Alessandra Zarcone

Logical Metonymy Resolution in a Words-as-Cues Framework: Evidence From Self-Paced Reading and Probe Recognition

Logical metonymy resolution (begin a book → begin reading a book or begin writing a book) has traditionally been explained either through complex lexical entries (qualia structures) or through the integration of the implicit event via post-lexical access to world knowledge. We propose that recent work within the words-as-cues paradigm can provide a more dynamic model of logical metonymy, accounting for early and dynamic integration of complex event information depending on previous contextual cues (agent and patient). We first present a self-paced reading experiment on German subordinate sentences, where metonymic sentences and their paraphrased version differ only in the presence or absence of the clause-final target verb (Der Konditor begann die Glasur → Der Konditor begann, die Glasur aufzutragen/The baker began the icing → The baker began spreading the icing). Longer reading times at the target verb position in a high-typicality condition (baker + icing → spread ) compared to a low-typicality (but still plausible) condition (child + icing → spread) suggest that we make use of knowledge activated by lexical cues to build expectations about events. The early and dynamic integration of event knowledge in metonymy interpretation is bolstered by further evidence from a second experiment using the probe recognition paradigm. Presenting covert events as probes following a high-typicality or a low-typicality metonymic sentence (Der Konditor begann die Glasur → AUFTRAGEN/The baker began the icing → SPREAD), we obtain an analogous effect of typicality at 100 ms interstimulus interval.

Inducing Script Structure from Crowdsourced Event Descriptions via Semi-Supervised Clustering

We present a semi-supervised clustering approach to induce script structure from crowdsourced descriptions of event sequences by grouping event descriptions into paraphrase sets (representing event types) and inducing their temporal order. Our model exploits semantic and positional similarity and allows for flexible event order, thus overcoming the rigidity of previous approaches. We incorporate crowdsourced alignments as prior knowledge and show that exploiting a small number of alignments results in a substantial improvement in cluster quality over state-of-the-art models and provides an appropriate basis for the induction of temporal order. We also show a coverage study to demonstrate the scalability of our ap-

Identifying actional features through semantic priming: Cross-Romance comparison

This paper reports four priming experiments in Italian and Spanish, whose main goal was to empirically verify the psychological reality of two aspectual features crucially involved in event type classification, resultativity and durativity. The participants performed two semantic decision tasks targeting these features: in the durativity task, they were asked whether the verb referred to a durable situation, and in the resultativity task whether it denoted a situation with a clear outcome. The results obtained prove that both features are involved in online processing of the verb meaning: achievements and activities (respectively classified as [+resultative, durative] and [-resultative, +durative]) were processed faster in certain priming contexts. This suggests that resultativity and durativity belong to the mental representation of verbal semantics. The pattern of priming effects obtained in the Romance languages presents some striking similarities (in the resultativity task, only * We gratefully acknowledge the financial and technical support of Laboratorio di Linguistica (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) and the assistance of its staff members (Irene Ricci and Chiara Bertini). We thank all participants from Pisa and Madrid, who agreed to donate their time to take the tests (undergraduate students in Translation and Interpretation, Modern Languages, Anthropology, Geography, History and Science of Music, Political Science and Law, Food Science and Technology), and all the colleagues and friends who did not hesitate to help ‘recruiting’ them (Elena de Miguel, Fernando Arroyo, Maria Jesus Zamora, Carmen Valcarcel, Mohamed El-Madkouri Maataoui, Esperanza Molla y Jesus Penalosa Olivares). Many thanks to Elena de Miguel for her insightful and encouraging comments on this study. This project was partially financed by the research project “Diccionario electronico multilingue de verbos de movimiento con significado amplio (andar, ir, venir y volver)” (FFI2009-12191, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid). Some of the results reported in this paper have been discussed in Zarcone (2008), Zarcone and Lenci (2010), and Batiukova et al. (2012). QUADERNI DEL LABORATORIO DI LINGUISTICA – VOL. 13/2014 2 achievements benefited from priming) alongside some intriguing differences, and clearly contrasts with the behaviour of another language tested, Russian, whose aspectual system differs in significant ways. Two hypotheses can be proposed to account for these results, both pointing to some sort of processing advantage for the achievements. The first hypothesis invokes the nature of the features involved: durativity is continuous and contextually malleable, whereas resultativity is binary and hence more stable. The second hypothesis focuses on the ontology of events, predicting that priming emerges when the target verb is actionally ambiguous. In this respect, transitively used activity verbs should occasionally yield priming, for they may be used as accomplishments. However, transitivity was not systematically controlled in the experiments reported below. Achievements, on the other hand, are inherently ambiguous: they can refer either to the moment at which a change of state occurs or to the resultant state itself.