In all human languages, noun phrases (NPs) (e.g., ‘a field’, ‘the woman with a book’) are used to identify entities in discourse. Previous evidence has shown that the spontaneous speech of patients ...with schizophrenia (Sz) shows differences in the distribution of grammatically different types of NPs, which are in part specific to patients with formal thought disorder (FTD). Here we sought to provide the first evidence of related grammatical effects in a non-Indo-European language. Results from a picture description task in a sample of 16 Turkish speakers with FTD (+FTD), 15 without FTD (-FTD), and 27 controls revealed that relative to controls, people with Sz over-produced NPs that are ‘bare’ (in the sense of lacking any grammatical items such as the or a in English). The +FTD group generally showed stronger effects than -FTD, and used more pronouns and less NPs co-referring with previously mentioned NPs. In addition, the dynamic distribution of NP types over narrative time showed an effect of increased mean distance between definite NPs in -FTD relative to controls. In +FTD but no other group there was an unexpected random distribution of indefinite DPs. Incidence rates of referential anomalies increased from controls to the -FTD and +FTD groups. These findings further confirm that Sz is manifest through specific linguistic effects in the referential structure of meaning as mediated by grammar. They provide a linguistic baseline for neurocognitive models of FTD and help to define appropriate targets for the automatic extraction of linguistic features to classify psychotic speech.
The role of the basal ganglia has been a longstanding issue in neural language models. Huntington's disease (HD) shows primary impairment in the striatum and has previously been shown to affect the ...processing of phrase-structural hierarchies that are built by phrasal movement (e.g. in passives). Here we asked patients with HD to judge the acceptability of sentences containing different types of illicit phrasal movement, which were contrasted with semantic violations involving no movement. A logistic mixed-effects regression showed that patients had a profound impairment in judging incorrect but not correct sentences across all types of illicit movement, while the semantic condition was also affected, but significantly less so. Adding neuropsychological variables to the model did not improve predictions. These results demonstrate a loss of cognitive control, worsening with disease progression, over phrase-structural hierarchies, which extends to forms of meaning built at sentential levels.
In factive clausal embedding (He knows that it is warm outside), the embedded clause is presupposed to be true. In non-factive embedding (He thinks that it is warm outside) there is no ...presupposition, and in counterfactive embedding (It only seems that it is warm outside) the embedded clause is presupposed to be false. These constructions have been investigated as a window into the complexity of language and thought, and there are disputes as to the relative contributions of lexical, syntactic or non-verbal resources in their interpretation. We designed a sentence-picture matching task to test comprehension of these constructions in a group of aphasic participants and in non-brain-damaged controls. In particular, we tested the capacity to reach a factive or counterfactive interpretation. In factive interpretation trials, participants with aphasia performed nearly as well as controls, while in counterfactive interpretation trials they performed significantly worse. Accuracy in factive and counterfactive interpretation trials correlated with other syntactic and lexical measures. Only performances on counterfactive trials correlated with non-verbal reasoning measures. Exploratory regression models suggest that verbal and non-verbal scores were separate factors. Results indicate that a disruption of counterfactive interpretation in aphasia is linked to reduction of syntactic and/or conceptual-propositional capacities.
•We tested aphasic comprehension of factives, non-factives and counterfactives.•Impairment was greater in trials which required counterfactive interpretation.•Performance in all trials correlated with degree of language impairment.•Performance in counterfactive trials also correlated with non-verbal reasoning.
Spencer's heritage, while almost a forgotten chapter in the history of biology, lives on in psychology and the philosophy of mind. I particularly discuss externalist views of meaning, on which ...meaning crucially depends on a notion of reference, and ask whether reference should be thought of as cause or effect. Is the meaning of a word explained by what it refers to, or should we say that what we use a word to refer to is explained by what concept it expresses? I argue for the latter view, which I call 'Darwinian', and against the former, 'Spencerian' one, assuming conceptual structures in humans to be an instance of adaptive structures, and adaptive relations to an environment to be the effect rather than the cause of evolutionary novelties. I conclude with the deficiency - both empirically and methodologically - of a functionalist study of human concepts and the languages they are embedded in, as it would be undertaken in a paradigm that identifies meaning with reference or that gives reference an explanatory role to play for what concepts we have.PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Truth's Fabric Hinzen, Wolfram
Mind & language,
April 2003, Letnik:
18, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
To understand language, philosophers have related sentences and/or their uses to the concept of truth. I study an aspect of this relation by studying the actual structures that sentences expressing ...truth judgements have, an issue that I consider empirical. So I propose to switch from studying ‘truth conditions’ for sentences (determined metaphysically, or normatively) to studying the structures of expressions of the form This sentence is true/has (some) truth to it. I argue that the status of the ‘truth predicate’ must be understood in terms of the syntax (in Chomsky's naturalistic sense of syntax) of possessive constructions, rather than in terms of metaphysical, epistemic, or action–theoretic factors.
Carnap took the content of a particular sentence or set of sentences to consist in the set of the consequences of the sentence or set. This claim equates meaning with inferential role, but it ...restricts the inferences to deductive or explicative ones. Here I reject a recent proposal by Robert Brandom, where inductive or ampliative inferences are also meant to confer contents on expressions. I argue that if Brandom's inferentialist picture is upheld, and both explicative and ampliative inferences confer meaning, one consequence of this is that the content of a sentence is to be read off from our ways of rationally altering our beliefs. Meaning and content then are largely concepts of pragmatics, with no clear theoretical interest. My critique affects certain aspects of Dummett's meaning-theoretic picture too, and the discussion also links up with the development of 'dynamic semantics'.
In a recent paper, Kit Fine offers a reconstruction of Cantor's theory of ordinals. It avoids certain mentalistic overtones in it through both a non-standard ontology and a non-standard notion of ...abstraction. I argue that this reconstruction misses an essential constructive and computational content of Cantor's theory, which I in turn reconstruct using Martin-Löf's theory of types. Throughout, I emphasize Kantian themes in Cantor's epistemology, and I also argue, as against Michael Hallett's interpretation, for the need for a constructive understanding of Cantorian 'existence principles'.
I argue that the implementation of the Dummettian program of an "anti-realist" semantics requires quite different conceptions of the technical meaning-theoretic terms used than those presupposed by ...Dummett. Starting from obvious incoherences in an attempt to conceive truth conditions as assertibility conditions, I argue that for anti-realist purposes non-epistemic semantic notions are more usefully kept apart from epistemic ones rather than being reduced to them. Embedding an anti-realist theory of meaning in Martin-Löf's Intuitionistic Type Theory (ITT) takes care, however, of many notorious problems that have arisen in trying to specify suitable intuitionistic notions of semantic value, truthconditions, and validity, taking into account the so-called "defeasibility of evidence" for assertions in empirical discourses.
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