Search

Parents' time with children has increased over the past several decades, according to many scholars. Yet, research predominantly focuses on childcare activities, overlooking the majority of time that parents spend with children. Using time diaries from the 1986–2015 Canadian General Social Survey, we examine trends in the quantity and distribution of parents' childcare time and total co‐present time in the company of children, as well as the behavioral or compositional drivers of these trends. Co‐present time with children increased sharply since the mid‐1980s, by 1 hour per day for fathers and 1.5 hours for mothers. This rise was driven not only by childcare activities, but also parents' time in housework and mothers' time in leisure with children present. Decomposition analyses indicate that changes in parenting behavior primarily explain these increases in co‐present time. This study expands knowledge on intensive parenting through a more comprehensive understanding of parents' daily lives with children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frege's puzzle is a fundamental challenge for accounts of mental and linguistic representation. This piece surveys a family of recent approaches to the puzzle that posit representational relations. I identify the central commitments of relational approaches and present several arguments for them. I also distinguish two kinds of relationism-semantic relationism and formal relationism-corresponding to two conceptions of representational relations. I briefly discuss the consequences of relational approaches for foundational questions about propositional attitudes, intentional explanation, and compositionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generalised dissimilarity modelling ( GDM) applies pairwise beta diversity as a measure of species turnover with the purpose of explaining changes in species composition under changing environments or along environmental gradients. Beta diversity only captures turnover across pairs of sites and, therefore, disproportionately represents turnover in rare species across communities. By contrast, zeta diversity, the average number of shared species across multiple sites, captures the full spectrum of rare, intermediate and widespread species as they contribute differently to compositional turnover., We show how integrating zeta diversity into GDMs (which we term multi-site generalised dissimilarity modelling, MS- GDM), provides a more information rich approach to modelling how communities respond to environmental variation and change. We demonstrate the value of including zeta diversity in biodiversity assessment and modelling using BirdLife Australia Atlas data. Zeta diversity values for different numbers of sites (the order of zeta) are regressed against environmental differences and distance using two kinds of regressions: shape constrained additive models and a combination of I-splines and generalised linear models., Applying MS- GDM to different orders of zeta revealed shifts in the importance of environmental variables in explaining species turnover, varying with the order of zeta and thus with the level of co-occurrence of the species and, by extension, their commonness and rarity. In particular, precipitation gradients emerged as drivers in the turnover of rare species, whereas temperature gradients were more important drivers of turnover in widespread species., Appreciation of the factors that drive compositional turnover across multiple sites is necessary for accommodating the full spectrum of compositional turnover across rare to common species. This extends beyond understanding drivers for pairwise beta diversity only. MS- GDM provides a valuable addition to the toolkit of GDM, with further potential for survey gap analysis and prediction of species composition in unsampled sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sophisticated senator and legislative onion. Whether or not you have ever heard of these things, we all have some intuition that one of them makes much less sense than the other. In this paper, we introduce a large dataset of human judgments about novel adjective-noun phrases. We use these data to test an approach to semantic deviance based on phrase representations derived with compositional distributional semantic methods, that is, methods that derive word meanings from contextual information, and approximate phrase meanings by combining word meanings. We present several simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and we show that they have a significant impact on predicting the acceptability of novel adjective-noun phrases even when a number of alternative measures classically employed in studies of compound processing and bigram plausibility are taken into account. Our results show that the extent to which an attributive adjective alters the distributional representation of the noun is the most significant factor in modeling the distinction between acceptable and deviant phrases. Our study extends current applications of compositional distributional semantic methods to linguistically and cognitively interesting problems, and it offers a new, quantitatively precise approach to the challenge of predicting when humans will find novel linguistic expressions acceptable and when they will not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article defends the view that the Faculty of Language is compositional; namely, that it computes the meaning of complex expressions from the meanings of their immediate constituents. I first argue that compositionality and other competing, non-compositional constraints on the ways in which we compute the meanings of complex expressions should be understood as hypotheses about the innate constrains of the semantic operations of the Faculty of Language. I then argue that, unlike compositionality, most of the currently available non-compositional constraints predict incorrect patterns of early linguistic development. This supports the view that the Faculty of Language is compositional. More generally, this article proposes a way of reframing the compositionality debate which, by focusing on its implications for language acquisition, opens what has so far been a mainly theoretical debate to a more straightforward empirical resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of evidence in cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggests a deep interconnection between sensory-motor and language systems in the brain. Based on recent neurophysiological findings on the anatomo-functional organization of the fronto-parietal network, we present a computational model showing that language processing may have reused or co-developed organizing principles, functionality, and learning mechanisms typical of premotor circuit. The proposed model combines principles of Hebbian topological self-organization and prediction learning. Trained on sequences of either motor or linguistic units, the network develops independent neuronal chains, formed by dedicated nodes encoding only context-specific stimuli. Moreover, neurons responding to the same stimulus or class of stimuli tend to cluster together to form topologically connected areas similar to those observed in the brain cortex. Simulations support a unitary explanatory framework reconciling neurophysiological motor data with established behavioral evidence on lexical acquisition, access, and recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on propositions and compositionality. He examines the semantic value of a natural language sentence and discusses compositionality and syntax and the belief that a natural language has a propositional and compositional semantic value assignment. He also tackles sentencization, schmentencite, Vacuous Quantification, and variable-free semantics.

It's often hypothesized that the structure of mental representation is map-like rather than language-like. The possibility arises as a counterexample to the argument from the best explanation of productivity and systematicity to the language of thought hypothesis-the hypothesis that mental structure is compositional and recursive. In this paper, I argue that the analogy with maps does not undermine the argument, because maps and language have the same kind of compositional and recursive structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orthodoxy says that the thesis that composition is identity (CAI) entails universalism: the claim that any collection of entities has a sum. If this is true it counts in favour of CAI, since a thesis about the nature of composition that settles the otherwise intractable special composition question (SCQ) is desirable. But I argue that it is false: CAI is compatible with the many forms of restricted composition, and SCQ is no easier to answer given CAI than otherwise. Furthermore, in seeing why this is the case we reveal an objection to CAI: that it allows for the facts concerning what there is to be settled whilst leaving open the question about what is identical to what. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orthodoxy says that the thesis that composition is identity (CAI) entails universalism: the claim that any collection of entities has a sum. If this is true it counts in favour of CAI, since a thesis about the nature of composition that settles the otherwise intractable special composition question (SCQ) is desirable. But I argue that it is false: CAI is compatible with the many forms of restricted composition, and SCQ is no easier to answer given CAI than otherwise. Furthermore, in seeing why this is the case we reveal an objection to CAI: that it allows for the facts concerning what there is to be settled whilst leaving open the question about what is identical to what. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the precisificational theories and incoherent sort of vagueness, and the commonsense moderate view of composition. Among the cases of vagueness discussed include the cloudishly arranged simples and homogenous cases of borderline composition. It also explores several objections on proto-cloud, an object of cloudishly arranged simples, which include simplicity, the sharpness of boundary between non-being and being of composition, and the explanatory role of composition.

Vector-based models of word meaning have become increasingly popular in cognitive science. The appeal of these models lies in their ability to represent meaning simply by using distributional information under the assumption that words occurring within similar contexts are semantically similar. Despite their widespread use, vector-based models are typically directed at representing words in isolation, and methods for constructing representations for phrases or sentences have received little attention in the literature. This is in marked contrast to experimental evidence (e.g., in sentential priming) suggesting that semantic similarity is more complex than simply a relation between isolated words. This article proposes a framework for representing the meaning of word combinations in vector space. Central to our approach is vector composition, which we operationalize in terms of additive and multiplicative functions. Under this framework, we introduce a wide range of composition models that we evaluate empirically on a phrase similarity task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the study on presuppositions. It presents the theoretical descriptions of presupposition projection. It discusses symmetries, the compositional rules, as well as the symmetric heritage rules. An overview on the older presuppositions theories are included. Recent symmetric theories of presuppositions are reviewed. The author believes that his proposed theories make plausible an overarching principle on presupposition projection.

Four experiments investigated 4-year-olds’ understanding of adjective-noun compositionality and their sensitivity to statistics when interpreting scalar adjectives. In Experiments 1 and 2, children selected tall and short items from 9 novel objects called pimwits (1–9 in. in height) or from this array plus 4 taller or shorter distractor objects of the same kind. Changing the height distributions of the sets shifted children’s tall and short judgments. However, when distractors differed in name and surface features from targets, in Experiment 3, judgments did not shift. In Experiment 4, dissimilar distractors did affect judgments when they received the same name as targets. It is concluded that 4-year-olds deploy a compositional semantics that is sensitive to statistics and mediated by linguistic labels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explains the explanatory priorities to understand the metaphysics of Intentionality. Because of the misleading and unclear situation, there is a problem regarding the formulation to start with the content of words and proceed to the content of sentences or vice versa. However, the reason to the fusion of sentences is that sentence meaning might be ontologically dependent on word meaning even if the order of explanatory priority is the other way around. It is not a good idea to confuse semantics with the epistemology of interpretation/translation, nor to confuse semantics with the psychology of learning, moreover to confusion semantic with the psychology of language production/comprehension.

This paper examines an attempt made in a series of articles ( Stanley, 2002, et al. ) to create a syntactic placeholder for contextual information. The initial shortcoming of Stanley’s proposal is that it does not easily integrate these placeholders with domain-restricting information syntactically encoded elsewhere in the utterance. Thus, Stanley makes erroneous predictions in the case of sentences in which quantifier-restricting information encoded in (for example) a prepositional phrase conflicts with quantifier-restriction valued by context is internally incoherent. I explore the space of possible solutions that are available to Stanley, demonstrating how each results in its own interpretation problem and, ultimately, fails. In doing so, I argue that Stanley’s syntactic approach to contextual restriction is untenable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent articles Fodor and Lepore have argued that not only do considerations of learnability dictate that meaning must be compositional in the well-known sense that the meanings of all sentences are determined by the meanings of a finite number of primitive expressions and a finite number of operations on them, but also that meaning must be‘reverse compositional’ as well, in the sense that the meanings of the primitive expressions of which a complex expression is composed must be determined by the meaning of that complex expression plus the manner of its composition. I argue against the requirement of reverse compositionality and against the claim that learnability requires it. I consider some objections and close the paper by arguing against the related claim that concepts are reverse compositional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on conditionals and compositionality. Examples of possible non-compositionality in English; Instances that depend upon sensitivity of conditionals to counterfactual situations; Description of the problem of the compositionality of quantified conditionals.

Some utterances of sentences such as ‘Every student failed the midterm exam’ and ‘There is no beer’ are widely held to be true in a conversation despite the facts that not every student in the world failed the midterm exam and that there is, in fact, some beer somewhere. For instance, the speaker might be talking about some particular course, or about his refrigerator. Stanley and Szabó (in Mind & Language, 15, 2000) consider many different approaches to how contextual information might give meaning to these ‘restricted quantifier domains’, and find all of them but one wanting. The present paper argues that their considerations against one of these other theories, considerations that turn on notions of compositionality, are incorrect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the simplest adjective-noun constructions and the apparent problem that they pose for compositionality. Two distinct levels of meaning associated with constructions of the sort in question, both of which are compositionally determined. Principle of compositionality; Linguistic data; Problem of adjectives.

In a language such as Greek where the morphological and syntactic phenomenon of nominal composition is extensively developed, the interpretation of a compound needs to take into account as much as possible its sense and the phraseological associations that could lead to the creation of the word in question. To illustrate this fact, five examples are considered: ... 'weak, feeble' < *'unable to hit' (... cf. ....), ... said in particular of heralds, not 'illustrious, noble' but perhaps 'he who cries loud', i.e. ... ... cf. ... 'fasting from food' < *'who has not been looked after, cared for', i.e. *on-[:omhe-no-s, cf. [sup *]kem-h[sub 2]- in ... same for ... Od. 23, 190-191 = ... perhaps 'born far away (from his parents)': ... cf. [sup *]h[sub 2]eug- 'grow'. Finally, ... can be compared to ... rather than ..., the original sense having been 'who rejoices in his ..., hence 'carefree'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the totality of nominal compounds attested in the Sabellic languages. It intends to evaluate any lexical correspondences between Sabellic and Latin and to classify the types of composition as productive or rather marginal respectively. Common innovations in the system of nominal composition contribute to the arguments in favour of a linguistic unity of Proto–Italic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on a study which reported on three coordinated studies that had the purpose of developing, evaluating and refining a framework to describe how experienced raters make decisions while evaluating ESL/EFL compositions. Background of the three studies; Implications from the three studies.

Paul Horwich argues for a ‘deflationary’account of compositionality, according to which, ‘. . . the compositionality of meaning imposes no constraint at all on how the meaning properties of words are constituted’. We have arrived at a tentative diagnosis, which is that Horwich fails to enforce several distinctions that turn out to be crucial. For example, sometimes he puts his main conclusion in the way we just quoted but sometimes, even on the following page, he puts it like this: ‘understanding one of oneÕs own complex expressions (non-idiomatically) is, by definition, nothing over and above understanding its parts and knowing how they are combined’. We propose, in what follows, to consider how Horwich’s deflationary account of compositionality fares if the distinction between theories of meaning and theories of understanding is properly attended to. Here’s how we think it all turns out: – Horwich is right to claim that compositionality is neutral with respect to the metaphysics of understanding expressions when ‘understanding’ refers to a (merely) dispositional state; but not when it refers to an occurrent state. – Horwich is right strictu dictu to claim that compositionality is neutral with respect to the character of lexical meanings, but only strictu dictu. – Compositionality taken, together with other constraints that semantic theories are required to satisfy, reduces the options in the theory of lexical meaning to a bare minimum. The first part of the paper is about compositionality and understanding, the second part is about compositionality and lexical meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My approach to the compositionality of meaning is deflationary in two respects. In the first place it shows that there is no need for a Tarski-style truth-theoretic account of it, and thereby avoids the difficult methodological and technical problems that would have to be solved on such an account. And in the second place it shows that compositionality imposes no constraint whatsoever on theories of lexical meaning. On the first of these points I am opposing Davidson and the tradition in semantics that he instigated. On the second point I am opposing Fodor and Lepore who have denounced various accounts of lexical meaning (including the one I favour – the use theory) for not squaring with compositionality. My plan for this paper is to outline the deflationary approach, to sketch its advantages, and to defend it against objections that have been made by Davidson, Fodor and Lepore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early part of the paper, I attempt to explain a dispute between two parties who endorse the compositionality of language but disagree about its implications: Paul Horwich, and Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore. In the remainder of the paper, I challenge the thesis on which they are agreed, that compositionality can be taken for granted. I suggest that it is not clear what compositionality involves nor whether it obtains. I consider some kinds of apparent counterexamples, and compositionalist responses to them in terms of covert indexicality and unspecific meanings. I argue that the last option is the best for most of the cases I consider. I conclude by stressing, as against Horwich and Fodor and Lepore, that the appropriate question concerns the extent to which compositionality obtains in a natural language, rather than whether it obtains or not, so that the answer is essentially messy, requiring detailed consideration of a wide range of examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the compositionality and inferentialism of pragmatist theory by Robert Brandom. Emphasis on the human and social character of content; Fundamental role of judgement in the theory of mind; Productivity of linguistic and cognitive capacities.

The article presents information on generative case grammar that is the basis for making comparison between the semantic structure of English and Spanish language. The article offers a grammatical model that is the basis of semantic universals and is concerned with the uses of language. A comparative-contrastive study is offered by an analysis of language that begins at an universal semantic base. Common semantic structures are entered in first language and target language. The formation of a sentence is assisted by a generative case grammar in terms of the semantic universals. Situationally oriented material is offered by the semantic grammar. In English and Spanish, the common semantic structured sentences need to consider as a point of departure. The point of departure is associated with the preparation of pedagogical grammars.