If Xena Warrior Princess went head to head with Wonder Woman, who would win?

Each week the weblords at www.electricferret.com post in-depth discussions of issues just like this. They call their on-line magazine Comic Book Universe Battles and post a weekly play-by-play account of a battle between two fictional characters. For example, besides the wrestling match between Wonder Woman and Xena, other noteworthy battles have included Count Dracula versus Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the aliens (from Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3) versus the Borg of Star Trek fame. While the topics inevitably involve imaginary characters in scenarios bizarre even from the standpoint of fiction, the debates can be quite spirited. Take, for example, the following excerpt from a discussion about a competition between cartoon sleuth Scooby Doo and the X-Files' FBI agents Mulder and Scully to uncover the cause of some mysterious deaths at an amusement park.

In the passage that follows this quotation, Goffman (1974) argues that the perception of everyday activity relies extensively on the projection of frames – so extensively, in fact, that it is often necessary to point to extreme cases of frame-shifting to reveal the constructive nature of social perception. Although their social function was central to Bateson's (1976; 1956) original concept of frames, this facet of background knowledge has been less prominent in contemporary cognitive science. One exception to this trend can be found in the work of cognitive anthropologists who study cultural models, or culturally shared frames. While previous chapters have focused on the role of frames in meaning construction prompted by language, many of those same frames are used to structure our actions and our expectations as we interact with each other in the world. Consequently, this chapter explores the social dimension of frames, examining real-life uses of cultural models in informants' discourse about the morality of abortion.

We have seen that on-line meaning construction is a nontrivial process in which a speaker assembles utterance meaning in response to linguistic clues. Because meaning is considerably underdetermined by the overt structure of language, it often requires the creative application of background knowledge. The importance of background knowledge is especially obvious when the objects of analysis are stretches of connected discourse. Schank & Abelso (1977), for example, point to the somewhat surprising difficulty of constructing a computational model capable of understanding simple stories like this one:

Although one might conceivably build a model that could construct meanings for each individual sentence, Schank & Abelson argued that such a modelwould fail to compute a number of things human readers would naturally assume to have transpired.

As you read this excerpt from a story about the 1998 Tour de France,perhapsyou imagine cyclist Pantani coming from behind, pedaling alone on the ascent of Mount Galibier, and being chased more closely as he climbed to the endof the stage at Les Deux Alpes. Or, perhaps you did not realize that thepassage was about a bicycle race, and wondered what the men in the story were doing on a rainy day in the French Alps without jackets. In either case, your comprehension of the passage involves the construction of a model of the events described therein. Moreover, the details of your model will dependboth on what you know about the Tour de France bicycle race and what aspects of your knowledge were brought to bear on interpretation of the passage.

Schank & Abelson's (1977) formulation of scripts represented a major advance in cognitive science in its acknowledgment of the constructive nature of comprehension. However, in some ways scripts and even the more recent, technologically sophisticated implementations do not go far enough in explaining the constitutive role of cognitive models in the structure and interpretation of experience. The latter has been almost exclusively the province of cognitive anthropologists who treat scripts as culturally shared representations that people use to give meaning to their actions in the world. Anthropologists Quinn & Holland (1987), for example, argue that the uniformity in culture members' description of particular scripts suggests that these data structures have cultural origins. Besides providing descriptions of action sequences in typical events, scripts can be used by people to structure plans, expectations, and actions. The organizing capacity of scripts extends well beyond the brain and into the set of practices that help constitute the social world. The restaurant script is a useful representational structure precisely because practices in real restaurants conform (more or less) to the script.

Another term for these culturally shared frames is cultural models, taken-for-granted models shared by members of a given social group, discussed briefly in Chapter 6. As data structures, cultural models consist of standardized sequences of events in a pared-down world. The definition of cultural models retains essential elements of scripts, frames, and schemas, while emphasizing their inter subjective nature and cultural origins. But althoughcultural models are widely shared among culture members, they need not correspondto anything in the external world.

Anyone with any doubt about the prevalence of natural language quantifiers need only open the morning paper, turn on the television, or tune in a radio broadcast such as the one excerpted above. In this short passage, we have “nearly one hundred Internet companies,” “numerous firms,” “many analysts,” “so many new tech stocks,” “some portfolio managers,” “too few dollars,” “too many deals,” “too much cash,” and “a few IPOs.” Intuitively, one might hope for a straightforward mapping between quantifiers and quantities, perhaps expressed as a percentage point. But, as luck would have it, things are not that simple.

Moxey & Sanford (1993) demonstrate that the comprehension of quantified expressions requires knowledge of the domain in question. For example, “numerous ants” presumably refers to more ants than the number of firms referredto by “numerous firms” in the preceding excerpt. Moreover, Moxey & Sanford point out how inquiries about quantity are frequently directed at eliciting advice about the advisability of pursuing a particular course of action.

In this chapter, we will tackle one of the central problems of cognitive how people combine concepts in order to yield new ones. One way that psychologists and linguists have addressed this issue in the past has been to look at the interpretation of simple noun phrases like “square peg” or “trashcan basketball.” But while the appeal of the noun phrase is presumably its simplicity, the meaning construction that underlies these phrases turns out to be very complex indeed. Ironically, while it appears to be a construction – a predicate and an argument – that would present the simplest case for compositionality, the meaning of noun phrases is rarely compositional. Much like inserting a square peg into a round hole, some previous attempts to account for conceptual combination have taken compositionality as a given, and formulated mechanisms for accommodating noncompositional phenomena. In contrast, in conceptual blending theory, the goal is to formulate an account of conceptual combination that is general enough to encompass both compositional and noncompositional phenomena.

This chapter addresses the application of blending theory to concept combination coded by modified noun phrases. In section 1, traditional assumptions predication in nominal compounds are contrasted with those offered inconceptual blending theory. In section 2, I point to similarities between the difficulty associated with accounting for people's understanding of predicating adjectives and that of accounting for nonpredicating adjectives and modified noun phrases. Section 3 discusses the treatment of privative adjectives such as “fake” or “toy,” which appear to predicate the absence of certain essential properties.

We have seen that language comprehension involves a complex set of processes in which listeners actively construct meanings by integrating linguistic input with background knowledge and local contextual information. Pursuing a constructivist approach, I have suggested that language cues the retrieval of frames from long-term memory for the construction of cognitive models in working memory. Language input, perceptual input, and current conceptual content all influence the recruitment of information as well as the construction of models. Comprehension proceeds by assembling a series of simple cognitive models and establishing the mappings, or correspondences, that exist between the elements and the relations in different spaces, or partitions of working memory.

When a word cannot be integrated into the model currently being built in the focus space, it may trigger frame-shifting, or reanalysis of information that has come before. Frame-shifting occurs when the currently activated frame does not adequately represent the relationship among two or more objects, actions, or events. While jokes provide a particularly salient example of the frame-shifting phenomenon, the need to construct novel frames to accommodate new information is quite common. Because sentential integration involves the coordination and accommodation of different frames, people presumably appeal to mechanisms of frame-shifting in the course of everyday language understanding.

However, as Churchland (1989) observes, frame-shifting can be accompanied by an experience of sudden insight. Can this remarkable event really be related to the more common processes of on-line meaning construction? Traditional models suggest the answer is no.