In principle, a prosodic boundary in an utterance might affect its interpretation in a local, context-independent fashion. In a right-branching language like English, the presence of a large prosodic boundary might signal the end of the current constituent, requiring the following constituent to be attached high in the syntactic tree. We present three listening experiments that test an alternat...

The aim of this article is to elucidate the processes that characterize natural language interpretation. The basic hypothesis is that natural language interpretation can be characterized as an optimization problem. This innovative view on interpretation is shown to account for the crucial role of contextual information while avoiding certain wellknown problems associated with compositionality. ...

As one of the symbolic occupation era economic globalization, appearance conference interpretation was much earlier than others in history, which is enough to illustrate significance its existence. Interpretation has a profound artistic background, and all interpreters regards their translation as work art. The Effort Models (EMs) proposed by Daniel Gile, an excellent professor regarding interp...

The hypothesized role of Broca's area in sentence processing ranges from domain-general executive function to domain-specific computation that is specific to certain syntactic structures. We examined this issue by manipulating syntactic structure and conflict between syntactic and semantic cues in a sentence processing task. Functional neuroimaging revealed that activation within several Broca'...

The resolution of temporary syntactic ambiguity involves not only the reanalysis of syntactic structure but also the resolution of the conflict between the new correct interpretation and the initial incorrect parse. The current study investigated the contribution of domain-general conflict resolution ability as indexed by performance on an n-back task (with lures) and the online resolution of t...

This paper discusses the semantic content of syntactic dependencies. We assume that syntactic dependencies play a central role in the process of semantic interpretation. They are defined as selective functions on word denotations. Among their properties, special attention will be paid to their ability to make interpretation co-compositional and incremental. To describe the semantic properties o...

1. Introduction Any theory of how language is internally organized and how it interacts with other mental capacities must address the fundamental question of how syntactic and lexico-semantic information interact at one central linguistic compositional level, the sentence level. With this general objective in mind, we examine “ " light-verbs” " , so called because the main thrust of the semanti...

This paper addresses the question whether locally coherent word sequences in spoken sentences interfere with the global interpretation. We present a visual world experiment where three depicted events were presented simultaneously while a sentence was spoken. The results suggest that local syntactic coherences are not only processed at a syntactic level, but they are interpreted on-line.

We have recently made significant changes to the BBN DELPHI syntactic and semantic analysis component. These goal of these changes was to maintain the fight coupling between syntax and semantics characteristic of earlier versions of DELPHI, while making it possible for the system to provide useful semantic interpretations of input for which complete syntactic analysis is impossible. Semantic in...

Several aspects of compounds make them particularly difficult to handle in a system performing automatic translation, being it a machine translation system or a system for cross-language information retrieval. First, the relation between the parts of a compound is implicit and thus its interpretation is never wholly compositional. Whereas the interpretation of clauses is guided by syntactic clu...