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"Polysemy"
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Debt and the Miracle: On the Economy of Grace and Conversion in Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora
This article reads two of Gonzalo de Berceo's Miracles of Our Lady, tracing how different economic operations find a vocabulary in moral words and concepts that open up to economic metaphorization and become ambiguous and polysemic. The analysis proposes that Miracle X \"The Two Brothers,\" and Miracle XXIII \"The Merchant of Byzantium,\" both structured on debt, present a particular idea of conversion.
Journal Article
Vector-Space Models of Semantic Representation From a Cognitive Perspective
Models that represent meaning as high-dimensional numerical vectors—such as latent semantic analysis (LSA), hyperspace analogue to language (HAL), bound encoding of the aggregate language environment (BEAGLE), topic models, global vectors (GloVe), and word2vec—have been introduced as extremely powerful machine-learning proxies for human semantic representations and have seen an explosive rise in popularity over the past 2 decades. However, despite their considerable advancements and spread in the cognitive sciences, one can observe problems associated with the adequate presentation and understanding of some of their features. Indeed, when these models are examined from a cognitive perspective, a number of unfounded arguments tend to appear in the psychological literature. In this article, we review the most common of these arguments and discuss (a) what exactly these models represent at the implementational level and their plausibility as a cognitive theory, (b) how they deal with various aspects of meaning such as polysemy or compositionality, and (c) how they relate to the debate on embodied and grounded cognition. We identify common misconceptions that arise as a result of incomplete descriptions, outdated arguments, and unclear distinctions between theory and implementation of the models. We clarify and amend these points to provide a theoretical basis for future research and discussions on vector models of semantic representation.
Journal Article
On The Gradability of Metaphor
My purpose in this paper is to demonstrate that metaphor should be viewed as a gradable conceptual phenomenon, and to elucidate further the notion of minimal metaphoric mapping between subordinate level concepts dominated by the same basic level category, which I called “syntaphor” in my previous studies. Since the concepts involved in metaphor represent different conceptual distances, metaphor appears to be gradable, starting from the lowest level of syntaphors through the level of close metaphors, to the level of distant and maximally distant metaphors, which have been the focus of interest in most cognitive studies of metaphor so far. In Section 1 I describe briefly an approach to metaphor from the point of view of the theory of categorization, whereby metaphor is defined in terms of mappings between concepts rather than domains. Section 2 presents the notion and four degrees of conceptual distance between the concepts involved in metaphor based on the subordinate, basic and superordinate levels of categorization. In Section 3 four kinds of metaphor are distinguished depending on three degrees of conceptual distance between the source and the target concepts: distant metaphors, close metaphors and syntaphors. The role of syntaphors is further discussed in polysemy and novel metaphors. Some of the crucial aspects of syntaphors are highlighted when they are compared with image metaphors. The most important implications of the study for the theory of metaphor are presented in Conclusions.
Journal Article
Manner/result polysemy as contextual allosemy: Evidence from Daakaka
Manner/result polysemy describes a phenomenon where a single root can encode both manner and result meaning components of an eventive verbal predicate. It therefore poses a challenge to (i) the hypothesis of manner/result complementarity as a fundamental constraint on verb/root meaning and (ii) a strict one-to-one mapping between roots and meaning. Examining novel data from the Oceanic language Daakaka, I provide further evidence that polysemous verbs like
tiwiye
‘press manually, break’ only apparently violate manner/result complementarity, as manner and result meaning components are in complementary distribution. As both meaning components are sensitive to their morphosyntactic environment, I develop an account of contextual root allosemy, in which manner and result interpretations are associated with designated syntactic positions in relative configuration to an event-introducing verbalizer
v
. In particular, I argue that a single root may be associated with two non-compositional entries in the encyclopaedia, an eventive and a stative one, which allows the root to be merged in either the manner or result position. Independent support comes from suppletive verb forms in the paradigm of polysemous roots in Daakaka, where the spell-out conditions of contextual allomorphy and contextual allosemy overlap. Finally, I discuss theoretical and empirical challenges for alternative accounts of manner/result polysemy, including accounts based on derivation, coercion, and homophony.
Journal Article
On the Role of Source and Target Words’ Meanings in Metaphorical Conceptualizations
The paper argues that metaphorical expressions do more than just instantiate conceptual metaphors. The main aim is to emphasize the role source and target words’ meanings play in construing generic-level metaphors. The latter are taken to act as superordinate categories for other metaphors, occurring at various levels of schematicity. Identification of lower-level metaphors takes into account source words’ metaphorical senses, not the central meanings of the categories they represent. This method brings the issue of source words’ polysemy into play, and hence helps explain why metaphorical expressions relating to the same generic-level metaphor may activate different lower-level metaphors, which carry different metaphorical meanings.
Journal Article
Polysemy Deciphering Network for Robust Human–Object Interaction Detection
Human–Object Interaction (HOI) detection is important to human-centric scene understanding tasks. Existing works tend to assume that the same verb has similar visual characteristics in different HOI categories, an approach that ignores the diverse semantic meanings of the verb. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel Polysemy Deciphering Network (PD-Net) that decodes the visual polysemy of verbs for HOI detection in three distinct ways. First, we refine features for HOI detection to be polysemy-aware through the use of two novel modules: namely, Language Prior-guided Channel Attention (LPCA) and Language Prior-based Feature Augmentation (LPFA). LPCA highlights important elements in human and object appearance features for each HOI category to be identified; moreover, LPFA augments human pose and spatial features for HOI detection using language priors, enabling the verb classifiers to receive language hints that reduce intra-class variation for the same verb. Second, we introduce a novel Polysemy-Aware Modal Fusion module, which guides PD-Net to make decisions based on feature types deemed more important according to the language priors. Third, we propose to relieve the verb polysemy problem through sharing verb classifiers for semantically similar HOI categories. Furthermore, to expedite research on the verb polysemy problem, we build a new benchmark dataset named HOI-VerbPolysemy (HOI-VP), which includes common verbs (predicates) that have diverse semantic meanings in the real world. Finally, through deciphering the visual polysemy of verbs, our approach is demonstrated to outperform state-of-the-art methods by significant margins on the HICO-DET, V-COCO, and HOI-VP databases. Code and data in this paper are available at https://github.com/MuchHair/PD-Net.
Journal Article
Stereotypical Metaphor: A Missing Piece in Conceptual Metaphor Theory
The paper argues for a new kind of metaphors referred to as
. They are assumed to be stereotype-based metaphors, in that they arise from stereotypical thoughts speakers within a speech community attach to concepts. They are shown to be instrumental in motivating metaphorical extension of a variety of lexical items. Two case studies are conducted to adduce evidence in support of their descriptive adequacy.
Journal Article
L2 English Speakers’ Ability to Process Novel Denominal Verbs: The Role of Proficiency and Language Experience
As if learning a second language (L2) was not challenging enough, languages continue to innovate and introduce new words. One source of lexical innovation can be the use of existing nouns as novel verbs (e.g., ‘to porch the newspaper’), which are termed denominal verbs. In a psycholinguistic study, we investigate whether L2 English speakers (N = 41) show lower acceptability judgments and higher processing effort when reading such novel denominal verbs, and whether this is influenced by their L2 proficiency or the diversity of their language experience. The results suggest that the L2 speakers are sensitive to the novel verbs, showing both reading time and judgment effects. No effects of language experience were attested, but the more proficient the speakers were, the more sensitivity they showed to the novel verbs in their judgments. This suggests that even relatively proficient L2 English speakers are still developing their flexible use of the L2, particularly when it comes to lexical innovation.
Journal Article
Algorithms in the historical emergence of word senses
Human language relies on a finite lexicon to express a potentially infinite set of ideas. A key result of this tension is that words acquire novel senses over time. However, the cognitive processes that underlie the historical emergence of new word senses are poorly understood. Here, we present a computational framework that formalizes competing views of how new senses of a word might emerge by attaching to existing senses of the word. We test the ability of the models to predict the temporal order in which the senses of individual words have emerged, using an historical lexicon of English spanning the past millennium. Our findings suggest that word senses emerge in predictable ways, following an historical path that reflects cognitive efficiency, predominantly through a process of nearest-neighbor chaining. Our work contributes a formal account of the generative processes that underlie lexical evolution.
Journal Article