Mid-term Study Guide

Embodiment

2 key ways in which meaning is embodied:
    form-meaning pairings are learned through experience
    language has function

How is categorization basic to all interaction with the environment?

What is the basis of McCrone’s contention that chimp grunts are more meaningful than the more referential utterances of other species ?

Associational model of cognition
Brain organization is hierarchical
Low level perceptual information is categorized into higher level patterns such as edge, contour, sound patterns, etc.
Higher level categories established through learning co-occurrences
Hebbian learning
Referential vs. linguistic representation

What did Z&M’s experiments set out to show?   (you don’t need to know the details of any of these experiments, but understand the basic design and goal)

Gibb’s paper talks about several experiments designed to illustrate that comprehenders  identify with the protagonist in a story.  Be familiar with one such experiment.


Categorization

How are categories embodied?
Basic level categories
    Define in terms of psychological status
    Some level of boundary drawing around feature space will optimize tension between category commonality and category differentiation from other categories   basic level

What are some ways basic level can be determined?
Superordinate category
Subordinate category
Prototype
    How has prototypicality been determined?
Polysemy vs. vagueness vs. ambiguity
Constructions
    Word category (N,V, etc.) formation
    Construction formation
    What is constructional meaning?
    

Attention/Framing/Construal

Frames are categories that associate other categories
Frames have prototypes
Two lexical items  may refer to same objective facts but via different frames
Evoking vs. invoking a frame (Fillmore)
How does lexical interpretation depend on framing?
Construal –
    From speaker’s perspective
    From comprehender’s persective
    Specificity
    Focusing
        Background/foreground
        Composition
        Compositional path
        Scope
            How is progressive marking an example of applying new scope
    Prominence
        Profile
        Trajector
        Landmark
            
    Perspective
        Viewing frame
            Speaker-hearer interaction
                Communicative intent
                Relationship of viewers to presented event
                Fixed vs. moving viewer
                Vantage point
                Vantage point  in temporal domain
                Subjective vs objective construal
    Dynamicity
        Conceived time vs processing time
        Temporal iconicity
        Mental scanning
            Reference point relationships
                Possessives’s

Humor

Humor theories
    Incongruity
    Incongruity & resolution
    Derision/superiority
Humor recognized from:
    Incongruity (w or w/o resolution)
    Derision or superiority factor
    Themes, characters
    Opening lines
    Scripts
How is humor created in frame shifting examples (Coulson)
How is humor created in scalar jokes