Abstract
So-called phenomenon-based perception verbs such as ‘sound, taste (of)’, and ‘look (like)’ allow for a use in inferential evidential constructions of the type ‘The chocolate egg tastes old’. In this paper, we propose a frame-theoretic analysis of this use in which we pursue the question how well-formed inferential uses can be discriminated from awkward uses such as #‘The chocolate egg tastes oval’. We argue that object knowledge plays a central role in this respect and that this knowledge is ideally captured in frame representations in which object properties are easily translated into attributes such as TASTE, smell, age, and form. We represent the more general knowledge of the range and domain of the attributes in a type signature. In principle, an inference is recognized as admissible if the values of one attribute can be inferred from the values of another attribute. In the analysis, this kind of inferability is modeled as an inference structure defined on the type signature. The definitions of type signatures and inference structures enable us to establish two constraints which are sufficient to discriminate the admissible and inadmissible uses of phenomenon-based perception verbs in simple subject-verb-adjective constructions.
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Notes
- 1.
The admissibility and awkwardness of the examples (1)–(3) can neither be explained by pure linguistic nor by pure world knowledge. In our view, the strict separation between world and lexical knowledge has to be abandoned in order to account for evidential uses of perception verbs.
- 2.
Note that in our framework the central node does not necessarily need to be the root of the graph (as it is in the example). Hence, it needs to be explicitly marked. For instance, in frames of functional concepts like ‘mother of’ or ‘taste of’ the central node is usually not a root node of the frame graph. For a discussion of frames with central nodes which are not roots see Petersen and Osswald (2013).
- 3.
Note that in the AC ‘ attr:attr’ the expressions attr and attr do not refer to two distinct objects carrying identical labels, rather the two expressions are identical and denote the same object (\(\mathrm{attr} \in \mathrm{ATTR}\ \subseteq \mathrm{TYPE}\)). Only to improve readability we use typography as a marker to distinguish between the attribute role and the type role of an attribute.
- 4.
Note that it is not principally impossible to declare properties of abstract entities like sound. Clearly, expressions like ‘a loud sound’, in which the adjective specifies the value range of the attribute volume encoded in ‘sound’, are unproblematic. Even synesthetic metaphors like ‘a loud color’ are acceptable. For a frame-based analysis of these expressions see the discussion in Petersen et al. (2008).
- 5.
It is not clear whether (food,TASTE,age) is a realistic inference relation as the value range of TASTE for objects of type food is so diverse that there is probably no general correspondence between the age of food and its taste. However, some of our informants accepted the sentence ‘The food tastes old’ and in order to exemplify the inheritance of inference relations we included this relation into our example type signature.
- 6.
From a cognitive perspective, abstract object properties such as taste and age can be conceived as object ‘dimensions’. A dimension can be defined as a set of mutually exclusive properties of which an individual has exactly one at each point of time (cf. Löbner, 1979). Thus, stative verbs encoding specific object dimensions can also be referred to as ‘stative dimensional verbs’ (cf. Gamerschlag et al., 2013, for a frame analysis of posture verbs such as ‘stand’ and ‘sit’, which constitute another type of dimensional verbs).
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Acknowledgements
This paper is a joint effort of the DFG-projects “Dimensional Verbs” and “Formal modeling of frames and functional concepts”, of the Research Unit “Functional Concepts and Frames” and their successor projects in the Collaborative Research Centre 991 “The Structure of Representations” supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG). We are grateful to our fellow researchers, in particular Sebastian Löbner, Ralf Naumann, Rainer Osswald, Tanja Osswald, and Brigitte Schwarze. Moreover, we would like to thank the audiences at the second Conference on Concept Types and Frames in Düsseldorf, the 8th Conference on Semantics and Formal Modeling in Nancy, and the 3rd UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference for valuable comments. A special thanks goes to the two anonymous reviewers of a former version of this article. Their comments and questions were very helpful and provided us with good ideas for alternative solutions and simplifications.
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Petersen, W., Gamerschlag, T. (2014). Why Chocolate Eggs Can Taste Old but Not Oval: A Frame-Theoretic Analysis of Inferential Evidentials. In: Gamerschlag, T., Gerland, D., Osswald, R., Petersen, W. (eds) Frames and Concept Types. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 94. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01541-5_9
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