This study explores the premise that knowledge in new product development proves both a barrier to and a source of innovation. To understand the problematic nature of knowledge and the boundaries that result, an ethnographic study was used to understand how knowledge is structured differently across the four primary functions that are dependent on each other in the creation and production of a high-volume product. A pragmatic view of “knowledge in practice ” is developed, describing knowledge as localized, embedded, and invested within a function and how, when working across functions, consequences often arise that generate problematic knowledge boundaries. The use of a boundary object is then described as a means of representing, learning about, and transforming knowledge to resolve the consequences that exist at a given boundary. Finally, this pragmatic view of knowledge and boundaries is proposed as a framework to revisit the differentiation and integration of knowledge.

We present interpretation-based processing—a theory of sentence processing that builds a syntactic and a semantic representation for a sentence and assigns an interpretation to the sentence as soon as possible. That interpretation can further participate in comprehension and in lexical processing and is vital for relating the sentence to the prior discourse. Our theory offers a unified account of the processing of literal sentences, metaphoric sentences, and sentences containing semantic illusions. It also explains how text can prime lexical access. We show that word literality is a matter of degree and that the speed and quality of comprehension depend both on how similar words are to their antecedents in the preceding text and how salient the sentence is with respect to the preceding text. Interpretation-based processing also reconciles superficially contradictory findings about the difference in processing times for metaphors and literals. The theory has been implemented in ACT-R [Anderson and Lebiere, The

This paper introduces an extension of collocational analysis that takes into account grammatical structure and is specifically geared to investigating the interaction of lexemes and the grammatical constructions associated with them. The method is framed in a construction-based approach to language, i.e. it assumes that grammar consists of signs (form-meaning pairs), and is thus not fundamentally different from the lexicon. The method is applied to linguistic expressions at various levels of abstraction (words, semi-fixed phrases, argument structures, tense, aspect and mood). The method has two main applications: first, to increase the adequacy of grammatical description by providing an objective way of identifying the meaning of a grammatical construction and determining the degree to which particular slots in it prefer or are restricted to a particular set of lexemes; second, to provide data for linguistic theory-building

The frequent and conventional use of non--literal language has been a major stumbling block for natural language processing systems since the early machine translation efforts. Metaphor, metonymy and indirect speech acts are among the most troublesome phenomena. Recent computational efforts addressing these problems have taken an approach that emphasizes the use of systematic knowledge about non--literal language conventions. We are currently engaged in an effort to supply this knowledge in the case of conventional metaphor. We are constructing MetaBank: an empirically derived and theoretically motivated knowledge--base of English metaphorical conventions. This article describes our three--part approach to the construction of MetaBank: the collection of on--line textual resources and databases of linguistic generalizations, the development of a methodology for analyzing these resources, and the construction of a knowledge--base based on the preceding analyses. 2 1 Introduc...

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This paper attempts to exemplify the advantages of perceptually grounded semantics with respect to traditional formalist approaches in elucidating the nature of the controversial notion of linguistic polysemy, or multiplicity of meaning. It is also suggested how some aspects of language typically associated with compositionality could be modeled, without there being a strictly "compositional semantics". This is done through a series of experiments, using modifications of Terry Regier's connectionist system for learning spatial relations [Regier, 1992] which constitutes a part of the L 0 project concerned with associating descriptions in an arbitrary language with an analog environment, (sequences of) pictures of simple 2-dimensional scenes. The emphasis is above all on the English preposition `over', famous for its polysemy, and analyzed in detail by [Brugman, 1981] and [Lakoff, 1987], but some modeling has been also done of the meaning of `under', as well as some rudimentary semantic...

It is well-established that (non-linguistic) categorization is driven by a functional demand of prediction. We suggest that prediction likewise may well play a role in motivating the learning of semantic generalizations about argument structure constructions. We report corpora statistics that indicate that the argument frame or construction has roughly equivalent cue validity as a predictor of overall sentence meaning as the morphological form of the verb, and has greater category validity. That is, the construction is at least as reliable and more available. Moreover, given the fact that many verbs have quite low cue validity in isolation, attention to the contribution of the construction is essential.

analyze the biological foundations of human cognition. A crucial component of their arguments is a simple but profound aphorism: Everything said is said by someone. It follows from this that any concept, idea, belief, definition, drawing, poem, or piece of music, has to be produced by a living human being, constrained by the peculiarities of his or her body and brain. The entailment is straightforward: without living human bodies with brains, there are no ideas — and that includes mathematical ideas. This chapter deals with the structure of mathematical ideas themselves, and with how their inferential organization is provided by everyday human cognitive mechanisms such as conceptual metaphor. The Cognitive Study of Ideas and their Inferential Organization The approach to Mathematical Cognition we take in this chapter is relatively new, and it differs in important ways from (but is complementary to) the ones taken by many of the authors in this Handbook. In order to avoid potential misunderstandings regarding the subject matter and goals of our piece, we believe that it is important to clarify these differences right upfront. The differences reside mainly on three fundamental aspects:

This article focuses on supervising professors’ and master’s degree students’ understanding and experiences of supervision practices in a Norwegian university, with focus on differences in text cultures and text norms between and within three academic disciplines. The interview study shows that each discipline is a heterogeneous discourse community with largely unarticulated differences. The findings suggest three supervision models, described as teaching, partnership, and apprenticeship. Dominant trends in supervisory relationships and textual practices are distinguished, and characteristics of each are outlined. Connections are shown between the models supervisors adhere to, the kind of texts they expect from their students, and how they provide feedback. As an example, conflicting attitudes toward exploratory student texts are discussed. The study shows that supervision models and textual expectations are influenced by the disciplinary text cultures in which supervisors and students take part. Finally, some practical implications of the study are suggested.

We set the context for three demonstrations by describing the Topological Media Lab's research agenda. We next describe three concrete applications that bundle together some of our responsive ambient media and augmented clothing instruments in illustrative scenarios. The first set of scenarios involves performers wearing expressive clothing instruments walking through a conference or exhibition hall. They act according to heuristics drawn from a phenomenological study of greeting dynamics, the social dynamics of engagement and disengagement in public spaces. We use our study of these dynamics to guide our design of expressive clothing using wireless sensors, conductive fabrics and on-the-body circuit logic. By walking into different spaces prepared with ambient responsive media, we see how some gestures and instruments take on new expressive and social value. These scenarios are studies toward next generation TGarden responsive play spaces [25] based on gesturally parameterized media and body-based or fabric-based expressive technologies.