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The distinction between abstract and concrete concepts is fundamental to cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. This distinction is commonly operationalized through concreteness ratings based on the aggregated judgments of many people. What is often overlooked in experimental studies using this operationalization is that ratings are attributed to words, not to concepts directly. In this paper we explore the relationship between the linguistic properties of English words and conceptual abstractness/concreteness. Based on hypotheses stated in the existing linguistic literature we select a set of variables (part of speech, morphological structure, countability, etymology) and verify whether they are statistically associated with concreteness ratings. We show that English nouns are rated as more concrete compared to other parts of speech, but mass nouns are rated as less concrete than count nouns. Furthermore, a more complex morphological structure is associated with abstractness, and as for etymology, French- and Latin-derived words are more abstract than words of other origin. This shows that linguistic properties of words are indeed associated with the degree of concreteness that we attribute to the underlying concepts, and we discuss the implications that these findings have for linguistic theory and for empirical investigations in the cognitive sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that conventionalized general knowledge – sometimes referred to as a frame – guides the perception and interpretation of the world around us has long permeated various branches of cognitive science, including psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. In this paper we provide experimental evidence suggesting that frames also play a role in explaining certain long-distance dependency phenomena, as originally proposed by Deane (1991). We focus on a constraint that restricts the extraction of an NP from another NP, called subextraction, which Deane (1991) claims is ultimately a framing effect. In Experiment 1 we provide evidence showing that referents are extractable to the degree that they are deemed important for the proposition expressed by the utterance. This suggests that the world knowledge that the main verb evokes plays a key role in establishing which referents are extractable. In Experiment 2 we offer evidence suggesting that the acceptability of deep subextractions is correlated with the overall plausibility of the proposition, suggesting that complex structures can evoke complex frames as well, if sufficiently frequent and semantically coherent, and therefore more easily license deeper subextractions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Miller's (1956, The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review 63(2). 81-97) working memory (WM) capacity of around seven items, plus or minus two, was never found by usage-based linguists to be a recurrent pattern in language. Thus, it has not figured prominently in cognitive models of grammar. Upon reflection, this is somewhat unusual, since WM has been considered a fundamental cognitive domain for information processing in psychology, so one might have reasonably expected properties such as capacity constraints to be reflected in language use and structures derived from use. This paper proposes that Miller's (1956) number has not been particularly productive in usage-based linguistics because it turns out to have been an overestimate. A revised WM capacity has now superseded it within cognitive science, a 'magic number four plus or minus one' (Cowan 2001, The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24(1). 87-185). This paper suggests, drawing on evidence from spoken language corpora and multiple languages, that a range of linguistic structures and patterns align with this revised capacity estimate, unlike Miller's (1956), ranging from phrasal verbs, idioms, n-grams, the lengths of intonation units and some abstract grammatical properties of phrasal categories and clause structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]