Abstract
Recent neurophysiological studies on canonical neurons demonstrate that
perceiving manipulable objects automatically activates the same neural circuits that fire
during the actual manipulation or grasping of objects: these findings allow us to conceive
affordances as «possibilities for action» brought about by objects’ physical properties.
The paper describes an attempt to apply this notion of affordances to the linguistic
domain. Affordances are annotated in a corpus focused on Italian grasp verbs, together
with semantic features. Classification experiments are conducted in order to distinguish
between different senses of verbs (concrete vs. metaphorical). Results show that
pragmatic information (affordances) is more relevant than semantic information in
assigning the correct interpretation to sentences.
Lingua originale | Inglese |
---|---|
pagine (da-a) | 179-191 |
Numero di pagine | 13 |
Rivista | Reti Saperi Linguaggi |
Volume | 1 |
DOI | |
Stato di pubblicazione | Pubblicato - 2014 |
Keywords
- affordances
- canonical neurons
- grasping
- pragmatics
- word sense disambiguation