24.1620, Diss: Cognitive Science/Linguistic Theories/Pragmatics/Psycholing/Semantics/Text/Corpus Ling/Chinese, Mandarin/English/Spanish: Rissman: 'Event Participant Representations and the Instrumental Role...'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-1620. Tue Apr 09 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.1620, Diss: Cognitive Science/Linguistic Theories/Pragmatics/Psycholing/Semantics/Text/Corpus  Ling/Chinese, Mandarin/English/Spanish: Rissman: 'Event Participant Representations and the Instrumental Role...'

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Date: Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:04:30
From: Lilia Rissman [lilrissman at gmail.com]
Subject: Event Participant Representations and the Instrumental Role: A cross-linguistic study

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Institution: Johns Hopkins University 
Program: Department of Cognitive Science 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2013 

Author: Lilia Rissman

Dissertation Title: Event Participant Representations and the Instrumental
Role: A cross-linguistic study 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science
                     Linguistic Theories
                     Pragmatics
                     Psycholinguistics
                     Semantics
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics

Subject Language(s): Chinese, Mandarin (cmn)
                     English (eng)
                     Spanish (spa)


Dissertation Director(s):
Kyle Rawlins
Barbara Landau

Dissertation Abstract:

We represent events as composed of participants.  In Joan was eating lasagna 
in the lecture hall, for example, this eating event is 'partitioned' into participants, 
including at least Joan, the lasagna, and the lecture hall.  In this dissertation, I 
address two questions about events and the participants that populate them: 
first, to what extent do we represent event participants as tokens of abstract 
roles such as Agent?  Second, what is the role of the verb in partitioning events 
into participants?  I address these questions through the case study of 
instrumental participants, as in Joan was eating lasagna with a fork.   In a 
comparison of the semantic properties of instrumental with and use, I argue that 
Instrument is not a semantic primitive, but that with and use each encode 
different instrumental properties.  Specifically, with requires that the instrument 
be part of a minimal instance of an event, whereas use specifies that acting on 
the instrument satisfies the agent's goals.  I then address whether verbs such as 
slice require that events of this type contain an instrument, and whether this 
requirement indicates that an instrument is an argument of slice.  In a novel 
experimental task, subjects reported their judgments about verbs and the event 
participants they require.  The results from this experiment suggest that 
instruments are not arguments, but that properties of verbal meaning bias the 
agent to be interpreted as having subparts.  In a second set of studies, I 
investigated the cross-linguistic generality of these findings.  Although the 
instrument does not appear to be an argument of slice, there may be languages 
where a verb with a similar meaning as slice does have an instrument argument.  
To test this hypothesis, I conducted the judgment study described above with 
speakers of Spanish and Mandarin.  The results were strikingly similar across 
English, Spanish and Mandarin, suggesting that in this domain, concepts about 
events correspond to language-specific lexicalizations in uniform ways.  These 
studies converge on the same broad understanding of the nature of the 
instrumental role: a participant that is an extension of the agent.






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