Oliver Bott

The processing of events

Synthesizing ideas from event semantics and psycholinguistics, this monograph provides a new perspective on the processing of linguistic aspect and aspectual coercion. Confronting alternative semantic accounts with experimental evidence, the author develops a comprehensive model of online aspectual interpretation. The first part of the book critically reviews competing theoretical accounts of aspectual coercion. As an analytical tool the author introduces a computational model based on the event calculus by Hamm & van Lambalgen (2005) which makes use of planning formalisms from artificial intelligence. Detailed predictions from this framework are then tested in the experimental work reported in the second part. The focus here is on such questions as: Is aspectual coercion a uniform phenomenon or must we distinguish different types? Is aspect processed incrementally or is it computed only at the clause boundary? And finally, what insights can event related potentials yield about how the brain resolves local aspectual mismatch?

Easy Solutions for a Hard Problem? The Computational Complexity of Reciprocals with Quantificational Antecedents

We report two experiments which tested whether cognitive capacities are limited to those functions that are computationally tractable (PTIME-Cognition Hypothesis). In particular, we investigated the semantic processing of reciprocal sentences with generalized quantifiers, i.e., sentences of the form Q dots are directly connected to each other, where Q stands for a generalized quantifier, e.g. all or most. Sentences of this type are notoriously ambiguous and it has been claimed in the semantic literature that the logically strongest reading is preferred (Strongest Meaning Hypothesis). Depending on the quantifier, the verification of their strongest interpretations is computationally intractable whereas the verification of the weaker readings is tractable. We conducted a picture completion experiment and a picture verification experiment to investigate whether comprehenders shift from an intractable reading to a tractable reading which should be dispreferred according to the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis. The results from the picture completion experiment suggest that intractable readings occur in language comprehension. Their verification, however, rapidly exceeds cognitive capacities in case the verification problem cannot be solved using simple heuristics. In particular, we argue that during verification, guessing strategies are used to reduce computational complexity.

The Processing Domain of Scope Interaction

We present six experiments which investigated the time course of the interpretation of quantifier scope ambiguity. We used variable binding in the first quantifier to enforce scope inversion. The first two experiments were offline tests that established that the sentences had the proposed interpretations. The third experiment employed self-paced reading to show that potential difficulty in doubly quantified sentences with a variable is not due to interpreting the variable per se, but must come from scope inversion. We then report the results of two further self-paced reading experiments and an experiment in which we measured eye-movements during reading. Taken together, the reading time studies demonstrate that relative scope is only computed at the sentence-boundary. Only at the end of the sentence we found clear scope inversion effects. Our study shows that quantifier scope is not assigned incrementally, but depends on a complete minimal sentence.

From Verbs to Discourse: A Novel Account of Implicit Causality

We present a semantic theory of causal discourse that allows us to derive expectations about upcoming discourse, specifically when to expect various types of explanations. We apply our theory to the phenomenon of implicit causality and show how the semantics of implicit causality verbs interacts with discourse structure. In particular, we show why certain verbs trigger explanations per default, what kind of explanations are triggered, and why these explanations are closely related to specific coreference patterns. Predictions derived from the theory were tested in a large-scale crosslinguistic production study comparing discourse continuations in German and Norwegian—two languages displaying differing discourse structuring properties. The production study fully confirmed our predictions, with explanation types and implicit causality bias distributing as expected. The study furthermore reveals that our semantic account of implicit causality is cross-linguistically valid.

Cross-Linguistic Variation in the Processing of Aspect

The present study investigates the cross-linguistic processing of aspect in English and German. Three self-paced reading experiments provide evidence that coercion of a (simple) past accomplishment into an activity reading causes processing difficulty in English (Experiment 1), but not in German (Experiments 2 and 3). We attribute this cross-linguistic difference to immediate aspectual specification in English, whereas we find delayed aspectual specification in German.

The Processing Domain of Aspectual Interpretation

In the semantic literature lexical aspect is often treated as a property of VPs or even of whole sentences. Does the interpretation of lexical aspect – contrary to the incrementality assumption commonly made in psycholinguistics – have to wait until the verb and all its arguments are present? To address this issue, we conducted an offline study, two self-paced reading experiments and an eyetracking experiment to investigate aspectual mismatch and aspectual coercion in German sentences while manipulating the position of the mismatching or coercing stimulus. Our findings provide evidence that mismatch detection and aspectual repair depend on a complete verb-argument structure. When the verb didn’t receive all its (minimally required) arguments no mismatch or coercion effects showed up at the mismatching or coercing stimulus. Effects were delayed until a later point after all the arguments had been encountered. These findings have important consequences for semantic theory and for processing accounts of aspectual semantics. As far as semantic theory is concerned, it has to model lexical aspect as a supralexical property coming only into play at the sentence level. For theories of semantic processing the results are even more striking because they indicate that (at least some) semantic phenomena are processed on a more global level than it would be expected assuming incremental semantic interpretation.

An Event Semantics with Continuations for Incremental Interpretation

This paper presents a method to construct event semantic representations incrementally from left to right. The proposed theory focusses on the interaction between events and other scope taking expressions, in particular quantificational DPs and adverbials that are sensitive to aspect. Psycholinguistic experiments have revealed that semantic mismatches can be detected as early as their lexical triggers are encountered, without waiting for a complete semantic or syntactic representation. Our theory thus provides for “incomplete” representations that nonetheless allow for an immediate explanation of such mismatches, right at the point where left to right parsing detects the offending triggers. Viewed from a broader perspective, our framework can be seen as a logical background for theories of semantic parsing in general. In contrast to existing implementations of incremental interpretation, we only employ a single compositional processing rule, namely functional composition of only one logical type of expressions. On the other hand, for this (otherwise unmatched) uniformity to work, we rely on advanced semantic techniques like continuations, dynamic binding, and unrestricted β-reduction (cf. Barker 2002, Gronendijk & Stokhof 1991, Klein & Sternefeld 2013, respectively). In the context of adverbials, these methods can be shown to interact in a non-trivial way with the mereology of events as proposed in Krifka (1992).

Turning Adults into Children: Evidence for Resource-Based Accounts of Errors with Universal Quantification

The present study shows that adults make errors of quantifier spreading similar to those commonly observed in preschool children when interpreting universally quantified sentences. In a resource demanding version of the truth value judgment task, adult participants often rejected scope disambiguated, universally quantified sentences (e.g. Every kid is such that it was praised by exactly one teacher) in situations where each kid was praised by exactly one teacher, but there was (A) an additional teacher praising no kids (= classic quantifier spreading) and/or (B) a teacher who praised more than one kid. While the classic spreading error has been studied extensively, spreading errors of the second type have not been attested in the acquisition literature. Neither type of error occurred in an ordinary picture verification task using the same materials. A third experiment ruled out the possibility that the errors observed in Experiment 1 are due to misrepresenting the situations in memory. Our results are most consistent with resource-based accounts of quantifier spreading (e.g. Geurts in Lang Acquis 11:197–218, 2003) but are unexpected under the discontinuity hypothesis (e.g. Philip in Event quantification in the acquisition of universal quantification. UMI, Ann Arbor, Michigan 1995) and accounts relying on plausible dissent (e.g. Crain et al. in Lang Acquis 5:83–153, 1996). We outline a novel explanation of quantifier spreading in terms of the computation and evaluation of default models that can account for the presented results as well as earlier findings reviewed in the introduction of the chapter.