Table Of ContentON SENTENCE INTERPRETATION
STUDIES IN THEORETICAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
VOLUME 22
Managing Editors
Lyn Frazier, Dept. ofL inguistics, University ofM assachusetts at Amherst
Thomas Roeper, Dept. ofL inguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Kenneth Wexler, Dept. ofB rain and Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Editorial Board
Robert Berwick, Artijical Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Manfred Bierwisch, Zentralinstitut fiir Sprachwissenschaft, Akademie der
Wissenschaften, Berlin
Merrill Garrett, University ofA rizona, Tucson
Lila Gleitman, School of Education, University ofP ennsylvania
Mary-Louise Kean, University of California, Irvine
Howard Lasnik, University of Connecticut at Storrs
John Marshall, Neuropsychology Unit, Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford
Daniel Osherson, M.I.T., Cambridge, Mass.
Yukio Otsu, Keio University, Tokyo
Edwin Williams, Princeton University
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
ONSENTENCE
INTERPRETATION
by
LYNFRAZIER
Department ofL inguistics,
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-7923-5602-8 ISBN 978-94-011-4599-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-4599-2
Printed on acid-free paper
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by K1uwer Academic Publishers in 1999
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
includ ing photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface .................................................................................................................. Vll
Acknowledgements............................................................................................. ix
CHAPTER 1 / INTRODUCTION .....................
H ................................................ .
CHAPTER 2 / DISCOURSE DEPENDENT INTERPRET A TION AND THE
ROLE OF MENTAL MODELS ................................................. 13
CHAPTER 3/ SENTENCE-INTERNAL INTERPRETATION:
LIMITATIONS ON IMMEDIATE INTERPRETATION 35
CHAPTER 4 / FOCUS ........................................................................................ 61
CHAPTER 5 / TOPICS ....................................................................................... 77
CHAPTER 6/ TRIPARTITE STRUCTURES AND THE GUIDED USE OF
CONTEXT ................................................................................ 103
CHAPTER 7 / THE INTERPRETATION OF DPS .......................................... lI7
CHAPTER 8 / CONCLUSIONS ....................................................................... l39
References .......................................................................................................... 143
Notes ................................................................................................................... 163
Index ................................................................................................................... 169
v
PREFACE
Grammatically-oriented investigations of human sentence processing have
largely ignored issues concerning the interpretation of sentences, with a few very
important exceptions. In the psychology literature, a large body of work does
address "semantic" processing of language. However, for the most part these
investigators have presupposed that an interpretation has (somehow) been
assigned to the input sentence and the question is how the sentence is integrated
into the discourse, what non-linguistic inferences it triggers and what contextual
and world knowledge is accessed during discourse integration. If theories of
syntactic processing and theories of discourse comprehension are ever going to
converge, the gap between these areas must be investigated. My purpose in
writing this monograph is to explore this gap, showing why existing theories do
not suffice, that is, do not add up to a theory of language comprehension.
The basic goal of the present work is to give shape to the problems that must
be addressed if we are ultimately going to explain (not presuppose) how people
assign an interpretation to sentences. Along the way, several provisional proposals
are advanced concerning the timing of various interpretive tasks and the nature of
the component tasks. A particularly important role in interpretation is attributed to
"focus" as defined grammatically, to Logical Fonn (especially in the
interpretation of Detenniner Phrases), and to implicit restrictor clauses which both
limit the domain of quantification and guide the processor's use of context during
the interpretation of phrases.
This book is primarily intended for individuals who are interested in human
sentence processing, especially psycholinguists. But I hope the book is also of
interest to psychologists working on language comprehension and to linguists
working in semantics or computational linguistics.
Vll
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported by NIH Grant HD-18708 to Clifton and Frazier and NSF
Grant DBS-9121375 to Rayner and Frazier. The new experimental work
summarized in Chapters 2 and 3 was conducted jointly "vith Professors Clifton and
Rayner of the Psychology Department at the University of Massachusetts. Quite
simply, the work could not have been done without them.
I also owe a great deal to my colleagues and graduate students in the Department
of Linguistics. Emmon Bach and Barbara Partee were generous enough to co-teach a
seminar on "Psychosemantics" with me in 1985. It was in the context of trying to
teach this seminar, and very much due to their efforts, that I began to realize how
enormous the challenges facing a theory of semantic processing really are. Angelika
Kratzer and her students are responsible for shaping my views on many aspects of
semantics, especially natural language quantification. Lisa Selkirk has
single-handedly disabused me of embarrassingly oversimplistic notions I had about
focus. For many years I have sat in on courses taught by these individuals and they,
along with several generations of graduate students, have patiently put up with
questions shaped by the external perspective provided by my concern with issues of
mental representation and language processing.
The writing of this monograph was made possible by a Faculty Fellowship
awarded by the University of Massachusetts which relieved me of formal teaching
duties in 1994. Part of Chapter 2 was written while I was at the Max Planck Institute
in N~imegen. I am grateful to the University and to the Max-Planck Institute for their
support. Chapter 7 appears in substantially the same form in M. Crocker, M.
Pickering and C. Clifton (Eds.) Architecture and mechanisms for language
processing (Academic Press). I am grateful to Academic Press for allowing me to
present that material here. I am indebted to Emmon Bach, Chuck Clifton, Tom
Roeper and two anonymous reviewers for extensive comments on the manuscript
and for their encouragement. Finally I want to thank Tom Maxfield for help in
preparing the manuscript.
ix
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background
This monograph takes up questions of semantic processing, more accurately
"interpretive" processing, during adult language comprehension. Therefore, I
must begin with a disclaimer. I am not a semanticist. Why, then, should I be so
foolhardy as to write a work devoted to the subject of interpretive processing?
The answer to this question lies in the peculiar state of my primalY field of
specialization - psycholinguistics. Before the explosion in the study of natural
language syntax heralded by Chomsky's pioneering work in the late 1950s and
1960s, study of the psychology oflanguage was left entirely to psychologists. Early
attempts to relate Chomsky's formal theory of grammar to the mental state of
language perceivers were carried out almost exclusively by psychologists (see
Fodor, Bever & Garrett, 1974; Chapter 5 for an excellent review of this period of
psycholinguistics). Starting in the late 1970s, investigators trained in linguistics
gradually got into the act. Today the study of syntactic processing is thriving, with
many investigators trained in linguistics as well as in psychology. Various explicit
models of syntactic processing exist. Questions· concerning the cross-language
validity of those models are being actively pursued. An annual conference devoted
to the study of sentence processing (the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference
initiated by Janet Fodor) provides a lively interdisciplinary forum for ongoing
discussion of sentence processing.
What is lacking almost entirely, however, are studies of interpretation or
semantic processing, as understood by a linguist. There are reasons both intellectual
and sociological for this peculiar state of affairs. The development of linguistic
semantics has lagged behind the study of syntax. Until recently the study of
semantics has been grounded in the philosophical tradition. Only in the last few
years have semanticists been in a position to concentrate on questions of a sort
familiar from the study of syntax: What semantic principles or properties are shared
2 CHAPTER 1
by all natural languages? What range of semantic possibilities is pennitted in natural
language? How does a child's biology equip her for acquiring the semantics of
whatever language she's exposed to? What principles govern the relation between
semantics and the syntactic structures motivated independently by careful detailed
study of the distribution of the formatives of the language? The newly established
journal Natural Language Semantics attests to the emergence of a body of work
with this distinctive outlook.
Unfortunately the insights of this research have not yet filtered into the study of
language processing. The studies of language interpretation that exist fall primarily
into three broad categories. First, investigations of the role of world knowledge in
language comprehension are numerous. See Chapter 4 of Clark & Clark, 1977;
Singer, 1994; van den Broek, 1994, for example.) But these studies tend to treat the
linguistic nature of the comprehension task as being incidental, and not really of
central interest. One gets the impression that problem solving and inferencing are the
real objects of inquiry. Put differently, the studies presuppose the existence of a
theory of how perceivers arrive at a sentence meaning that is pennitted by the
grammar of their language. A second set of studies, discussed in Chapter 4,
investigates the effect of discourse context on sentence processing. However for the
most part, the question is conceived narrowly: Does, or doesn't, discourse context
guide initial syntactic analysis. (Though see Crain & Steedman, 1985, for a proposal
where presupposition violations are claimed to govern the processor's immediate
choice of a syntactic analysis for an input sentence fragment.) Third, there exist a
variety of studies carried out in the mental models framework of Johnson-Laird and
colleagues (see Gamham, 1987; Jolmson-Laird, 1983). Though these studies
emphasize the importance of representing what a text is about, the entities and
relations described, the constraints placed by the grammar on the pennissible
interpretation( s) of a sentence are not highlighted. (See Chapter 2 for discussion.)
In sum, grammatically determined aspects of interpretation are largely being
ignored in psycho linguistics. Given this circumstance, it is worthwhile, I hope, to put
forward some explicit hypotheses about semantic processing and, more generally,
interpretive processing motivated by current experimental evidence, by intuitions of
processing preferences and by processing complexity differences between sentences.
Without question the view which will emerge from this work will be incomplete,
surely inadequate, and perhaps fimdamentally wrong, once systematic attention is
INTRODUCTION 3
directed to these issues on a large scale. My hope is simply that the view developed
here serves as a catalyst, if only by annoying others into a concerted effort to show
how wrong it is.
1.2 Assumptions about the architecture of the language processor
Language is enonnously complicated. Taking its complexity seriously, It IS
difficult to embrace the view that everything we know about our language and
everything we believe about everything else magically merge to automatically,
unconsciously produce an interpretation of any sentence of our language. Moreover,
one would need to imagine that the magic merger manufactures systematicity out of
chaos to explain the systematic preferences and regularities across different
individuals of the sort typically investigated by psycholinguists.
More recently the magic merger view has been given a more substantial shape in
constraint-based models, where constraints on grammatical well-fonnedness and
constraints on contextual probabilities interact in an ongoing fashion. Sentence
processing is viewed as a competitive process whereby all available infonnation
incrementally modulates the activation of alternative representations/interpretations:
Evidence supporting one alternative increases the activation of that analysis and
automatically decreases the activation of alternative analyses (MacDonald,
Pearlmutter & Seidenberg, 1994).
Instead of an unstructured or constraint-based view, I will adopt the
assumption that language comprehension is a much more structured process
accomplished by a variety of specialized subsystems, each serving as an expert for
accomplishing a particular task with resources appropriate to that task. (See l.A.
Fodor, 1983, for articulation and justification of this general approach; see
Frazier, 1985 and 1990 for arguments that it is the representational vocabulary
that is responsible for the definition of tasks and for the particular division of the
grammatical processing system into modules or subsystems.)
Of particular relevance is the assumption that the initial syntactic analysis
computed for any portion of an input sentence is identified on purely structural
grounds. In other words, immediate syntactic analysis is accomplished by enforcing
the syntactic requirements of the language (see Frazier, 1987; Frazier & Clifton,
