Volume 25, Issue 1

Two empirical studies – a verb elicitation experiment and a collostructional analysis – were conducted to investigate the Mandarin LVS construction with respect to the lexical semantics of the verb and its collocation with grammatical aspect. Converging evidence from both studies indicates strong schematicity and productivity in the verb category of the LVS construction. Although most exemplars fall into a few major lexical semantic clusters, there are more low-frequency marginal exemplars than previously recognized, reinforcing the constructional schema in an essentially radial category. In addition to the lexical semantic regularity of the verb slot, both studies showed the existence of high-frequency tokens with prototype status. As far as grammatical aspect is concerned, the converging evidence indicates that the LVS category is compatible not only with the durative aspect, but also with the perfective as well as the resultative and directional lexical aspect. The attraction of grammatical aspect to the verb of LVS is graded rather than absolute, with some mutual selection patterns more typical than others. The two grammatical aspects as marked by the durative -zhe and the perfective -le are non-interchangeable.

What factors influence the ways in which people resolve ambiguity? In English, two contrasting perspectives are implicit in deictic temporal expressions: the Moving Time metaphor conceptualizes time as moving forward towards the ego and the Moving Ego metaphor conceptualizes the ego as moving forward towards the future (Clark 1973). We examine the ambiguity arising from these two conceptualizations, claimed to be equally likely in a “neutral” context (Boroditsky and Ramscar 2002). Whereas previous studies have demonstrated that exposure to a spatial situation related to one interpretation may influence the resolution of the ambiguity (e.g. Boroditsky 2000; Nunez 2007), we focus on the lifestyle and personality factors of the participants as potential additional influences on ambiguity resolution in the interpretation of temporal metaphors. Experiment 1 asks whether lifestyle might influence an individual's approach to time and resulting resolution of temporal ambiguity, comparing preferred responses from two groups of participants with very different demands on the structuring of time: university students and administrators. We observed a difference between the two groups, with administrators more frequently adopting the Moving Time perspective and students, the Moving Ego perspective. Experiment 2 examines personality-related differences, focusing specifically on individual differences in procrastination (Lay 1986) and conscientiousness (John 1990). We observed a significant effect with participants who adopted the Moving Ego perspective reporting higher procrastination scores and lower conscientiousness scores than participants who adopted the Moving Time perspective. Experiment 3 investigates further personality-related differences, focusing specifically on individual differences in extroversion (John 1990). We observed a relationship between extroversion and disambiguation responses, with participants who adopted the Moving Ego perspective evidencing higher levels of extroversion. Taken together, the results from these three studies suggest that individual differences in lifestyle and personality may influence people's perspectives on the movement of events in time and their concomitant interpretation of temporally ambiguous utterances, precluding a universal “neutral” context within which language is interpreted.

We used free association and verbal fluency tasks to investigate verb-argument constructions (VACs) and the ways in which their processing is sensitive to statistical patterns of usage (verb type-token frequency distribution, VAC-verb contingency, verb-VAC semantic prototypicality). In experiment 1, 285 native speakers of English generated the first word that came to mind to fill the V slot in 40 sparse VAC frames such as `he ____ across the. . . .', `it ____ of the. . . .', etc. In experiment 2, 40 English speakers generated as many verbs that fit each frame as they could think of in a minute. For each VAC, we compared the results from the experiments with corpus analyses of verb selection preferences in 100 million words of usage and with the semantic network structure of the verbs in these VACs. For both experiments, multiple regression analyses predicting the frequencies of verb types generated for each VAC show independent contributions of (i) verb frequency in the VAC, (ii) VAC-verb contingency and (iii) verb prototypicality in terms of centrality within the VAC semantic network. VAC processing involves rich associations, tuned by verb type and token frequencies and their contingencies of usage, which interface syntax, lexis and semantics. We consider the implications for the mental representation of VACs.

In two complementary experiments we took an integrated approach to a set of tightly interwoven, yet rarely combined questions concerning the spontaneous interpretation of novel (unfamiliar) noun-noun compounds (NNCs) when encountered in isolation, and possible (re)interpretations of novel as well as conventional (familiar) NNCs when encountered in verbo-visual context. To enhance ecological validity, we mirrored our research questions in real-life concerns on the naming of commercial food products and the risk of consumers being misled by the names that producers give to them, focusing on the Danish food market and using Danish NNCs. Specifically, we addressed a highly productive type of compound food names where the modifier denotes a geographical entity and the head denotes a type of food, e.g. Hawaii pizza. Our findings contribute new evidence to central issues of (cognitive) linguistic theory concerning the relations between semantics and pragmatics, as well as system and usage, and psycholinguistic issues concerning the processing of NNCs. New insights and methodological tools are also provided for supporting future best practices in the field of food naming and labelling.