{"pk":29846,"title":"Chaining and historical adjective extension","subtitle":null,"abstract":"A hallmark of natural language is the innovative reuse of ex-isting words. We examine how adjectives extend over timeto describe nouns and form previously unattested adjective-noun pairings. Our approach is based on the idea of chainingthat postulates word meaning to extend by linking novel ref-erents to existing ones that are close in semantic space. Wetest this proposal by exploring a set of models that learn toinfer adjective-noun pairings from historical text corpora fora period of 150 years. Our findings across three diverse setsof adjectives support a chaining mechanism that is sensitiveto semantic neighbourhood density, best captured by an exem-plar model of category extension. This work sheds light on thegenerative cognitive mechanisms of word usage extension.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"word usage extension; chaining; exemplar theory;generative model; adjectives"}],"section":"Poster Session 2","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59m035gq","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Karan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Grewal","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto","department":""},{"first_name":"Yang","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29846/galley/19700/download/"}]}