Journal

Volume 5, Issue 2 (July 31, 2004)

3 articles

• Analogical Uses of the First Person Pronoun: A Difficulty in Philosophical Semantics
  by Jerome Pelletier
  J. CS. 2004, 5(2), 139-155;
  Abstract Analogical counterfactuals such as “If I were you, I would do so and so…” create a puzzle for philosophical semantics. Whereas the ‘received view’ in philosophical semantics has it that the first person pronoun always refers to its utterer, one may wonder whether this is still the case when the firs... [Read more].
  Abstract Analogical counterfactuals such as “If I were you, I would do so and so…” create a puzzle for philosophical semantics. Whereas the ‘received view’ in philosophical semantics has it that the first person pronoun always refers to its utterer, one may wonder whether this is still the case when the first person pronoun is embedded in analogical counterfactuals such as (2) “If I were you, I would stay away from me”. I suggest that the intelligibility of (2) lies in the fact that the token of the expression ‘I’ in the consequent of the counterfactual does not refer to its utterer. Should one then conclude, following the ‘anaphoric theory’ that the second occurrence of ‘I’ in (2) does refer to its addressee? For the ‘anaphoric theory’, ‘I’ in ‘I would stay away from me’ refers anaphorically, thanks to the linguistic context, to the referent of ‘you’ in ‘If I were you’. On the basis of an analysis of the imaginative project involved in uttering a practical advise in the form of (2), I suggest contra the ‘anaphoric theory’ that the first pronoun ‘I’ in the consequent of (2) behaves as an indexical and that its content is obtained by the application of its character to a pretend context differing from the context of its utterance. According to the so-called ‘pretence theory’, the first person pronoun in its second occurrence in (2) pretends to refer to a fictional composite of the utterer and the addressee. [Collapse]
• The Linguistic Representation and Processing of Event Structure
  by David J. Townsend & Milton S. Seegmiller
  J. CS. 2004, 5(2), 157-244;
  Abstract Current linguistic theories suggest that inherent temporal boundedness (telicity) may underlie syntactic representations of sentences. Corpus analysis and acceptability judgments showed a weak relation between telicity and syntactic form. Two experiments on self-paced reading of sentences with reduc... [Read more].
  Abstract Current linguistic theories suggest that inherent temporal boundedness (telicity) may underlie syntactic representations of sentences. Corpus analysis and acceptability judgments showed a weak relation between telicity and syntactic form. Two experiments on self-paced reading of sentences with reduced relative clauses showed that argument structure preferences had immediate effects on the garden path but verb telicity did not, nor did the garden path depend on an interaction of verb telicity with object specificity or preposition. A probe recognition experiment showed that response times were faster for sentences with a telic predicate. The results suggest early access to argument structure preferences and later access to a derived semantic representation of temporal boundedness. [Collapse]
• Phonology, Orthography, and Reading Process
  by Chang H. Lee
  J. CS. 2004, 5(2), 245-263;
  Abstract Increasing amount and types of studies have recently provided evidence for phonological recoding in word processing. This paper reviews three main hypotheses on the role of phonology in word recognition. A piece of experimental evidence supporting the role of phonology were summarized. Based on thes... [Read more].
  Abstract Increasing amount and types of studies have recently provided evidence for phonological recoding in word processing. This paper reviews three main hypotheses on the role of phonology in word recognition. A piece of experimental evidence supporting the role of phonology were summarized. Based on these previous research reviewed, the strength of the phonological recoding hypothesis is discussed as compared to other competing hypotheses. [Collapse]