Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A non-probabilistic model of speakers competence regarding extraction from a coordinate structure, which was argued tobe sensitive to how the conjuncts are connected to each other in discourse (e.g., Lakoff, 1986; Kehler 2002) is presented.The model makes use of Lakoffs (1986) account of the acceptability of extraction from coordinate structures by adoptingthe Frame Semantics framework. Lakoff argues that acceptability of extraction is affected by the belonging of the conjunctsto certain scenarios (e.g. a natural sequence of events), something that is measurable in this framework. An algorithm thatmeasures the degree of relatedness between two conjuncts by consulting FrameNet (the framework implementation) andquantifying the common frames they belong to is proposed and tested on sentences used in an acceptability judgementsurvey on extraction from coordinate structures (Harris, 2009). The models outcomes interact with the experimentalconditions in predicting human judgements, providing initial support for the proposal.