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Dept. of Computer Science

University of Toronto



CSC 2540
Special Topics: Cognitive Linguistics
Spring 2005

Topic List and Readings

Readings not available electronically will be available for pickup from the AI office in Pratt 283 one week before the class in which they are covered.

"Chapters" below refer to chapters of the book Cognitive Linguistics, by William Croft and D. Alan Cruse, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Overview of the list of topics:

Jan 5: Intro to Cognitive Linguistics. Sections of Chapters 1-4.

Jan 12: Polysemy and Sense Boundaries. Chapter 5.

Jan 19: Hyponymy and Meronymy. Chapter 6.

Jan 26: Metaphor. Chapter 8.

Feb 2: Construction Grammar. Chapter 9, 10.1.

Feb 9: Usage-Based Model: Frequency in the Grammar. Chapter 11.

Feb 16 and Feb 23: No class.

Mar 2:

   Reading: John Newman and Sally Rice (2004). Patterns of usage for English SIT, STAND, and LIE: A cognitively-inspired exploration in corpus linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics 15:3, Pages 351-396.

Mar 9: (two readings)

1.   Reading: Eleanor Rosch (1978). Principles of Categorization. From Readings in Cognitive Science, a Perspective from Psychology and Artificial Intelligence, Allan Collins & Edward E. Smith, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Mateo, California, 1988, pp 312-322

2.   Reading: George Lakoff (1987). Chapter 4. Idealized Cognitive Models. From Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, University of Chicago Press. Handed out on paper.

Mar 16:

   Reading: Morgan, Pamela S. (1997) Figuring out Figure out: Metaphor and the semantics of the English verb-particle construction. Cognitive Linguistics 8, 327-57. Handed out on paper.

Mar 23:

   Reading: Bowerman and Choi (2003). Space under Construction: Language-Specific Spatial Categorization in First Language Acquisition. In Gentner, D., and Meadow, S.G., Eds., Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Mar 30:

1.    Reading: Patrick Saint-Dizier (2005). PrepNet: a Framework for Describing Prepositions: Preliminary Investigation Results. In Sixth International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS'05). Tilberg, Netherlands.

2.    Reading: Patrick Olivier and Jun-ichi Tsujii (1994). A Computational View of the Cognitive Semantics of Spatial Prepositions. In 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'94). Las Cruces, NM.

Apr 6: Final discussion.