Emese K. Molnár


2024

pdf bib
The Mental Lexicon of Communicative Fragments and Contours: The Remix N-gram Method
Emese K. Molnár | Andrea Dömötör
Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon @ LREC-COLING 2024

The classical mental lexicon models represented the lexicon as a list of words. Usage-based models describe the mental lexicon more dynamically, but they do not capture the real-time operation of speech production. In the linguistic model of Boris Gasparov, the notions of communicative fragment and contour can provide a comprehensive description of the diversity of linguistic experience. Fragments and contours form larger linguistic structures than words and they are recognized as a whole unit by speakers through their communicative profile. Fragments are prefabricated units that can be added to or merged with each other during speech production. The contours serve as templates for the utterances by combining specific and abstract linguistic elements. Based on this theoretical framework, our tool applies remix n-grams (combination of word forms, lemmas and POS-tags) to identify similar linguistic structures in different texts that form the basic units of the mental lexicon.