Assignment 4: Categories, Frames, and Images Schemas

Assigned Thursday, February 29, 2008
Due Thursday, March 6, 2008 in class — please turn in paper writeup. Include your name and login on the writeup. Electronic submission via your course account is okay for late submissions. Problem 5 will require that you find a language informant. Please start early.

For Problems 1–4 we assume speakers of American English.

Problem 1: Levels of Categorization

Consider the following three words:

1. fork
2. sugar cookie
3. software

1. What is the prototypical meaning of fork? Does this prototype refer to a culture-specific frame, or a universal schema?

For each of sugar cookie, software, and prototypical fork, answer (b) and (c) below:

2. Is this a subordinate, basic-level, or superordinate category?
   • If subordinate, give a basic-level category containing it.
   • If basic-level, give an example of a superordinate category containing it.
   • If superordinate, give a basic-level category contained in it.
3. For the basic-level category you identified in (b) [whether one of the given words or the related basic-level category you identified], how do you know it's basic? Give four reasons.

Problem 2: Polysemy (Radial Category) Networks

Each of the example sentences below contains a different sense of the word branch:

1. These recruiters belong to several different branches of the military.
2. The nest was situated between two branches.
3. There are thousands of books in the downtown branch of the library.
4. My dad has 8 siblings, so my family tree has lots of branches.

Give a brief characterization of each sense exemplified above. Then, draw a polysemy network incorporating the four senses. In your graph identify the central case, and connect nodes for other senses based on how they are extensions of a (central or non-central) case. Hint: Unlike with cases of homophony (e.g. river vs. financial bank), there should be no isolated nodes in your graph.

Problem 3: Frame Semantics

List at least 5 roles/entities and at least 3 events/actions that might belong to each of the following frames:

1. a game of tennis
2. a religion (i.e., roles and events typical of religions in general)

If any of the events are subparts of other events you listed, indicate this.

Problem 4: Image Schemas

This problem will concern image schemas, a class of frames which deal with spatial relations and motion of objects.

Imagine a situation in which a rattlesnake slithers out of a hole, across the ground, and into a house (via the front door). You've already learned how to represent the beginning and end portions of the scenario using the Trajector-Landmark, Container, and Source-Path-Goal (SPG) image schemas. To review, here are definitions for these schemas using Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG), which you will learn more about later in the course:

schema TrajectorLandmark
   roles
      trajector
      landmark

schema Container
   roles
      boundary
      portal
      interior
      exterior

schema SPG
   roles
      mover
      source
      path
      goal

Now, the meanings of the words out of and into are specified with OutOf and Into schemas that evoke Trajector-Landmark, Container, and Source-Path-Goal schemas, binding them together in different ways:

schema OutOf
   evokes TrajectorLandmark as tl
   evokes Container as cont
   evokes SPG as spg
   roles
      trajector
      landmark
   contraints
      self.trajector ↔ tl.trajector
      self.landmark ↔ tl.landmark ↔ cont
	  spg.source ↔ cont.interior
	  spg.path ↔ cont.portal
	  spg.goal ↔ cont.exterior

schema Into
   evokes TrajectorLandmark as tl
   evokes Container as cont
   evokes SPG as spg
   roles
      trajector
      landmark
   contraints
      self.trajector ↔ tl.trajector
      self.landmark ↔ tl.landmark ↔ cont
	  spg.source ↔ cont.exterior
	  spg.path ↔ cont.portal
	  spg.goal ↔ cont.interior

Without worrying too much about the notation, take a look at the last three lines of the above schemas. For Into the source is the exterior of the container and the goal is the interior of the container; for OutOf it is reversed. For both Into and OutOf, the path is the portal (which allows passage through the boundary of the container). In our scenario, the roles specified in the above schemas will be bound to fillers representing the entities in context. For example, with OutOf, the landmark/container will be bound to the hole, and the trajector will be bound to the snake.

For this problem you are asked to use some new schemas to represent the middle portion of the scenario, in which the snake is in the front yard. Consider the following sentences:

1. The rattlesnake was above the ground. [i.e. not underground]
2. The rattlesnake was on the ground.
3. The rattlesnake slithered across the ground. [i.e., from the hole to the house via the ground]

Your task is to specify role bindings for the Above, On, and Across schemas as used in these sentences. You may need to use Trajector-Landmark, Container, and/or Source-Path-Goal, as well as:

// States that one object is positioned higher than another on the vertical axis
schema RelativeVerticalPosition
   roles
      higherObject
      lowerObject

// States that two objects are in contact with each other. (The order doesn't matter.)
schema Contact
   roles
      object1
      object2

1. Which is the trajector for all three sentences: the rattlesnake, the hole, the ground, or the house?
2. Which is the landmark for all three sentences: the rattlesnake, the hole, the ground, or the house?
3. Complete the table below with role correspondences for the three sentences. Blanks on the first line are for evoked schema names (On will evoke two schemas, and Across three). The rest of the blanks are for role names. Fill in a role or schema name only where there's a blank. The Above schema has been started for you.

4. Absent some context, the word into is ambiguous, as these sentences illustrate:
   1. The car turned into the driveway.
   2. The car turned into the garage door.
   3. The car turned into a winged chariot.
   Briefly, how might one set up an experiment to test whether the previous context (i.e. the sentence that comes before it) primes one interpretation of into over the others?

Problem 5: Spatial Categorization

The illustration above is from a paper by Melissa Bowerman and Soonja Choi, titled Space under Construction: Language-Specific Spatial Categorization in First Language Acquisition. In it you see several actions, most of which are encoded by the English words "put in" or "put on". In particular, you see depictions of:

1. Put the cup on the table.
2. Put the magnet on the refrigerator door.
3. Put the ring on the finger.
4. Put the button in the buttonhole. (Button the button.)
5. Close the drawer (tightly).
6. Put the book in the bookcase.
7. Put the apple in the bowl.
8. Put the book in the bag.

Your task will be to find out how these actions are encoded in another language. After finding a language consultant fluent in a non-English language, ask him or her to translate these sentences with the help of the illustration. (The language should be one that you are not fluent in yourself, although it is permissible for you to have some familiarity with it.) Either you or your language consultant should write down the translations, and you should create a gloss for each translation. A gloss is a word-for-word annotation of the sentence. (You may have to select Unicode UTF-8 encoding on your browser to view the below correctly.)

   Bǎ  bēizi  fàng  zài  zhūo   shàng. (Mandarin)
   BA  cup    put   at   table  top
   Put the cup on the table.

Unglossable elements maybe left untranslated. After completing the glosses, boldface the non-English verbs and underline the non-English spatial terms. For example:

   Bǎ  bēizi  fàng  zài  zhūo   shàng.
   BA  cup    put   at   table  top
   Put the cup on the table.

Then answer these questions:

1. What are the various spatial words that your chosen language uses for these actions?
2. What are the various verbs that your language uses for these actions?
3. What distinctions does your language not encode that English does? Does your language make an on/in distinction?
4. What distinctions does your language encode that English does not? If your language uses different words for what English uses the same word for, how does your language determine which word to use?