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Chinese allows both gapped and gapless topic constructions without their usage being restricted to specific contexts, while English only allows gapped topic constructions which are used in certain contexts. In other words, Chinese uses 'topic prominence', whereas English does not. The contrast between English and Chinese topic constructions poses a learnability problem for Chinese learners of English. This paper uses an empirical study investigating first language (L1) transfer in the case of Chinese learners of English and the extent to which they are able to unlearn topic prominence as they progress in second language (L2) English. Results of an acceptability judgment test indicate that Chinese learners of English initially transfer Chinese topic prominence into their English, then gradually unlearn Chinese topic prominence as their English proficiency improves, and finally unlearn Chinese topic prominence successfully. The results support the Full Transfer Theory (Schwartz, Bonnie & Rex Sprouse. 1996. L2 cognitive states and the Full Transfer/Full Access model. Second Language Research 12. 40–72) and the Variational Learning Model (Yang, Charles. 2004. Universal Grammar, statistics or both? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8. 451–456), but contradict the proposal that the topic prominence can never be transferred but may be unlearned from the beginning in Chinese speakers' acquisition of English (Zheng, Chao. 2001. Nominal Constructions Beyond IP and Their Initial Restructuring in L2 Acquisition. Guangzhou: Guangdong University of Foreign Studies Ph.D. dissertation). In addition, the type of topic constructions that is used and whether or not a comma is added after the topic have an effect on learners' transfer and unlearning of topic prominence. It is proposed that the specification of Agr(eement) and T(ense) as well as the presence of expletive subjects in English input can trigger the unlearning of topic prominence for Chinese learners of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In their recent paper, Lau, Clark, and Lappin explore the idea that the probability of the occurrence of word strings can form the basis of an adequate theory of grammar (Lau, Jey H., Alexander Clark & 15 Shalom Lappin. 2017. Grammaticality, acceptability, and probability: A prob- abilistic view of linguistic knowledge. Cognitive Science 41(5):1201-1241). To make their case, they present the results of correlating the output of several probabilistic models trained solely on naturally occurring sentences with the gradient acceptability judgments that humans report for ungrammatical sentences derived from roundtrip machine translation errors. In this paper, we first explore the logic of the Lau et al. argument, both in terms of the choice of evaluation metric (gradient acceptability), and in the choice of test data set (machine translation errors on random sentences from a corpus). We then present our own series of studies intended to allow for a better comparison between LCL's models and existing grammatical theories. We evaluate two of LCL's probabilistic models (trigrams and recurrent neural network) against three data sets (taken from journal articles, a textbook, and Chomsky's famous colorless-green-ideas sentence), using three evaluation metrics (LCL's gradience metric, a categorical version of the metric, and the experimental-logic metric used in the syntax literature). Our results suggest there are very real, measurable cost-benefit tradeoffs inherent in LCL's models across the three evaluation metrics. The gain in explanation of gradience (between 13% and 31% of gradience) is offset by losses in the other two metrics: a 43%-49% loss in coverage based on a categorical metric of explaining acceptability, and a loss of 12%-35% in explaining experimentallydefined phenomena. This suggests that anyone wishing to pursue LCL's models as competitors with existing syntactic theories must either be satisfied with this tradeoff, or modify the models to capture the phenomena that are not currently captured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pragmaticism states that general rules of action, or habits, are generalizing tendencies that lead us to action in conceivable situations describable in general terms. As a method of 'putting questions to our minds,' it assigns meanings to signs in terms of conceivable practical consequences for rational conduct. Questions are experiments on various ways of finding solutions in thoughts. This paper proposes pragmaticism as a logical method to study consciousness. In particular, perceptions of relations of differences create a "temporal contract" between states of minds that give rise to experiences. Peirce's "dyadic consciousness" is this drafting of a contract between states of mind, anticipating and occasionally furthering beyond the key notions of 4E cognitive science. [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]

The sense of taste has been considered an 'inferior' sense for a long time, both in philosophical and scientific fields of investigation (Cavalieri 2011. Gusto: l'intelligenza del palato. Bari: GLF editori Laterza). However, the recent growing interest in Cognitive Science has driven scholars to a reconsideration of the role of taste in human cognition. This paper intends to investigate such a role in a corpus of five Shakespearean plays. To do so, I conducted an analysis by looking at the occurrences of seven taste terms. The research aims at exploring the metaphorical occurrences of the lexicon of taste, i.e. concordances in which a taste word does not describe food or an actual taste sensation. I propose an idealised cognitive model to organise such occurrences that involves a central mapping from which others derive, in keeping with Kövecses (2010. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press). Results are consistent in showing the role of taste in the motivation of metaphorical expression in Shakespeare's plays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translation has long played a role in linguistic and literary studies research. More recently, the theoretical and methodological concerns of process research have given translation an additional role in cognitive science. The interest in the cognitive aspects of translation has led scholars to turn to disciplines such as cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics or even neurology in search of innovative approaches and research methods. This paper reviews current issues in translation studies, and a variety of empirical studies that may contribute to enlarging our knowledge of translation. The intention is to show that the combined work of disciplines from cognitive science may be influential, not only in defining the factors that underpin the translation process and the translator's work, but also in describing the potential impact that translation research has on communication and language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]