Cover not available
Part of
Perspectives on Abstract Concepts: Cognition, language and communication
Edited by Marianna Bolognesi and Gerard J. Steen
[Human Cognitive Processing 65] 2019
► pp. 145–165

Chapter 7
Acceptability properties of abstract senses in copredication

This chapter explores the acceptability properties of copredication and how they can inform debates about the representation of abstract concepts. Across a series of acceptability judgment experiments, it was tested whether copredication in book-, lunch- and city-type nominals is difficult across-the-board or depends on adjective ordering in sentences like “John said that the folded and educational newspaper was on the shelf”. The results revealed no acceptability difference between copredication and non-copredication, however there was a strong preference for concrete adjectives to be placed before abstract ones. It is suggested for the first time that the parser is sensitive to semantic complexity, and that it is more optimal to access abstract concepts after associated concrete concepts than the reverse.

Keywords: copredication, lexical frequency, sense order, simplicity first
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Experiment 1: Foundations of copredication
    • 2.1Materials and methods
      • 2.1.1Participants
      • 2.1.2Materials
      • 2.1.3Procedure
    • 2.2Results
      • 2.2.1Comprehension question analysis
      • 2.2.2Acceptability judgment data
    • 2.3Discussion
  • 3.Experiment 2: Sense order effects
    • 3.1Materials and methods
      • 3.1.1Participants
      • 3.1.2Materials
      • 3.1.3Procedure
    • 3.2Results
      • 3.2.1Comprehension question analysis
      • 3.2.2Acceptability judgment data
    • 3.3Discussion
  • 4.Norming studies
    • 4.1Study 1: Sense frequency and adjective coordination
      • 4.1.1Methods and materials
      • 4.1.2Results and discussion: Sense frequency
      • 4.1.3Results and discussion: Adjective coordination
    • 4.2Study 2: Adjective co-occurrence and sense relatedness
      • 4.2.1Methods and materials
      • 4.2.2Results and discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgment
  • References
Published online: 6 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.65.08mur
References
Arapanis, A.
2013 Referring to institutional entities: Semantic and ontological perspectives. Applied Ontology 8, 31–57.Google Scholar
Asher, N.
2011 Lexical Meaning in Context: A Web of Words. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 Types, meanings and coercions in lexical semantics. Lingua 157, 66–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cruse, D. A.
2000 Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2004 Lexical facets and metonymy. Ilha do Desterro 47, 73–96.Google Scholar
Duffy, S., Morris, R. K., & Rayner, K.
1988 Lexical ambiguity and fixation times in reading. Journal of Memory and Language 27, 429–446. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Field, A.
2013 Discovering Statistics using IBM SPSS Statistics. 2nd edn. London: SAGE Publications.Google Scholar
Frisson, S.
2015 About bound and scary books: The processing of book polysemies. Lingua 157, 17–35. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibson, E., & Fedorenko, E.
2010 Weak quantitative standards in linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14, 233–234. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gotham, M.
2015 Copredication, Quantification and Individuation. PhD thesis, University College London.Google Scholar
Greenhouse, S. W., & Geisser, S.
1959 On methods in the analysis of profile data. Psychometrika 24, 95–112. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jezek, E., & Vieu, L.
2014 Distributional analysis of copredication: Towards distinguishing systematic polysemy from coercion. First Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics 1, 219–223.Google Scholar
Moltmann, F.
2013 Abstract Objects and the Semantics of Natural Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Murphy, E.
2014 Review of Definite Descriptions by Paul Elbourne. The Linguistic Review 31(2), 435–444.Google Scholar
2016 Phasal eliminativism, anti-lexicalism, and the status of the unarticulated. Biolinguistics 10, 21–50.Google Scholar
2017a Acquiring the impossible: developmental stages of copredication. Frontiers in Psychology 8, 1072. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017b Predicate ordering effects in copredication. Poster presented at the 30th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston. 30 March-1 April.Google Scholar
Pustejovsky, J.
1995 The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Rayner, K., & Duffy, S. A.
1986 Lexical complexity and fixation times in reading: effects of word frequency, verb complexity, and lexical ambiguity. Memory and Cognition 14(3), 191–201. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Simpson, G. B., & Burgess, C.
1985 Activation and selection processes in the recognition of ambiguous words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 11, 28–39.Google Scholar
Sprouse, J.
2011 A validation of Amazon Mechanical Turk for the collection of acceptability judgments in linguistic theory. Behavior Research Methods 43(1), 155–167. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Traxler, M. J., McElree, B., Williams, R. S., & Pickering, M. J.
2005 Context effects in coercion: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language 53, 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Murphy, Elliot
2021. Predicate order and coherence in copredication. Inquiry ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Murphy, Elliot
2021. Persistence Conditions of Institutional Entities: Investigating Copredication Through a Forced-Choice Experiment. Frontiers in Psychology 12 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.