This paper investigates the relation between observed discourse frequencies of linguistic elements and structures, on the one hand, and assumptions concerning the entrenchment of these units in the minds of speakers, on the other. While it is usually assumed that there is a fairly direct correlation between frequency of use and degree of entrenchment, it is argued that many essential questions concerning this relation have remained unanswered so far: What is the role of absolute frequency of occurrence as opposed to frequency relative to a given reference construction? How are relative discourse frequencies to be captured statistically in such a way that, for instance, rare lexical items that typically occur in certain constructions can be differentiated from frequent lexical items which are more versatile but also observed to occur in the same construction, often with considerable absolute frequencies of occurrence? What are the psychological implications of different combinations of high and low absolute and relative frequencies? While the paper suggests solutions to some of these problems it also points to a number of unresolved issues to be addressed in the future and calls for a more modest and cautious way of interpreting quantitative observations in cognitive terms.

Does frequency in text instantiate entrenchment in the cognitive system

: When two people talk, they focus their attention on only a small portion of what each of them knows or believes. Both what gets said and how it gets interpreted depend on a shared understanding of this narrowing of attention to a small highlighted portion of what is known. One of the effects of understanding an utterance is to be focused on certain entities (both relationships and objects) from a particular perspective. A speaker provides a hearer with clues to what to look at and how to look at it -- what to focus on, how to focus on it, and how wide or narrow the focusing should be. These clues may be linguistic or they may come from knowledge about the relationships between entities in the domain. Linguistic clues may be either explicit, deriving directly from certain words, or implicit, deriving from sentential structure and from rhetorical relationships between sentences. This paper examines focusing in dialog, discusses focusing mechanisms based on domain structure clues, and, from this perspective, indicates future research problems entailed in modeling the focusing process more generally. The importance of focusing is illustrated by considering the problem of generating and understanding definite descriptions.

Focusing in dialog

CITATION: Stein, D. E. S. Cognitive factors as a key to plain-sense biblical interpretation : resolving cruxes in Gen 18:1–15 and 32:23–33. Open Theology, 4(1):545-589, doi:10.1515/opth-2018-0043.

Cognitive Factors as a Key to Plain-Sense Biblical Interpretation: Resolving Cruxes in Gen 18:1–15 and 32:23–33

This paper presents the results of a concept formation experiment that provides evidence on the possible existence of a basic-level of taxonomic organization in phonological categories as conceived of by phonetically naive, native speakers of English. This level is roughly equivalent to the phoneme as described by phonologists and linguists. The reason why the phoneme could be considered as the basic level of taxonomies of phonological categories is discussed.

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The phoneme as a basic-level category: experimental evidence from english

Abstract This paper models conventionalisation of language structure as constitutive of processing fluency. I postulate that the difference in conventionalisation of linguistic forms used for communication significantly influences our reasoning about linguistically-expressed problems. Two studies are reported that tested this hypothesis with the use of variably conventionalised - fluent and disfluent - formulations of problem-solving tasks. Th e findings indicate that even in tasks requiring analytic reasoning, the degree to which the linguistic forms employed to communicate are conventionalised is correlated with the subjects’ performance success rate. On a more general level, this paper seeks to empirically address the nature of links between linguistic form and meaning construction.

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Processing Fluency and Decision-Making: The Role of Language Structure

Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1977), pp. 475-487

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Pamela A. Downing

Papers

On "Basic Levels" and the Categorization of Objects in English Discourse