SFB 833: Emergence of Meaning: The Dynamics and Adaptivity of Linguistic Structures
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Final Report Abstract
The central topic of the SFB 833 has been the emergence of meaning. We have concentrated on sentence meaning, and formal compositional semantics has taken center stage in our investigations. It has been our goal to establish compositional semantics, a comparatively young subdiscipline of linguistics, as part of linguistic research especially into the more dynamic and adaptive processes that human language shows. We have distinguished three levels of dynamics/adaptivity: (i) during language processing; (ii) in context; (iii) at the level of the grammar. This has led to investigating semantic composition in three areas in which it had previously not been well represented: (i) We have investigated combinatory semantic processes during language comprehension in our area B. Our central question: ‘How does meaning emerge?’ here becomes the question of what a model of incremental semantic composition during processing looks like. At the same time, we have to inquire into the cognitive factors which affect this emergence of meaning. (ii) In our area A, we have investigated the issue of how meaning arises in the context of an utterance. This encompasses combinatory adaptation mechanisms like coercion as well as enriched meaning, disambiguation and discourse embedding. (iii) Research in area C has been dedicated to the emergence of meaning at the level of an individual language or grammar. Dynamics then means language change, and adaptivity refers to the option space for language variation. The three areas have been connected by way of our interface questions I Cognition: ‘How is the language system embedded in human cognition?’ and II Composition: ‘What should the implementation of the principle of compositionality look like?’. The various aspects of our central question ‘How does meaning emerge?’ have seen a significant development over the past twelve years. One example of this is the development of formal diachronic semantics as a subfield (as witnessed by the new workshop series ‘Formal Diachronic Semantics’ since 2016); another is the rise of experimental research into meaning (e.g. the DFG network XPRAG 2014-2020). The SFB 833 has contributed to the overall development primarily in the following ways: (i) Area B: The SFB has contributed first proposals for a model of incremental semantic composition, which integrate numerous particular results from area B and elsewhere. Concerning the cognitive foundation of the emergence of meaning, the SFB has found that at sentence level, both sensorimotor and amodal representations play a role. However, on the basis of our results we assume that sentence meaning primarily arises via amodal representations. (ii) Area A: The concrete implementation of compositionality in the face of challenges for composition has been a focus in the SFB’s work. Bücking and Maienborn (2019) could show for the domain of modification that adaptivity is anchored in the lexicon and integrated into compositional meaning constitution. Similarly, Maienborn and Herdtfelder (2017) offer a case study on how conceptual knowledge can be integrated with classical composition principles without giving up a principled view of compositionality. The A area has also been able to illuminate the interface of discourse and sentence meaning in a number of case studies. (iii) Area C: In the recent past, semantic variation has come to be studied increasingly in a comparative way, going beyond studies on individual languages. The SFB has contributed a programmatic paper reflecting our current state of knowledge. The C projects have investigated language variation and language change in conjunction relating to diverse topics in semantics. Looking beyond the three project areas, linking different fields of investigation has been an important contribution of the SFB 833. The SFB has provided an impetus for processing research across languages. The interdisciplinary connection of linguistics and literature has seen some novel pioneering work in the SFB; it has been productive in projects A2 and A5. The cooperation of psychology and linguistics has been a cornerstone of the SFB 833 throughout its existence and has led to numerous publications. These works show how we have managed to make progress with our core goal of integrating compositional semantics into its neighboring fields.
Publications
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Beck, S., Krasikova, S., Fleischer, D., Gergel, R., Hofstetter, S., Savelsberg, C., Vanderelst, J., & Villalta, E.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1075/livy.9.01bec) - (2010). Left-right coding of past and future in language: The mental timeline during sentence processing. Cognition, 117(2), 126-138
Ulrich, R., & Maienborn, C.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.08.001) - (2011). Root versus roof: Automatic activation of location information during word processing. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 1180-1188
Lachmair, M., Dudschig, C., de Filippis, M., de la Vega, I., & Kaup, B.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-011-0158-x) - (2012). Location, existence, and possession: A constructional-typological exploration. Linguistics, 50(3), 533-603
Koch, P.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2012-0018) - (2013). Syntactic base positions for adjuncts? Psycholinguistic studies on frame and sentence adverbials. Questions and Answers in Linguistics, 1(2), 57-72
Störzer, M., & Stolterfoht, B.
- (2014). Acquisition of comparison constructions. Language Acquisition, 21(3), 215-249
Hohaus, V., Tiemann, S., & Beck, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2014.892914) - (2014). On the meaning of fictional texts. In D. Gutzmann, J. Köpping & C. Meier (Eds.), Approaches to Meaning (pp. 250-275). Leiden: Brill
Bauer, M., & Beck, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004279377_012) - (2015). Do we map remembrances to the left/back and expectations to the right/front of a mental timeline? Space-time congruency effects with retrospective and prospective verbs. Acta Psychologica, 156, 168-178
Maienborn, C., Alex-Ruf, S., Eikmeier, V., & Ulrich, R.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2014.11.006) - (2015). Effects of processing on the acceptability of ‘frozen’ extraposed constituents. Syntax, 18(4), 464-483
Hofmeister, P., Culicover, P. W., & Winkler, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/synt.12036) - (2015). On the temporal interpretation of present participles in German. Journal of Semantics, 32(3), 477-523
Rapp, I.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffu005) - (2015). The cross-linguistic processing of aspect: An eyetracking study on the time course of aspectual interpretation in Russian and German. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 30(7), 877-898
Bott, O., & Gattnar, A.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2015.1029499) - (2015). The diachronic semantics of English again. Natural Language Semantics, 23, 157-203
Beck, S., & Gergel, R.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-015-9111-2) - (2018). Automatic focus annotation: Bringing formal pragmatics alive in analyzing the information structure of authentic data. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT) (pp. 117-128)
Ziai, R., & Meurers, D.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N18-1011) - (2020). Towards automatically generating Questions under Discussion to link information and discourse structure. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING) (pp. 5786-5798)
De Kuthy, K., Kannan, M., Ponnusamy, H. S., & Meurers, D.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.509) - (2016). The sounds of sentences: Differentiating the influence of physical sound, sound imagery, and linguistically implied sounds on physical sound processing. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 16(5), 940-961
Dudschig, C., Mackenzie, I. G., Strozyk, J., Kaup, B., & Leuthold, H.
(See online at https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.3758/s13415-016-0444-1) - (2016). Transition-based dependency parsing with topological fields. In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL, Volume 2: Short Papers) (pp.1-7). Berlin, Germany, August 2016 [ACL 2016 Outstanding Paper]
de Kok, D., & Hinrichs, E.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.18653/v1/P16-2001) - (2017). An event semantics with continuations for incremental interpretation. Journal of Semantics, 34(2), 201-236
Bott, O., & Sternefeld, W.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffw013) - (2017). Eventive vs. stative causation: The case of German causal vonmodifiers. Linguistics and Philosophy, 40, 279-320
Maienborn, C., & Herdtfelder, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-016-9201-8) - (2017). Evidential adverbs in German: Diachronic development and present-day meaning. In S. Cruschina & E.-M. Remberger (Eds.), Rise and Development of Evidential and Epistemic Markers (Journal of Historical Linguistics, 7(1/2)), 9-47
Axel-Tober, K., & Müller, K.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.7.1-2.02axe) - (2017). From a focus particle to a conjunction. German zumal: Diachronic and synchronic analysis. Language, 93(2), e66-e96
Eberhardt, I.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2017.0031) - (2017). Incremental generation of answers during the comprehension of questions with quantifiers. Cognition, 166, 328-343
Bott, O., Augurzky, P., Sternefeld, W., & Ulrich, R.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.023) - (2018). Heavy NP shift does not cause freezing. Canadian Journal of Linguistics / Revue Canadienne de Linguistique, 63(3), 454-464
Konietzko, A., Winkler, S., & Culicover, P. W.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1017/cnj.2017.56) - (2018). Is German discourse-configurational? Experimental evidence for a topic position. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 3(1), 20, 1-24
Störzer, M., & Stolterfoht, B.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.122) - (2018). The Russian perfective present in performative utterances. In D. Lenertová, R. Meyer, R. Šimík & L. Szucsich (Eds.), Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2016 (pp. 127-146). Berlin: Language Science Press
Gattnar, A., Heininger, J., & Hörnig, R.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2545517) - (2018). Towards a model of incremental composition. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, 21(1): 143-161
Beck, S., & Tiemann, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2018.v21i1.129) - (2019). Accompaniment by participation: The interpretation of mit as a free particle in German. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 4(1), 1-41
Bücking, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.734) - (2019). Aspectuality: An Onomasiological Model Applied to the Romance Languages. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter
Dessì Schmid, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110562088) - (2019). Coercion by modification – The adaptive capacities of event-sensitive adnominal modifiers. Semantics and Pragmatics, 12, 1-39 (no.9)
Bücking, S., & Maienborn, C.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.9) - (2019). No word is an island: A transformation weighting model for semantic composition. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 7, 437-451
Dima, C., de Kok, D., Witte, N., & Hinrichs, E.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00275) - (2019). Pragmatic processing: An investigation of the (anti-)presuppositions of determiners using mouse-tracking. Cognition, 193, no.104024
Schneider, C., Schonard, C., Franke, M., Jäger, G., & Janczyk, M.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104024) - (2019). The Decathlon Model. In A. Kertész, C. Rákosi & E. Moravcsik (Eds.), Current Approaches to Syntax: A Comparative Handbook (pp. 155-186). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
Featherston, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110540253-006) - (2019). The space-time congruency effect: A metaanalysis. Cognitive Science, 43(1), e12709
von Sobbe, L., Scheifele, E., Maienborn, C., & Ulrich, R.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12709) - (2020). Activation of literal word meanings in idioms: Evidence from eye-tracking and ERP. Language & Speech
Kessler, R., Weber, A., & Friedrich, C. K.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830920943625) - (2020). Context and complexity in incremental sentence interpretation: An ERP study on temporal quantification. Cognitive Science, 44(11), e12913
Augurzky, P., Hohaus, V., & Ulrich, R.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12913) - (2020). Immediate sensorimotor grounding of novel concepts learned from language alone. Journal of Memory and Language, 115, no.104172
Günther, F., Nguyen, T., Chen, L., Dudschig, C., Kaup, B., & Glenberg, A. M.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104172) - (2020). Linguistics Meets Literature: More on the Grammar of Emily Dickinson. Berlin: de Gruyter
Bauer, M., Beck, S., Riecker, S., Brockmann, S., Zirker, A., Bade, N., Dörge, C., & Braun, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110646825) - (2020). Semantic parameters and universals. In D. Gutzmann, L. Matthewson, C. Meier, H. Rullmann & T. E. Zimmermann (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics
Beck, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118788516.sem010) - (2021). (No) variation in the grammar of alternatives. Linguistic Variation
Howell, A., Hohaus, V., Berezovskaya, P., Sachs, K., Braun, J., Durmaz, S., & Beck, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.19010.how)
