Frame-shifting and Frame Semantics: Joke Comprehension on the Space Structuring Model

Consider how one might understand the following ad, "For Sale, Parachute. Used once; never opened; small stain." Although there are no explicit cues to do so, the reader naturally recruits knowledge about how and why parachutes are normally used in order to construe the listed features of this chute as being causally related to one another. Empirical support for the importance of such causal and relational information in language comprehension comes from the consistent finding that memory for short texts includes inferred material (Sanford, 1981). Further, computational considerations imply that language comprehension involves a capacity for dynamic inferencing based on general knowledge represented as frames (Lange, 1989). Invented somewhat independently by researchers in the field of linguistics and natural language processing (Schank, 1977), frame-type data structures are often invoked to account for inferential aspects of language comprehension (Fillmore, 1982). As used here, frames are representations with slot/filler structure, default values, and weak constraints on the type of fillers for a given slot (reviewed in Barsalou, 1992). Frames contain causal and relational information, are organized hierarchically so as to allow recursive embedding of frames within frames, and can be used to represent knowledge about a wide variety of objects, actions, and events. In linguistics, frame semantics is a research program in which a word's semantic properties are described with respect to the way that they highlight aspects of an associated frame. For example, buy and sell both evoke the Commercial Transaction frame. But buy highlights the buyer and the goods, while sell highlights the seller and the money. Background knowledge thus figures prominently in the establishment of meaning, as language functions against the backdrop of conceptual structure. Below we examine the utility of frame semantics for models of language comprehension, and focus on its capacity to explain the sorts of inference needed to understand the parachute joke. In section 1, we consider the role that pragmatics plays in on-line meaning construction, contrasting the view that context-independent meaning is supplemented with background and contextual knowledge with the view that background and contextual knowledge is essential for the construction of meaning. Although most people working in pragmatics subscribe to varying versions of the latter, these portraits of the semantics/pragmatics interface have had almost no influence on language researchers in psychology, computer science, and cognitive science. One exception to this trend is the space structuring model (Coulson, 2000), a model of language comprehension inspired …