Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing

Verbs play an important role in how events, states and other "happenings" are mentally represented and how they are expressed in natural language. Besides their central role in linguistics, verbs have long been prominent topics of research in analytic philosophy-mostly on the nature of events and predicate-argument structure-and a topic of empirical investigation in psycholinguistics, mostly on argument structure and its role in sentence comprehension. More recently, the representation of verb meaning has been gaining momentum as a topic of research in other cognitive science branches, notably neuroscience and the psychology of concepts. The present volume is an expression of this recent surge in the investigation of verb structure and meaning from the interdisciplinary perspective of cognitive science, with up-to-date contributions by theoretical linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists and neuroscientists. The volume presents new theoretical and empirical studies on how verb structure and verb meaning are represented, how they are processed during language comprehension, how they are acquired, and how they are neurologically implemented. Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing is a reflection of the recent collaboration between the disciplines that constitute cognitive science, bringing new empirical data and theoretical insights on a key element of natural language and conceptualization.

Auteur

Dr. Roberto G. de Almeida is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Concordia University, in Montreal, Canada. He received his PhD in Psychology (Cognitive Science) from Rutgers University.

Dr. Christina Manouilidou is a Assistant Professor in the Department of Philology at the University of Patras, Greece. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Ottawa, Canada.

Texte du rabat

Verbs play an important role in how events, states and other happenings are mentally represented and how they are expressed in natural language. Besides their central role in linguistics, verbs have long been prominent topics of research in analytic philosophymostly on the nature of events and predicate-argument structureand a topic of empirical investigation in psycholinguistics, mostly on argument structure and its role in sentence comprehension. More recently, the representation of verb meaning has been gaining momentum as a topic of research in other cognitive science branches, notably neuroscience and the psychology of concepts. The present volume is an expression of this recent surge in the investigation of verb structure and meaning from the interdisciplinary perspective of cognitive science, with up-to-date contributions by theoretical linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists and neuroscientists. The volume presents new theoretical and empirical studies on how verb structure and verb meaning are represented, how they are processed during language comprehension, how they are acquired, and how they are neurologically implemented. Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing is a reflection of the recent collaboration between the disciplines that constitute cognitive science, bringing new empirical data and theoretical insights on a key element of natural language and conceptualization.

Contenu

Part 1: Foundations.- Chapter 1: The study of verbs in Cognitive Science - Roberto G. de Almeida (Concordia University) & Christina Manouilidou (University of Patras).- Part 2: Structure and Composition.- Chapter 2: Lexicalizing and combining - Paul Pietroski (University of Maryland).- Chapter 3: Optional complements of English verbs and adjectives - Brendan Gillon (McGill University).- Chapter 4: The representation and processing of participant role information - Gail Mauner (University at Buffalo).- Part 3: Events: Aspect, and Telicity.- Chapter 5: Force dynamics and directional change in event lexicalization and argument realization - William Croft (University of New Mexico).- Chapter 6: Neural processing of verbal event structure: temporal and functional dissociation between telic and atelic verbs - Evgenia Malaia, Javier Gonzalez-Castillo, Christine Weber-Fox, Thomas M. Talavage, & Ronnie B. Wilbur, (Purdue University).- Chapter 7: Argument structure and time reference in agrammatic aphasia - Roelien Bastiaanse (University of Groningen) & Artem Platonov (Radboud University Nijmegen).- Chapter 8: Building aspectual interpretations online - E. Matthew Husband (University of Oxford), Linnaea Stockall (Queen Mary University of London).- Part 4: Meaning and Structure: Representation and Processing.- Chapter 9: Visual and motor features of the meanings of action verbs: a cognitive neuroscience perspective - David Kemmerer (Purdue University).- Chapter 10: Which event properties matter for which cognitive task? - Jean-Pierre Koenig, Doug Roland, Hohg-Oak Yun, & Gail Mauner (University at Buffalo).- Chapter 11: Verb representation and thinking-for-speaking effects in Spanish-English bilinguals - Vicky T. Lai (University of South Carolina and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) & Bhuvana Narasimhan (University of Colorado, Boulder).- Part 5: Acquiring Verbs.- Chapter 12: Argumentstructure: Relationships between theory and acquisition - Sudha Arunachalam (Boston University).- Chapter 13: The beginning of morphological learning: Evidence from verb morpheme processing in preverbal infants - Alexandra Marquis (Université de Montréal) & Rushen Shi (Université du Quebec à Montréal).