We propose a cognitive-psychological model of linguistic intuitions about copredication statements. In copredication statements, like "The book is heavy and informative," the nominal denotes two ontologically distinct entities at the same time. This has been considered a problem for standard truth-conditional semantics. In this paper, we…

Cognition in work teams has been predominantly understood and explained in terms of shared cognition with a focus on the similarity of static knowledge structures across individual team members. Inspired by the current zeitgeist in cognitive science, as well as by empirical data and pragmatic concerns, we offer an alternative theory of team…

We introduce a computational theory of situated language understanding in which the meaning of words and utterances depends on the physical environment and the goals and plans of communication partners. According to the theory, concepts that ground linguistic meaning are neither internal nor external to language users, but instead span the…

Four different kinds of grammars that can define crossing dependencies in human language are compared here: (1) "context sensitive rewrite" grammars with rules that depend on context; (2) "matching" grammars with constraints that filter the generative structure of the language; (3) "copying" grammars which can copy structures of unbounded size;…

What the participants share, their common "sense" of the world, creates a foundation, a framing, an orientation that enables human actors to see and act in coordination with one another. For recurrent activities, the methods the participants use to understand each other as they act change, making the intersubjective space in which actors operate…

An item that stands out (is isolated) from its context is better remembered than an item consistent with the context. This isolation effect cannot be accounted for by increased attention, because it occurs when the isolated item is presented as the first item, or by impoverished memory of nonisolated items, because the isolated item is better…

Research on perception and cognition suggests that whereas East Asians view the world holistically, attending to the entire field and relations among objects, Westerners view the world analytically, focusing on the attributes of salient objects. These propositions were examined in the change-blindness paradigm. Research in that paradigm finds…