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Most words are ambiguous: Individual word forms (e.g., run) can map onto multiple different interpretations depending on their sentence context (e.g., the athlete/politician/river runs). Models of word-meaning access must therefore explain how listeners and readers can rapidly settle on a single, contextually appropriate meaning for each word that they encounter. I present a new account of word-meaning access that places semantic disambiguation at its core and integrates evidence from a wide variety of experimental approaches to explain this key aspect of language comprehension. The model has three key characteristics. (a) Lexical-semantic knowledge is viewed as a high-dimensional space; familiar word meanings correspond to stable states within this lexical-semantic space. (b) Multiple linguistic and paralinguistic cues can influence the settling process by which the system resolves on one of these familiar meanings. (c) Learning mechanisms play a vital role in facilitating rapid word-meaning access by shaping and maintaining high-quality lexical-semantic knowledge throughout the life span. In contrast to earlier models of word-meaning access, I highlight individual differences in lexical-semantic knowledge: Each person's lexicon is uniquely structured by specific, idiosyncratic linguistic experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of the given research is connected with the investigation of there sentences in English The word there is a polysemeous word and can be a pronoun or an adverb. As a pronoun it can be used as the subject of the verb 'be' to say that something exists or does not exist, or to draw attention to it; in front of certain verbs when you are saying that something exists, develops, or can be seen. Whether the verb is singular or plural depends on the noun which follows the verb; The word there can be used in the form of convention. It is used after 'hello' or 'hi' when you are greeting someone. When the word there is used as an adverb its semantics varies. The question of how the two ways of using there originated also plays some part in synchronic treatments, as reflected in recent developments in linguistics. In the field of generative grammar, defining the categorial status and syntactic function of there is of central importance. Grammarians are unanimous in their view that the there is often a subject in a sentence. However, there is disagreement about whether there is introduced transformationally, or whether it is already present in the syntactic deep structure. Proponents of generative grammar separate nominal there very strictly from adverbial there. They tend to regard the identity of form as coincidental. Syntactic analyses contribute little or nothing about the semantics of there. Characteristic of this is the recurrent description of there as "dummy there", indicating that it has no meaning. But we should say that in spite of the fact that dummy words have no meaning they do have a grammatical function. The author investigates syntax and semantics of the word 'there'. In the article the ambiguity of sentences with the word 'there' and its emphatic characteristics are shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is language designed for communicative and functional efficiency? G. K. Zipf famously argued that shorter words are more frequent because they are easier to use, thereby resulting in the statistical law that bears his name. Yet, G. A. Miller showed that even a monkey randomly typing at a keyboard, and intermittently striking the space bar, would generate "words" with similar statistical properties. Recent quantitative analyses of human language lexicons (Piantadosi et al., 2012) have revived Zipf's functionalist hypothesis. Ambiguous words tend to be short, frequent, and easy to articulate in language production. Such statistical findings are commonly interpreted as evidence for pressure for efficiency, as the context of language use often provides cues to overcome lexical ambiguity. In this study, we update Miller's monkey thought experiment to incorporate empirically motivated phonological and semantic constraints on the creation of words. We claim that the appearance of communicative efficiency is a spandrel (Gould & Lewontin, 1979), as lexicons formed without the context of language use or reference to communication or efficiency exhibit comparable statistical properties. Furthermore, the updated monkey model provides a good fit for the growth trajectory of English as recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. Focusing on the history of English words since 1900, we show that lexicons resulting from the monkey model provide a better embodiment of communicative efficiency than the actual lexicon of English. We conclude by arguing for the need to go beyond correlational statistics and to seek direct evidence for the mechanisms that underlie principles of language design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]