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Searching for specific sentence meaning in context: the conceptual relation between participants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2019

YAO-YING LAI  and
MARIA MERCEDES PIÑANGO
YAO-YING LAI*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA and Research Institute, National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disabilities, Tokorozawa, Saitama, Japan
MARIA MERCEDES PIÑANGO*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
*
†Addresses for correspondence: Yao-Ying Lai: E-mail yaoyinglai@gmail.com;
‡Maria Mercedes Piñango: E-mail maria.pinango@yale.edu.
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Abstract

We argue that the interpretation of transitive aspectual-verb sentences like “Sue finishes the book” results from an evaluation of the degree of asymmetry in control power between the participants in the sentence. Control asymmetry is proposed as one conceptual constraint on sentence meaning precisification. An evaluation of ‘high control asymmetry’ for the relation between “Sue” and “book” yields an agentive/actor-undergoer interpretation (Sue is doing something involving the book). An evaluation of ‘low control asymmetry’ yields a constitutive/part–whole interpretation (Sue’s story is the last one in the book). Which reading emerges depends on the comprehender’s control-asymmetry evaluation based on contextual cues or, in the absence of explicit context, based on conventionalized control asymmetry expectations given the participants’ denotations. Results show that semantically under-specified aspectual-verb sentences such as “Sue finishes/begins/continues the book” (i) receive multiple readings in a control-asymmetry neutral context, (ii) are judged as less acceptable than their control asymmetry-biased counterparts, and (iii) clearly evidence the constitutive reading as part of their core reading. These findings are consistent with a real-time linguistic meaning composition system that systematically draws from context guided by lexically driven semantic demands and that presents the structure of these demands as a cognitively viable metric of complexity.

Keywords

semantic under-specificationsemantic ambiguitycontextacceptabilitysentence processingcomplement coercion
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 582 - 620
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2019 

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Footnotes

*

This research was funded by NSF-BCS grant BCS-0643266 to Maria Mercedes Piñango, and NSF-INSPIRE Grant CCF-1248100 to Maria Mercedes Piñango, Ashwini Deo, Todd Constable, and Mokshay Madiman. We thank Ashwini Deo for useful discussions on this project and Michiru Makuuchi for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. Declaration of interest: We have no conflict of interest regarding this study.

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