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LINGUISTIC MARKERS AND COGNITIVE OPERATIONS

Jean Caron

Universit de Poitiers

The analysis of verbal protocols as a means for the study of cognitive processes has long been a controversial
issue. Is it not a return to the ancient, and discredited, method of introspection? It is well-known, at least since
Watson and the times of dominant behaviorism, introspection is not a scientific method. What human subjects are
able to report about their mental processes is utterly unreliable, and has therefore to be prohibited as a source of
scientific data. The first part of this assertion is right, but the second part is questionable.
The behaviorism has taught us to rely only on observable - that is, behavioral - data. But it can be noticed that
verbal reports are behavioral data. Speaking is a kind of behavior, and as such can convey information about what
is happening in the 'black box'. The question is, what kind of information ?
Ericsson and Simon (1984) have argued that, if properly controlled, the method of 'thinking aloud' can give
reliable information about the successive states of the subjects' short-term memory. While processes are not in
themselves available to conscious inspection, at least the products of those processes are; and, when subjects talk
about such and such items, that means at least that these items are indeed present somewhere in their processing
registers. Although this is a limited view of language production - reduced to a mere encoding of the contents of
short-term memory (STM), it can provide valuable insights into cognitive processes, as has been convincingly
shown in the seminal work of Newell and Simon (1972).
However, it seems possible to go further than Newell and Simon did. Current methods of verbal protocols
analysis make use of only a small part of the information available from linguistic data - namely, referential use of
linguistic units via a simple 'labeling' process. The linguistic form of verbal productions - lexical choices, syntactic
structure, function words - is hardly taken into account (or, when it is, it is only in a scanty and intuitive fashion -
cases in point are i.a. Anzai & Simon (1979) and Van Lehn (1991)).
In fact, when subjects 'think aloud' during the course of a cognitive task, they are performing a somewhat
complicated activity. Language production involves a complex set of operations, which do not boil down to a mere
labeling of mental objects. Moreover, if those operations are performed during the course of a cognitive task, there
is no reason to think that they are implemented independently of the cognitive process with which they are co-
occurring. So, the linguistic features of the subjects' discourse are likely to bear some relation with the cognitive
processes they are performing.
The general assumption we will develop in this volume, and which we are attempting to verify in the PROVERB
project, is that a careful study of the linguistic form of subjects' verbal reports during a cognitive task enables us to
characterize in some detail the cognitive processes involved in the task. In other words, verbal protocols, not taken
as descriptions of the subjects' mental processes, but as interpretable traces of those processes, can be a valuable
source of on-line information about cognitive functioning.
This hypothesis entails a number of assumptions about the mechanisms of language processing. The purpose of
the present paper is to give an overview of this theoretical framework. These assumptions are largely drawn from
the theory of enunciative operations developed by A. Culioli, who can be considered as a precursor of the current
theories of 'cognitive linguistic' and 'cognitive grammar' (Culioli 1990, 1995). As such, our theoretical framework
departs more or less from the current stream of current psycholinguistic research.

1. The problems of meaning

Most current work in the cognitive psychology of language is devoted to two kinds of issues:
a) How are linguistic forms identified? This first heading covers essentially the numerous studies on lexical
access and syntactic parsing. In this kind of research, language is considered as a collection of symbols, and
syntactic rules for combining them, without consideration of the meanings they convey. When meaning is taken into
account, it is only in the form of associations among items (as in the phenomenon of semantic priming).
b) How are pieces of knowledge stored, retrieved, and processed? Semantic information is considered here as
cast in a form which is largely independent from the linguistic format in which it has been conveyed. Most generally,
it is conceived as represented in a propositional format, which can be described in logical (truth-functional) terms.
Both kinds of research are indeed legitimate in their own right, and currently flourishing. What they leave aside,
however, is a major problem, which seems to be central for any reasonable account of the psychological
processing of language: how is a cognitive representation constructed on the basis of a linguistic input? Or,
conversely, how is a mental representation converted into a string of linguistic signs? More generally, what are the
psychological processes by which a correspondence is achieved between a linguistic form and a mental
representation?
The answer - generally left implicit - could run as follows: language is one thing, mental representation is another
one. Language must be conceived of as a formal system, processed in a formal fashion. The output of this
processing is also formal: it is a 'logical form', i.e. something like a propositional function, computed on the basis of
the syntactic structure of the sentence. Up to there, there is no meaning yet. Then semantic memory comes into
play, where our knowledge is stored in the form of a huge network of concepts. Each word (or at least content
word) in the sentence points to a node in the network (i.e. to a concept). Thus words activate the relevant concepts,
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which come to fill in the slots in the logical form. Further processing will consist in drawing the relevant inferences
to adjust this 'sentence meaning' to contextual information (as described by for instance Sperber & Wilson 1986).
Perhaps oversimplified, this picture is not far removed from the current assumptions of the psycholinguistic
community. I want to discuss now a number of problems these assumptions raise. I will not discuss the theoretical
background they presuppose, viz. Fodor's thesis on the modularity of language and Chomsky's views about the
autonomy of syntax, which can be argued against on experimental grounds (see e.g. Marslen-Wilson & Tyler
1987). More specifically, I will show that these assumptions are not able to deal with a number of features of natural
languages.
A very general feature is the polysemy of linguistic units. Apart from a few technical terms, most words can take
very different meanings according to the context in which they appear.
A simple way of dealing with this problem is to consider that a given word does not have one single meaning
associated with it, but a list of possible meanings - as in dictionaries. The relevant meaning would then be selected
on the basis of contextual information: in part, this can be achieved by a simple effect of grammatical and lexical
constraints. Subsequently, inferential procedures can be performed for selecting the relevant interpretation. In this
view, polysemy is simply the same thing as homonymy.
This conception, which tacitly underlies most experimental studies on ambiguity and models of the mental
lexicon, runs into several difficulties. First of all, contrary to homonymy, which is a fortuitous coincidence by which
two different words happen to share the same phonological form, polysemy implies some continuity among the
various senses a given word may give rise to - what Wittgenstein (1953) referred to as a 'family resemblance'.
Similar patterns can be found for corresponding words in different languages: for example, the various senses of
the conjunction if can be observed, not only in Indo-European languages (French si, German wenn), but also in
Finnish (jos) and Arabic (itha). Secondly, such a model of polysemy would require the storage of a huge amount of
information for interpreting most common words (see e.g. dictionary entries for words such as give, take, thing,
etc.). The selection process would be quite cumbersome and resource-consuming. Finally, as argued at length by
Clark (1983), the selection hypothesis fails to explain how new meanings can be assigned to old words, as 'nonce
senses'.
A second feature of natural languages is the close relationship they display in their use between sense and
reference. In the classical view, words and sentences have intrinsic meanings. Referring is another process, by
which those purely mental meanings are matched with extra-linguistic objects. But, on the one hand, it is difficult to
account for the ubiquitous phenomenon of deixis, which is present in all natural languages. On the other hand,
words and utterances take their sense from the particular domain to which they refer (see e.g. Clark 1992).
A third important feature, which is somewhat akin to deixis, is the fact that all natural languages display a set of
devices for relating utterances to the parameters which define the situation of utterance: 'enunciator', and 'co-
enunciator' (as termed by Culioli 1990) and time of utterance. Among those are, for example, the various linguistic
markers which express modalities or propositional attitudes. Propositional representations can hardly account for
these linguistic devices: all they can do is to consider, for example, expressions of belief ("I think that..."), or
performatives ("I promise to..."), as mere descriptions of subjective states ("It is true that my state of mind is such
and such". See for an illustration of this reductionist point of view Sperber & Wilson (1986).

2. A dynamic conception of meaning

The source of those problems can be ascribed to the widely held (yet generally tacit) assumption that words and
sentences "have" a meaning; that meanings are somewhat "contained" in them: what Reddy (1979) termed the
'conduit metaphor'. An alternative view, which I shall briefly outline, is to consider words and utterances, not as
containers of thoughts, but as tools for making sense. Such a view has already been considered by several
authors. A similar view has been developed by Culioli (1978) in his conception of 'notional domains'. Current
approaches of meaning in 'cognitive linguistics' are closely related to this line of thought. For example, Langacker,
quoting Reddy, presents his own view of semantics as follows :
Rather than treating expressions as metaphorical 'containers' necessary holding only a limited quantity of the
metaphorical substance called 'meaning', it sees them as providing an active, engaged conceptualizer with access
to an open-ended body of knowledge evoked in a flexible, context-dependent way.
(Langacker 1995: 108)
In the same line of thought, several psychologists have proposed a 'constructive' approach of meaning (see e.g.
Bransford et al. 1972); the 'procedural' theory of semantics developed by Johnson-Laird (1983; Miller & Johnson-
Laird 1976) runs in the same direction. But it does not seem to have, until now, given rise to systematic
experimental research.
What is the meaning of a word? If we define it as the mental representation it evokes when it is heard in a given
context, then most words have a huge number of meanings - and it is difficult to avoid the selection hypothesis. But
if we conceive words, not as conveying meanings, but as creating them, the question becomes easier: the variety
of senses a word can create are not inherent to it, they are the product of the operations this word triggers on a
particular representational context.
In order to make this point clearer, I suggested elsewhere (Caron 1995) an analogy: a given tool - say, a
hammer - can be used for producing a variety of effects: pounding nails, cracking nuts (or other breakable things),
beating something flat (a piece of leather, or metal), making a hole in a wall, knocking somebody senseless, etc.
Those various effects are not a property of the hammer itself, they depend on the nature and the properties of the

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objects on which the tool is operating. According to those properties, various effect will obtain: penetration into a
resistant material, change in shape, in internal structure, or in physiological functioning, etc. What defines the
hammer as such is none of those effects, but a more abstract property - something like transferring a certain
amount of kinetic energy on a given object.
What I would like to suggest is that the meaning of words can be conceived in a similar fashion. A given word
does not "contain", or "point to" a variety of predetermined meanings. It operates on the contextual representation
to construct a meaning. What the word conveys is not, strictly speaking, a 'meaning', but a pattern of procedures
which, in a given context, will produce a particular 'sense effect'. It is only those 'sense effects' that are consciously
available. The procedural pattern - which I have proposed to call 'meaning schema' - is not: it has to be inferred
from empirical data.
In fact, this description is perhaps simplistic. First of all, it neglects the fact that the 'context' on which the
'meaning schema' operates is itself the product of other linguistic units, so that the final meaning is the product of
an interaction among them. Moreover, contextual parameters may assign different weightings to the procedural
components of the 'meaning schema'. Finally, what I have called 'procedures' (with reference to 'procedural
semantics') could perhaps be better described in other terms - Gestalt-like organizations, for example, as
suggested by Culioli's notion of 'schematic form', which can better be represented in connectionist models.
However, as a first step towards understanding the processes of sense construction, this description will be
sufficient for our purpose, and can be put through experimental testing.
Let me give an example of experimental data supporting this procedural hypothesis. If these assumptions are
correct, polysemous words are associated with only one meaning schema, while homonyms correspond to (at
least) two different schemas. This prediction was tested in an experiment by F. Guillabert (1989) in our laboratory.
Subjects were presented with sentences including either a polysemous verb (e.g. monter , "to rise"), or a
homonymous one (e.g. il peignait, from peigner , "to comb" or peindre , "to paint"); immediately after the verb, a
complement was presented, and subjects had to decide, by pressing a button, whether this complement was
semantically acceptable. Response times were registered.
The results in Figure 1 show a markedly different pattern in the distribution of reaction times for the two kinds of
verbs. While polysemous verbs give rise to a normal distribution, the distribution for homonyms is clearly bimodal.
This can be explained by assuming that subjects considered at first one of the possible senses of the homonymous
verb. If it was coherent with the complement, they could respond immediately; if it was not the case, they had to
consider the other sense, thus giving a slower response. The important fact is that such an effect does not obtain
with polysemous verbs, which is consistent with the hypothesis that they activate a unique schema.

Figure 1. Distribution of RTs for semantic decision (after Guillabert 1989)

A 'meaning schema' consists of two kinds of constituents. First, it includes a set of procedures or operations,
which (with the caveats formulated above) can be considered as invariant. Operations act on the current
representation, organize and transform it. Secondly, a set of contextual parameters which define, on the one hand,
the conditions of use of the word, and which determine, on the other hand, the various observable 'sense effects' ,
according to the values of those parameters (including, possibly, default values).
Of course, those meaning schemas are not observable as such; they have to be inferred from the diversity of
contextual 'sense effects' they give rise to. Linguistic analyses like those which are made around Culioli (for
instance by J. J. Franckel in this volume) can be particularly helpful. However, the psychological relevance of
linguistic descriptions remains to be assessed. For that purpose, experimental techniques are available. I will briefly
present and exemplify a technique I have found interesting.
If, as I argued above, the different senses a given word may take on are not represented in human subjects'
memory in the form of a catalogue (as in dictionaries), but as a schema including a set of contextual parameters,
what has to be determined is the set of psychologically relevant relationships which hold between those senses.
Those relationships define a 'semantic space' the dimensions of which can be interpreted as characterizing the
parameters which account for sense effects.

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The idea is to have subjects provide data about the mental organization of those senses. This can be done, for
example, by means of a sorting task, where they are instructed to sort a set of sentences into categories, on the
basis of the similarity of senses they perceive between the different occurrences of the target word. From the
frequency with which two sentences are put into the same category, one can infer a measure of the semantic
distance between them. A multidimensional analysis can then give a picture of the word's semantic space, and of
its main dimensions. Another procedure consists in a paraphrasing task, where subjects are instructed to rephrase
sentences, without using the target word (e.g. rephrasing the sentence "If you are thirsty, there is some beer in the
refrigerator" without using the word if). The analysis will then be carried out on the different kinds of paraphrases
used. Not surprisingly, those two kinds of tasks yield very similar results.
As an illustration, I will first take the example of the French conjunction si ("If"), which is well known for its large
variety of senses, according to the context in which it appears. Some of them are, more or less, close to the
material implication, but most of them are not. For example, the 'logical' meaning of si can hardly be found in the
following sentences:
(1) Si tu as soif, il y a de la biPre dans le rJfrigJrateur
Si l'affaire a JchouJ, ce n'est pas ma faute
Si je suis ton ami, je ne suis pas ton complice
Si votre mJtier vous plaTt, pourquoi en changeriez-vous?
Si nous allions au cinJma?
Si seulement tu faisais un effort!
The primitive meaning of si has thus to be conceived in a way which may give rise to the logical interpretation,
but also to other senses, according to the context. In an experiment I have presented elsewhere (Caron 1987), a
multidimensional analysis of subjects' responses in a sorting task on a list of French sentences led to define as
follows the main contextual parameters which give rise to those different senses (see Figure 2):

a) Is p the description of a fact, or the content of a (possible or actual) speech act (somebody has said, or could
have said, that p)?
b) What is the illocutionary force of q (assertion, question, threat, etc.)?
c) Does the speaker commit him/herself to p (i.e. accepts it as a fact, or as a valuable argument, or not)?

One can then reduce the 'meaning schema' of si p, q to the following set of instructions (in part inspired by Ducrot
1972):

a) Restrict (temporarily) the domain of discourse to a 'mental space' where p is the case, and withhold assertion
about this domain.
b) In this domain, consider q as relevant.

Contextual information will then be used in order to assign values to the specific parameters defined above. The
various senses of si clearly follow (see Caron loc.cit., for a more detailed analysis). It is interesting to notice that the
same parameters - with slightly different weights - appeared in similar analyses of German wenn and Finnish jos
(Caron et al. 1987). The Arabic particle itha seemed to behave in a somewhat different way.
Finally, it can be observed that the truth-functional value of si appears then as a particular case, where those
different parameters take on 'default values': p and q are taken as propositions, endowed with truth values, no
speaker's commitment to p is taken into account, and relevance is reduced to truth. This meaning, far from being
primitive, would then be in fact the highly elaborated product of a process of abstraction.

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Figure 2: Meaning schema for si

Another example can be found in the area of modal verbs. Their polysemy is well known and has given rise to an
extensive literature. In French, the verb pouvoir entails a number of different senses, as illustrated by the following
examples:

(2) Je peux soulever cette valise

(3) Les JlPves internes peuvent sortir le mercredi
(4) Pierre peut Ltre trPs dJsagrJable
(5) Il pouvait Ltre minuit quand l'incendie se dJclara
(6) Il peut bien venir me voir, je ne lui parlerai pas
(7) Puissiez-vous rJussir!
(8) On peut demander conseil B Paul
Note that pouvoir corresponds to two distinct English verbs: "can" and "may", but each of these is also
polysemous.
One can thus distinguish between a 'radical' sense ((2), expressing a physical ability), a deontic one ((3):
permission), an epistemic sense ((4), reflecting the speaker's uncertainty), a 'sporadic' one ((5): the event referred
to happens at some points of the time); sometimes it can express an hypothesis, as in (6), a wish, as in (7), a
suggestion, as in (8), etc. But the list can be extended in various ways. Moreover, there are cases where the sense
is not clearly assignable to one of those categories, but seems an intermediate one.
To account for this polysemy, it is naturally possible to resort to the notion of metaphor, as Sweetser (1990)
does. However, the problem is to understand what makes metaphor possible. Here again, the notion of 'meaning
schema' (or 'schematic form') is strongly suggested.
Multidimensional analyses have been performed on data provided by adult French-speaking subjects, who were
instructed, either to sort a set of sentences into categories, on the basis of the similarity they perceived between the
various senses of pouvoir or to rephrase those sentences without using the verb pouvoir. The results of those two
analyses were highly similar (Le Goff & Caron 1988, Caron, Le Goff & Caron-Pargue 1989). The main dimensions
of the semantic space of the verb can be interpreted as defined by the following contextual parameters (see Figure
3):

a) What is the starting point from which the possibility of p is assessed? Either the process starts with a scanning
of the domain D of possible events (in which p is encountered), or it starts from the properties of p to insert it into D.
'Sporadic' uses (as in (4)), or epistemic ones (as in (5)) illustrate the first case; physical possibilities (2), for
example, correspond to the second case.
b) What is the status of p with respect to the speaker? It can either be the product of a decision from the speaker
(as in (5) or (8)), or rely on established facts (as in (2) or (3)).
c) What is the status of p with respect to the actual situation? Either it is referred to it ((2), (3), (5)), or it is
'detached' from it ((4), (6), (7)).

The 'meaning schema' of pouvoir can be described as follows:

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- pouvoir instructs the addressee to withdraw from the current representation (Culioli's 'detachment') and to
consider a domain D of alternative representations, with which the intended proposition p is consistent.

By combining the different values of the parameters, the various senses of the modal verb can be easily
explained (for more details see Caron et al. 1989).

Figure 3. 'Meaning schema' for pouvoir

Such an approach of word meanings can provide a parsimonious account of polysemy, without assuming the
storage in memory of a list of possible senses, and more generally of the possibility of metaphorical uses. Of
course, the theory has yet to be refined in more detail, particularly as to the exact nature of 'meaning schemas' for
different kinds of words: the first example given above was a function word; for content words, such as nouns or
verbs, the case is certainly more complex. However, polysemy and metaphor exist as well in nouns and verbs; and,
at least in the case of verbs, experimental data do suggest, as I argued above (see Figure 1) a unitary
interpretation in terms of 'meaning schemas'. Experiments are currently performed in our laboratory to study the
differences in the processing of polysemous words (nouns and verbs) versus homonyms.
Moreover, the approach of meaning I have argued for can easily handle the problems of deixis and reference.
The representations on which the linguistic tools operate can be 'external' as well as 'internal', that is to say, they
may as well consist of perceptual data, as is the case for deictic uses and more generally for the processes of
external reference. There is no principled difference between the way words and utterances act upon a perceptual
environment, or upon an abstract or imaginary representation.
Finally, it should be noted that the meaning schemas I have described above make use of notions such as
'domain', 'scanning', etc. which refer to properties of mental representations which are of a topological nature -
rather than the algebraic and logical models on which computational accounts of cognition are commonly based.
Such topological notions have proven useful in theoretical linguistics: Culioli's theory relies on operations which are,
for the most part, of this nature. And more recent developments - such as the various schemas used by Langacker
(Langacker 1987) or Fauconnier's (Fauconnier 1984) theory of 'mental spaces' are of a similar kind. From a
psychological point of view, these suggestions are stimulating. Some aspects of mental representation have
already been explored in the domain of mental imagery (see Denis 1991), but they have hardly been studied in the
area of language processing. A particularly intriguing problem directly related to the issues we are discussing, is
that of the representation of 'belief spaces'. I will only mention here a series of experiments conducted in our
laboratory on the cognitive processing of verbs of opinion or 'propositional attitude' (such as "X believes, thinks,
supposes,... that..."). Measures of recognition time for information embedded in such sentences gave evidence for
their being represented in another 'space' than the speaker's beliefs (Guerry & Caron 1993). Such results strongly
support the idea of a mental representation endowed with 'spatial' properties, akin to those which can be observed
at the sensorimotor level.

3. Language production and verbal protocols

So far we have essentially focused on the processes of language comprehension. But the same remarks hold for
language production. If linguistic units do not convey mental contents, but operations, language production has to
be conceived in the same way: utterances are not the result of the encoding of a mental content, but the traces of
the mental activity by which the speaker's representations are constructed and modified.
Language production has been essentially analyzed, either as the process of encoding pieces of knowledge
(conceived as ready-made propositional representations, waiting to be put in textual format - as in Kintsch & Van
Dijk 1978), or as a communicative activity, which aims at fulfilling the speaker's intentions "by means of the
recognition of this intention" (Grice 1957). Both approaches are legitimate and able to account for different aspects
of language use. But underlying them, we assume that there is a more fundamental aspect of language, which is to
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produce overt traces of the speaker's cognitive work on his/her representations. Those may involve a
representation of the addressee's assumptions; and they may function, in this case, as operations on this
representation (see Caron (1995) for an approach of conversation as problem solving); but they may also be a
simple trace of the speaker's own processing of information.
That leads us to come back to our first topic, which was the analysis of the subjects' verbal reports during a
cognitive task, and to the kind of information such an analysis can provide about cognitive processes.
As already mentioned, Ericsson & Simon (1984) have argued that, if properly controlled, that method gives
reliable information about the successive states of the subjects' short-term memory. But if our assumptions are
correct, there is much more information to gain from the subjects' verbalizations.
Considering, as we did, linguistic markers as traces of the speaker's cognitive activity, verbal protocols can be
used as giving, if properly interpreted, a large amount of on-line cues about the cognitive operations which are
being performed. Verbal reports are not a description of what happens in the subject's mind: they are an
observable trace of his/her cognitive functioning.
When subjects are instructed to 'think aloud' while solving , for instance, the problem of the Tower of Hanoi, the
verbalizations they produce imply a series of linguistic choices which do not derive from a communicative purpose.
One can readily infer that, focusing on their solving process, subjects produce utterances whose structure and
content are directly controlled by that process. More precisely, verbal protocols exhibit a number of characteristic
features.
3.1 Lexical selections
The same extra-linguistic referent (e.g. a disk, or a peg, or a move) can be 'encoded' in a number of ways. As
referring expressions, they are equivalent. Why do they change at certain points of the protocol? For example, in
Anzai and Simon's (1979) protocol, the same move (transferring disk 3 from peg A to peg C) is associated with a
number of different formulations:

(9) I'll place 3 from A to C (29)

And then I'll bring 3 from A to C (66)
Oh, yes, 3 will have to go to C first (82)
3 will be at C (112)
3 will go from A to C (118)
And then, 3 from A to C (158)
Move 3 from A to C (172)
And then, 3 goes from A to C (215)

Such changes in lexical choice can be interpreted as the trace of changes in the functional organization of the
subject's representation. The exact nature of these changes has, of course, to be inferred, on the one hand, from
the context, and on the other hand, from the semantic analysis of the linguistic units used. For example, differences
between verbs such as "place" and "bring", or "move" and "go", or between tenses, need a careful analysis (not to
mention the shift in grammatical subject, from "I" to "3").

3.2 Linear order

The same propositional content can be expressed in several ways: even with the same lexical items, the speaker
has to choose the 'starting point' of the utterance (Halliday 1985: 39), and to locate the different constituents in
relation with each other. Many studies have focused on that issue from a psychological point of view, and defined
the function of this starting point in various manners: 'given' information versus 'new' information, 'point making',
'topic' versus 'comment', etc. (MacWhinney 1977). A more elaborated approach relies on Culioli's theory of
enunciative operations, where the operation of location ('repJrage') is defined as a fundamental one in natural
languages, intervening at different levels of the construction of the utterance (see e.g. Culioli 1978).
Here again, this linguistic structure of utterances is an important clue to the organization of the subject's
representation, and especially of attentional processes.

3.3 Connectives

A third kind of linguistic markers are connectives, which link utterances or sets of utterances. Their function has
been the topic of a number of studies (see Caron (1995) for a review). In the case of problem solving, they can be
used as a basis for characterizing the way representations are organized or reorganized, and for the kind of
relationships they involve.

3.4 Modal markers

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Finally, modal expressions (such as "can", "must", "have to") together with interjections ("oh", "well", ...) can be
interpreted as traces of operations by which the subject does not work anymore on the current representation, but
'withdraws' from it (Culioli's dJcrochement) in order to have access to another representation. It may correspond
either to the planning of a new course of action or to the access to knowledge stored in long-term memory (LTM).
The analysis of a large number of protocols has led us to assume that the latter type of process (access to LTM) is
mainly marked by interjections. As for modal expressions, they imply some sort of computation from the current
situation (Johnson-Laird 1978), and can be interpreted as marking, in the protocols, the computation of new goals.
Apart from those four main kinds of linguistic markers, for which detailed analyses of 'meaning schemas', in the
line of those presented above, have to be developed, other verbal cues, such as pauses, lapses and self-repairs,
have to be taken into account. Detailed examples of those kinds of linguistic clues to cognitive functioning are
analyzed in Caron-Pargue and FiPvre's paper in this volume.
The question is, how far those linguistic cues can lead us in the analysis of the subject's cognitive processes? At
least, they can provide a larger amount of on-line information about those processes than the mere observation of
overt behavior can do. At best, they can give sufficient insights into the processes at hand, to model those
processes in a satisfactory manner. A systematic analysis of a number of protocols has already been made along
those lines, in order to produce a tentative characterization of the subjects' cognitive processes. The aim of the
PROVERB project is to test these interpretations, by a systematic comparison between the subjects' behavior, and
computer simulations based on those psycholinguistic analyses.

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