abstractWe argue that the interpretation of transitive aspectual-verb sentences like “Sue finishes the book” results from an evaluation of the degree of asymmetry in control power between the participants in the sentence. Control asymmetry is proposed as one conceptual constraint on sentence meaning precisification. An evaluation of ‘high control asymmetry’ for the relation between “Sue” and “book” yields an agentive/actor-undergoer interpretation (Sue is doing something involving the book). An evaluation of ‘low control asymmetry’ yields a constitutive/part–whole interpretation (Sue’s story is the last one in the book). Which reading emerges depends on the comprehender’s control-asymmetry evaluation based on contextual cues or, in the absence of explicit context, based on conventionalized control asymmetry expectations given the participants’ denotations. Results show that semantically under-specified aspectual-verb sentences such as “Sue finishes/begins/continues the book” (i) receive multiple readings in a control-asymmetry neutral context, (ii) are judged as less acceptable than their control asymmetry-biased counterparts, and (iii) clearly evidence the constitutive reading as part of their core reading. These findings are consistent with a real-time linguistic meaning composition system that systematically draws from context guided by lexically driven semantic demands and that presents the structure of these demands as a cognitively viable metric of complexity.

中文翻译：

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在上下文中寻找特定的句子意义：参与者之间的概念关系

摘要我们认为，像“苏完成了这本书”结果来自对句子参与者之间控制力不对称程度的评估。控制不对称被提出作为句子意义精确化的一种概念约束。对“Sue”和“book”之间关系的“高度控制不对称”的评估产生了一个代理/参与者-被执行者解释（Sue 正在做一些涉及这本书的事情）。对“低控制不对称”的评估产生了一种构成/部分-整体的解释（苏的故事是书中的最后一个）。出现哪种阅读取决于理解者基于上下文线索的控制不对称评估，或者在没有明确上下文的情况下，基于给定参与者外延的常规控制不对称预期。结果表明，语义上未指定的体态动词句子，例如“苏完成/开始/继续这本书” (i) 在控制不对称的中性环境中接收多个读数，(ii) 被判断为比控制不对称偏向的对应物更不可接受，并且 (iii) 清楚地证明了构成的阅读作为他们核心阅读的一部分。这些发现与实时语言意义组合系统一致，该系统系统地从由词汇驱动的语义需求引导的上下文中提取，并将这些需求的结构呈现为认知上可行的复杂性度量。