Background
Frazier, Lyn was born on October 15, 1952 in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Daughter of Lyman Frazier.
(At present there exists no empirically-motivated theory o...)
At present there exists no empirically-motivated theory of how perceivers assign a grammatically-permissible interpretation to a sentence. Implicit in many investigations of language comprehension is the idea that each constituent of a sentence is interpreted by the perceiver at the earliest conceivable point, using all potentially relevant sources of information. A variety of counter examples are presented to argue against this implicit theory of sentence interpretation. It is argued that an explicit alternative theory is needed to specify which decisions are made at which points during interpretive processing and to spell out the principles governing the processor's preferred choice at points of ambiguity or uncertainty. Several specific issues are taken concerning how the processor assigns a focal structure to an input sentence, how it identifies the topic of the sentence, how implicit restrictors on the domain of quantification are interpreted and how the identification of the content of a restrictor may guide the processor's use of discourse information. Exploiting intuitions about preferred interpretations of ambiguous sentences as well as the results of both old and new experimental studies, a theory of the preferred interpretation of Determiner Phrases is presented. This work explores important, but overlooked questions in on-line sentence interpretation and attempts to erect some of the scaffolding for an eventual theory of sentence interpretation.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0792355083/?tag=2022091-20
( Construal presents a new theory of sentence processing...)
Construal presents a new theory of sentence processing, one that allows a limited type of underspecification in the syntactic analysis of sentences. It extends what has arguably been the dominant theory of parsing (the garden-path theory developed by Lyn Frazier and colleagues) through the 1980s into new and previously unexplored domains, and greatly advances the potential for insights into how meaning is both made and understood. Frazier and Clifton, both pioneers in parsing theory, present new psycholinguistic theory and experimentation concerning how "nonprimary" phrases are analyzed in sentence comprehension. They define a process of "construal" and show how it accounts for cases in which the parser does not fully determine structure during the course of ordinary comprehension. The idea of construal arises in part through the authors' critical review of the challenges to their established framework for research on structural parsing. While they demonstrate that the principles of parsing theory remain valid for a wide variety of languages and grammatical constructions, they go beyond them to clearly identify those types of constructions built by the process of construal. Frazier and Clifton show that construal follows distinct principles, and they flesh out their hypothesis with previously unexamined evidence and new empirical tests.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262061791/?tag=2022091-20
Frazier, Lyn was born on October 15, 1952 in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Daughter of Lyman Frazier.
Bachelor in linguistics, University Wisconsin, 1974. Master of Arts in linguistics, University Connecticut, 1976. Doctor of Philosophy in linguistcs, University Connecticut, 1978.
Professor University Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1978. Linguistics advisory board National Science Foundation, 1990-1992. Scientific advisory council MAx Planck Institute, for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands, 1994-1999.
( Construal presents a new theory of sentence processing...)
(At present there exists no empirically-motivated theory o...)