Greg Carlson

A unified analysis of the English bare plural

It is argued that the English ‘bare plural’ (an NP with plural head that lacks a determiner), in spite of its apparently diverse possibilities of interpretation, is optimally represented in the grammar as a unified phenomenon. The chief distinction to be dealt with is that between the ‘generic’ use of the bare plural (as in ‘Dogs bark’) and its existential or ‘indefinite plural’ use (as in ‘He threw oranges at Alice’). The difference between these uses is not to be accounted for by an ambiguity in the NP itself, but rather by explicating how the context of the sentence acts on the bare plural to give rise to this distinction. A brief analysis is sketched in which bare plurals are treated in all instances as proper names of kinds of things. A subsidiary argument is that the null determiner is not to be regarded as the plural of the indefinite article a.

Linguistic structure in language processing

The Internal Structure of the Syllable.- Reading Complex Words.- A Synthesis of Some Recent Work in Sentence Production.- The Isolability of Syntactic Processing.- Neuropsychological Evidence for Linguistic Modularity.- Parsing Complexity and a Theory of Parsing.- Comprehending Sentences with Long-Distance Dependencies.- Thematic Structures and Sentence Comprehension.- Integrating Information in Text Comprehension: The Interpretation of Anaphoric Noun Phrases.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.

The role of thematic structures in interpretation and parsing

Abstract This paper explores how thematic role information associated with verbs is used in language processing. We suggest that thematic roles are useful for co-ordinating different types of information in language processing because they represent aspects of conceptual/semantic representation that map directly on to syntactic form. We review some recent studies investigating the use of thematic information in syntactic ambiguity resolution and present some new evidence that thematic information can be used to eliminate completely the garden path typically associated with reduced-relative clauses. We then review some of our recent work investigating lexical structure in the processing of sentences with long-distance dependencies, and conclude that thematic structure guides the initial interpretation of these sentences. We conclude with a discussion about how thematic information might enable the processing system to make early semantic commitments that take into account relevant aspects of discourse context.

On the Semantic Composition of English Generic Sentences

One part of the task in presenting a semantics for a natural language is to show how the meanings of the constituents of a sentence are combined with one another to build up a meaning for the whole sentence. To a certain degree, this part of the task can be worked on without committing oneself too specifically to any particular theory of meaning, and that is what I am going to try to do here. The construction of interest is that of generic sentences. Such sentences are found in all natural languages (though not in all artificial languages), but I will confine my remarks to how English generic sentences are built up from constituent meanings, ever hopeful that what I have to say about English will shed light on similar constructions in a wider range of natural languages. I will begin by giving a series of descriptions of what generic sentences are, working from the most notional and towards the most linguistic, to first stake out the domain of inquiry. I then turn to the semantic composition of such sentences, arguing that they are not uniformly of subject-predicate form, but that a wider variety of internal relations must be recognized. The overall purpose of the following discussion is to provide a set of general considerations that any formal semantic theory incorporating generics must contend with.1

Levels of representation in the interpretation of anaphoric reference and instrument inference

The level of representation accessed when inferences are made during sentence comprehension was examined. The inferences investigated included antecedent assignment for both definite noun phrase anaphors and pronouns and also instrument inferences. In making these inferences, a listener must access the inferred element, whether an antecedent or an instrument, in either a linguistic form representation or a discourse model. The level of representation involved in these inferences was determined by exploiting differences in the lexical-decision and naming tasks, which were argued to exhibit differential sensitivity to representational levels. In three experiments, the priming of antecedent and instrument targets in the lexical decision task was compared with priming of the same targets in the naming task. Differences in the patterns of activation across the two tasks indicated that all three types of inferences required-accessing-elements in a discourse model. Three control experiments ruled out simple context or congruity checking as an explanation for our results. The following conclusions were also supported by these studies: (1) Antecedent assignment occurs immediately after processing an anaphor; (2) antecedent assignment involves inhibition for the inappropriate antecedent rather than facilitation for the appropriate antecedent; (3) although subjects do not make instrument inferences-when they hear isolated sentences containing verbs that strongly imply certain instruments, the inferences are made when sentences are preceded by a context that mentions the instrument.

Generic terms and generic sentences

ConclusionWhether or not the particular view of generic sentences articulated above is correct, it is quite clear that the study of generic terms and the truth-conditions of generic sentences touches on the representation of other parts of the grammar, as well as on how the world around us is reflected in language. I would hope that the problems mentioned above will highlight the relevance of semantic analysis to other apparently distinct questions, and focus attention on the relevance of linguistic problems to other already established areas of inquiry.

Lexical structure in Parsing long-distance dependencies.

We review a series of experiments investigating lexical influences in parsing sentences with long-distance dependencies. We report three primary results. First, gaps are posited and filled immediately following verbs that are typically used transitively, even when the filler is an implausible object of the verb. However, gaps are not posited after verbs that are typically used intransitively. Second, plausibility determines whether or not a filler is treated as the object of a verb when the verb is typically used with both a direct object and an infinitive complement. Finally, verb control information is used immediately in determining which noun phrase will be interpreted as the “understood” subject of an infinitive complement.

Comprehension of Deep and Surface Verbphrase Anaphors

Abstract Linguistic research on anaphora (Hankamer & Sag, 1976; Sag & Hankamer, 1984) suggests that anaphors can be divided into two classes: Surface anaphors that find their antecedents in some level of linguistic representation, and deep anaphors that find their antecedents in a discourse model or a corresponding mental representation. In three experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the syntactic form of the antecedent for a subsequent anaphor would affect the difficulty with which surface anaphors but not deep anaphors would be comprehended. In a “makes-sense” judgement task, surface anaphors were judged to make sense more often when the antecedent was introduced in a phrase that was syntactically parallel to the anaphor than when it was syntactically non-parallel. In contrast, the syntactic form of the antecedent did not affect judgements to the deep anaphors. Parallelism did, however, influence comprehension times for both types of anaphors. The results provide qualified support for the hypothesi...

Thematic Roles and the Individuation of Events

The history of thematic roles (alternatively called ‘case roles/relations’ (Fillmore, 1968) and ‘thematic relations’ (Gruber, 1965)) in recent linguistic theory is one filled with varying conceptions of what these are, if indeed they exist at all.1 They have at times been conceived of as purely syntactic objects (e.g. the ‘theta roles’ of Chomsky, 1981; the “case relations” of Fillmore, 1968), as names for parts of lexical/conceptual structure (e.g. Jackendoff, 1987), as purely semantic objects (Dowty, 1991; Parsons 1990, Carlson, 1984), or as epiphenomena (Ravin, 1990). The question of whether thematic roles are objects made reference to by a linguistic theory has been examined and reexamined with mixed results (Jackendoff (1972, 1987), Nishigauchi (1984), Dryer (1985), Bresnan (1982), Ladusaw and Dowty (1988), Ravin (1990)). This is perhaps not surprising since thematic roles would appear to be dispensable entities in the sense that it is easy to conceive of how to write a lexicon, a syntax, a morphology, a semantics, or a pragmatics without them. Still, the observations surrounding thematic roles are just tantalizing enough to take notice, and make one wonder what they might be.

FILLING GAPS ONLINE - USE OF LEXICAL AND SEMANTIC INFORMATION IN SENTENCE PROCESSING

Two experiments investigated how people assign an interpretation to question phrases. In order to determine the meaning of the WH-phrase (e.g., who, what), a “gap” must be located and the role associated with the gap assigned to the WH-phrase. Two experiments tested the Lexical Expectation model of Fodor (1978), according to which lexical properties of the verb determine when a gap is posited, and the All Resorts model of Stowe (1984), according to which all possibilities are considered and evaluated on their pragmatic appropriateness. In Experiment 1, subjects judged the meaningfulness of full sentences. The frequency with which verbs are used transitively determined whether there was an effect of the plausibility of the WH-phrase to act as an object of the verb. Effects of plausibility of the WH-phrase as an object showed up in just those cases where the object role should be assigned to the WH-phrase according to the Lexical Expectation model, rather than as predicted by the All Resorts model. In Experiment 2, these results were replicated using the word-by-word self-paced reading paradigm. The plausibility effect showed up at the verb itself when it is normally used transitively. This evidence suggests that a gap is preferred even over a lexically filled object for transitive expectation verbs.