Seeing clearly: Frame Semantic, Psycholinguistic, and Cross ...

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 4
I believe that linguists should be concerned with the psychological processes of language
production and understanding and their underlying neurological mechanisms, and that
linguistic theories should be consistent withwhatisknown in those elds. The eld of psy-
cholinguistics undoubtedly has the most to contribute to linguistics proper; if nothing else,
it often demonstrates the di culty of experimentally studying constructs which linguists
may assumeasgiven, such as derivational complexity (Are passives really more complex
than actives?), or which linguists rarely consider in detail, such as lexical access (Exactly
what is retrieved from memory at what point insentence processing?).
Finally, linguists should be aware of developments in computer science, particularly
in areas such as knowledge representation, connectionist networks, information retrieval,
and natural language processing. Although relatively few computer scientists have based
their work directly upon contemporary linguistics, many have adapted some elements of
linguistic theory for particular purposes, and it should be instructive for linguists to see
what works and what does not in such implemented systems.
Semantics and World Knowledge
One of the most di cult questions in the eld of semantics is where (if anywhere)
to draw the line between meanings conveyed by language and knowledge of the world in
general. At one extreme, some cognitive linguists deny the possibility of delimiting lin-
guistic semantics in any clearcut way: \The distinction between semantics and pragmatics
(or between linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge) is largely artifactual, and the only
viable conception of linguistic semantics is one that avoids such false dichotomies and is
consequently encyclopedic in nature." (Langacker 1987:154) Langacker gives the example
of the noun compound buggy whip (p. 157), which cannot be explained compositionally
unless the semantics of buggy is taken to include the notions of a driver and a horse. At
the other extreme, we nd statements such as \Crucially, all aspects of meaning that are
situational must be removed from the study of Grammar, since they overload the Grammar
with redundant material and prevent the formulation of important empirical generaliza-
tions."(Bouchard 1995:16). 2
2 Situational is a tricky wordtodene. One cannot understand the concept of buggy whip without
understanding what we will call the frame in which itisused,involving at least a horse, a buggy, and a
driver. On the other hand, the meaning of buggy whip does not depend on whether or not one is riding on
a buggy at the time of speaking the words.