Neural Substrates of Copredication When an unstoppable scan meets an impossible object Elliot Murphy Division of Psychology and Language Sciences University College London PARLAY Conference 2014 University of York September 12 th 2014
Unlike ‘object recognition’, ‘object structure’ remains largely a mystery. A ‘thing’ ( river , house ) remains an obscure notion, existing not in the physical world (H 2 O) but within syntax and the Conceptual-Intentional system ( water ). The concept BOTTLE draws on visual cognition through its shape and colour features, while language uniquely contributes its functional properties, such as CONTAINER , ARTEFACT , and USED TO MOVE MASSES OF NON - RIGID MATERIALS (McGilvray 2005: 308). Chomsky (1996) also notes that a random pile of sticks in a forest is not a thing , but if they were put there intentionally (for the purposes of acting as a signal, for instance), the pile immediately becomes a thing, able to be named, individuated, etc.
In a number of publications Poeppel (e.g. 2012) has observed that there is currently an absence of ‘linking hypotheses’ through which to explore how the primitives of neuroscience (dendrite, cortical column, neuron, etc.) form the basis of linguistic computation (concatenation, existential closure, cyclic transfer, etc.). This ‘mapping problem’ encompasses what Poeppel calls the ‘Granularity Mismatch Problem’ : Linguistics and neuroimaging studies of language operate on objects of different granularity. Schlesewsky and Bornkessel-Schlesewsky: ‘the only syntactic operation which appears to have possible neurobiological correlates is Merge or something akin to it’ (2013: 279).
• Poeppel and Embick (2005) further note that by taking linguistic theory, and not neurobiology, as a guide, we can ‘use language to learn how the brain works’, rather than other way round. • Recent research into one particular topic in I-semantics ( Pietroski’s term), copredication , has the potential to build on the above assumptions and provide a unique (though tenuous) connection between the brain sciences and linguistic theory.
In 1995, the publication of Chomsky’s The Minimalist Program heralded a new direction for syntactic theory, and was rightly praised as one of the most important contributions to cognitive science of the closing years of the twentieth century. In the same year, however, MIT Press also published Pustejovsky’s first unified account of his ‘Generative Lexicon’, which arguably did for compositional semantics what The Minimalist Program did for syntax, though it generated far less awe and comment.
• Weinreich (1964) distinguished between contrastive ambiguity (river bank vs. financial institution) and complementary ambiguity ( bank [V] vs. bank [N]). • Pustejovsky terms logical polysemy ‘a complementary ambiguity where there is no change in lexical category and the multiple senses of the word have overlapping, dependent, or shared meanings’ (1995: 8). • Contrastive ambiguity – the most basic and uninteresting type – occupies the bulk of research in semantics and neurolinguistics.
In The Generative Lexicon , Pustejovsky (1995: 263) explores copredication, or the problem of two apparently incompatible properties being attributed to a single object ( city , lunch , book ). For instance, in The Joyce book was brilliant but weighed a ton , what Pustejovksy calls the ‘dot objects’ of INFORMATION and PHYSICAL OBJECT are attributed simultaneously to the book, creating an ‘impossible’ entity. These and other complex types are coherently bound reifications of multiple types. This is one reason why nominalist debates are beside the point, focusing – like Aristotle and other pre-Lockean philosophers – on allegedly metaphysical questions, not cognitive ones.
A newspaper can also be an object or an organization (or indeed an imagined object, if someone plans to start their own newspaper): (1) The newspaper attacked the prime minister for raising taxes. (2) Mary spilled coffee on the newspaper. (3) The newspaper I held this morning has gone bust. As Pustevjosky (1995: 133) notes, ‘while the noun newspaper is logically polysemous between the organization and the printed information-containing object, the noun book refers only to the latter, while the noun author makes reference to the “producer” of the book’ . A journalist, then, simply contributes, rather than brings about, the existence of a newspaper – an observation which could potentially yield interesting stimuli for neuroimaging studies of copredication, e.g.: (4) Parts of Owen Jones’ new book have been printed in[ PHYS_OBJ ]/by[ ORGNS/PHYS_OBJ&ORGNS ] the local newspaper.
A similar situation arises in Lunch was delicious but took forever , where delicious is a predicate which should be applied only to food, and took forever should only be applicable to events. This is a much more complex phenomenon than many accounts over the past decade have supposed, including even those of Pustejovsky (2001). A recent contribution by Gotham (2012) shows that copredication cannot be solved by appealing, as some have done, to coordination reduction, as in Lunch 1 was delicious but lunch 2 took forever , since copredication occurs in other syntactic structures (see also Gotham 2014). Furthermore, how copredication is understood ‘will have to be explained in any theory’ of semantics, Gotham notes (2012: 2), and ultimately by any neurolinguistic theory.
Although generativists in the late 1990s and throughout the last decade have been virtually the only linguists concerned with copredication (and even they are a minority among semanticists), the earliest modern account I have found of it was by Paul Postal, in his Epilogue to Jacobs and Robenbaum’s early textbook on transformational grammar, though he did not label or explore it much (1968: 273). One might argue that it was known to scholastic philosophers as qua predication, where X qua Y has the property P.
• Modern accounts of type manipulation essentially follow this approach, and view a property and event not as distinct parts of lunch , but instead see these as the same object under different conceptualisations. Dot-Exploitation is the compositional operation of Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon which disambiguates dot objects in context (a mild form of coercion, where Type Coercion is the operation which ‘converts an argument to the type which is expected by a function, where it would otherwise result in a type error’ (Pustejovsky 1995: 59)). • This mereological account must be inadequate however, since no one would judge Five books are heavy but easy to understand correct when faced with two volumes of the same INFORMATION book and a trilogy of three PHYSICAL OBJECT books. PHYSICAL - INFORMATIONAL composites are thus never counted in determiner phrases involving numerals (i.e. [ DP [ num ]]) . • These and other examples of copredication are clear cases of where the distinction between classical categories and family-resemblance categories (of the sort adopted by Pinker 1999) breaks down. • Perhaps it becomes more accurate to say that a book can be ‘realised as’ – or have as its ‘host’ – a physical medium, more than it would be to say that a given physical object is itself a book.
Copredication is relevant to and has been discussed by syntacticians and semanticists, and should be of concern (though currently is not) to neurolinguists studying the neural correlates of the processing of abstract, concrete and polysemous words. It has been well established by brain scanning studies, for instance, that the semantic lexicon is organised by imageability, and that low- imageability words ( justice , heaven ) are harder to retrieve from memory than high-imageability words ( hammer , phoenix ). This has been widely termed the ‘concreteness effect’ .
Suppose the library has two copies of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Peter takes out one, and John the other. Did Peter and John take out the same book, or different books? If we attend to the material factor of the lexical item, they took out different books; if we focus on its abstract component, they took out the same book. We can attend to both material and abstract factors simultaneously. Chomsky (2000: 16) Chomsky uses this and related examples (e.g. London burned down and was re-built 100 miles away ) to (i) demonstrate the complexity of the innate lexicon, and (ii) attack various ‘externalist’ theories in philosophy of language. But these constructions can be used for another purpose, (iii) to explore the neural correlates of concrete, abstract, polysymous and other concepts.
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