解释上述发现。文章指出,实验结果支持一种既不同于花园路径模型,又不同于制约满意理论的权变的理论。阅读中遇到兼类词时,读者能立即为其指派句法角色。这种指派过程既可以利用概率制约信息,也可以在句法分析原则指导下进行。句法分析原则是否起作用,取决于概率制约信息的制约强度     

Plausible Reasoning and the Resolution of Quantifier Scope Ambiguities

Despite overwhelming evidence suggesting that quantifier scope is a phenomenon that must be treated at the pragmatic level, most computational treatments of scope ambiguities have thus far been a collection of syntactically motivated preference rules. This might be in part due to the prevailing wisdom that a commonsense inferencing strategy would require the storage of and reasoning with a vast amount of background knowledge. In this paper we hope to demonstrate that the challenge in developing a commonsense inferencing strategy is in the discovery of the relevant commonsense data and in a proper formulation of the inferencing strategy itself, and that a massive amount of background knowledge is not always required. In particular, we present a very effective procedure for resolving quantifier scope ambiguities at the pragmatic level using simple quantitative data that is readily available in most database environments.     

Can propositional biases modulate syntactic repair processes? Insights from preceding comprehension questions

ABSTRACT

There is an ongoing debate about whether discourse biases can constrain sentence processing. Previous work has shown comprehension question accuracy to decrease for temporarily ambiguous sentences preceded by a context biasing towards an initial misinterpretation, suggesting a role of context for modulating comprehension. However, this creates limited modulation of reading times at the disambiguating word, suggesting initial syntactic processing may be unaffected by context [Christianson & Luke, 2011 Christianson, K. , & Luke, S. G. (2011). Context strengthens initial misinterpretations of text. Scientific Studies of Reading , 15 (2), 136–166. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/10888431003636787 [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. Context strengthens initial misinterpretations of text. Scientific Studies of Reading, 15(2), 136–166]. The current experiments examine whether propositional and structural content from preceding comprehension questions can cue readers to expect certain structures in temporarily ambiguous garden-path sentences. The central finding is that syntactic repair processes remain unaffected while reading times in other regions are modulated by preceding questions. This suggests that reading strategies can be superficially influenced by preceding comprehension questions without impacting the fidelity of ultimate (mis)representations.