Semantic Composition of English For-Adverbials as an Argument for a Continuous Meaning Space for Language, Maria Piñango (Yale University)
Jackendoff’s Parallel Architecture opened the opportunity to investigate the linguistic semantic system, lexico-conceptual structure, as a mental space for meaning generation and composition through purely semantico-conceptual means. In this talk I explore this vision of linguistic meaning through the examination of the iterativity associated with English for-adverbial composition as in the sentence “The girl jumped happily for an hour”. Starting from a linguistically motivated lexico-semantic analysis of the construction, I show how the results from a robust body of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experimental work from the past twenty-five years, reveal not only that computation of this iteration is isolable as processing cost and circumscribed cortical recruitment but that this behavioral pattern is indistinguishable from that normally associated with sentential contextualization. This blurs the distinction between lexical meaning and conceptual structure and questions the need for lexical meanings as discrete linguistic units. I end with a sketch of a model of the meaning system that not only requires that it be combinatorial and generative but also that it be continuous.