Silverstein (1976)’s hierarchy of features and ergativity (Referential Hierarchy) was proposed to capture apparent systematic variation with respect to word-class (pronouns versus nouns) in the expression of the grammatical functions Subject and Object and the semantic roles Agent and Undergoer linked to these functions. An assumption of the original hierarchy was obligatoriness of marking, rat...

    This study investigates the relationship between extraversion/introversion personality dimension and the use of strategic competence (SC) in oral referential communication by Iranian EFL learners. Referential communication refers to a kind of guided communication in which the referents (or topics) are given to the speakers to convey their meanings to the listeners. 50 sophomore English stud...

This study explores Latent Semantic Analysis as a model of coherence relations in spoken discourse. Two studies were conducted on language data from six adult learners of English observed longitudinally for one year. The studies investigated whether LSA values increase as a function of time spent learning English and if there were links between negotiations for meaning and LSA values. Results s...

This paper proposes an elaboration of the Generative Lexicon (GL) in Pustejovsky (1995) based on a survey of BCCWJ (2009). I manually classified the Japanese NP1-no NP2 “NP1’s NP2” construction in accordance with semantic relations between the two nominals. The result indicates the need for the expansion of GL for computing the meaning of the NP1no NP2 construction by incorporating referential ...

We present a probabilistic incremental model of early word learning. The model acquires the meaning of words from exposure to word usages in sentences, paired with appropriate semantic representations, in the presence of referential uncertainty. A distinct property of our model is that it continually revises its learned knowledge of a word’s meaning, but over time converges on the most likely m...

From a plausible cognitive hypothesis explaining how little children develop complex meaning structures, we come to the conclusion that linguistic meanings are planned. The plans, we call them discourse plans, are tree-like structures composed of primitive situations and establishing referential links between the situations and the context. Linguistic meanings are second order Lambda-terms deri...

This paper discusses the processes by which dialogue participants incrementally compute the conveyed meaning of referential descriptions. I show that some of the phenomena observed in the psycholinguistics literature can be accounted for by theories of conversational implicature that exploit ingredients from computational models of Referring Expression Generation. The result is a system that co...