The Linguist and the Laundromat
The Linguist and the Laundromat
No Thumbnail Available
Files
Publication or External Link
Date
1998-11-03
Authors
Weinberg, Amy
Advisor
Citation
DRUM DOI
Abstract
This paper resulted from a roundtable discussion at the 1998 CUNY Sentence
Processing Conference held at Rutgers University. Jerry Fodor (Philosphy,
Rutgers University) an argued there that an adequate lexical semantics had
to invoke a criterion of Rever se Compositionality. Fodor gives the
following definition of 'Reverse Compositionality'(RC): "Nothing belongs
to the lexical entry for a lexical item except what that item contributes
to the grammatical representation of its hosts" where 'host is defin ed
as "any expression E ...of which E is a constituent. " Moreover, Fodor
claims that invoking this criterion has broad consequences for theories of
language processing and acquisition, particularly with respect to theories
that attribute processing beha vior to "lexical effects.
Fodor claims that "...most of what cognitive science blithely refers to as
lexical effects in parsing and language learning aren't in fact mediated
by information of the kind that lexical entries contain...." and "... that
language acquisition delivers sh allow lexical entries consonant with
reverse compositionality, and that parsing delivers correspondingly
shallow lexical entries consonant with assigning tokens to their types,
and that everything else will turn out to be 'performance theory' ...
In this paper, I argue that frequency and other standard lexical
processing effects can form a legitimate part of a theory of sentence
processing even if it adopts the criterion of "reverse compositionaliy".
Cases drawn from the literature are used to s ketch what a theory adopting
Fodor's criterion and using frequency and/or probabalistic information
would look like. This commentary will appear in Proceedings of CUNY
Conference on Sentence Processing, 1998, S. Stevenson and P. Merlo, eds,
J. Benjami ns..
Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-98-52