drohne said:
what was the two point response? "remunerate" is only a good synonym for one of the several uses of "compensate." "compensate" is a much broader word. seems a bit arbitrary, really.
I agree that, at times, the desired responses seemed somewhat arbitrary-- both in the responses sought as well as the fact that, as you alluded to, most words have multiple valid interpretations, which would thus necessitate different answers. For "compensate", though I don't recall the exact phraseology, the 2 point response wasn't a single word, but rather a phrase; I believe it was something like "to make an appropriate payment", though I could be a bit off (this was 4 weeks ago). Though obviously, the other connotations of "compensate", such as "offsetting an undesirable quality", are equally valid; in some cases where multiple senses were present, the responses accounted for all of the most frequent understandings/uses of the word in common vernacular. I believe that whether or not they admitted of alternate definitions/descriptions had to do with how common the second and third usages are. I think you'd admit that the "payment" conceptualization of "compensate" is more frequently employed than some of its other meanings.
As for why I said that "remunerate" was "beyond" the 2 point response, well, it's because I saw the 2 point response, realized that it involved the sense of "payment", and felt that "remunerate" would be a more succinct expression of the concept they were looking for (and a more "high level" word, to boot). It was totally a subjective opinion of mine to say that it was "beyond the 2 point response", because, in actuality, "remunerate" wasn't even on the list of acceptable responses, though the sense of it was.
As for why certain words such as "ominous" required a response of the somewhat high-level word "foreboding", well, I would imagine that the theory behind it is that of semantic networks, where we construct parallel, integrated semantic relationships between words in our neural network as per connectionist models of consciousness and perception. So, for example, we could have "animal" at the top of the hierarchy in one node (activated neuron); below this might be "mammal", and then below that, "bird". At the very bottom, you'd have specific examples of birds such as "robin" or "pigeon" (the degree to which, and speed with which, one recognizes these lower order elements as members of the preceding "category" has to do with so-called "necessary and sufficient" and "defining" features; it actually largely parallels Plato's "real and ideal forms" line of reasoning, but I digress
).
Now, the speed with which one can produce a word or recognize an image or word as being a certain element which is connected to other members of the hierarchy is largely dependent upon one's expertise. So if you are asked whether a "robin" is a bird, you are quick to respond in the affirmative. If you're asked whether it's an "animal", you'd also be quick to respond (though not as quick as for "bird"; these reaction times vary on the order of milliseconds, but hold across subjects, and thus are legitimate); now, if you're asked whether "robin" is a mammal, the lag in response time would be dramatic, as most people simply don't have the expertise needed to rapidly make that connection (i.e., they don't have a clear conceptual understanding of the necessary and sufficient features, and the defining features, of the class "mammals"; beyond that, it's only infrequently encountered in speech or writing as well, which further hinders performance). Now, a zoologist would not suffer nearly as much in this regard as a lay person, because his mental construction of "mammal" is sufficiently fleshed out through constant use and experience with the word in a wide range of circumstances, and so he would suffer little, if any, lag when identifying a robin as a mammal.
Expertise moves the "base level" for semantic recall down further. Picture a branch diagram with animal at the top, and below that "mammal", and then "bird" and specific instances of birds as described. For the average person, the base level is that of "animal" (when speaking of land-dwelling creatures). Technically speaking, when one hears the word "robin", the spreading activation should more quickly reach "mammal" when travelling up from the bottom towards "animal", yet we witness precisely the opposite effect; this is because the node containing "mammal" is murky and must be thoroughly scanned to produce a connection. As our brain is "scanning" the mammal node, the spreading activation continues to spread; believe it or not, it gets all the way up to "animal" before the scanning of "mammal" is anywhere
near completed, which is why we are quicker to recognize a robin as an animal than as a mammal.
Now, as this seemingly unrelated example shows, "expertise" has a profound effect on the rapidity of articulatory ability. Relating it to something like "ominous", as discussed before, is fairly straightforward (though somewhat beyond the scope of what I just described). Someone who is thoroughly familiar with the word "ominous", and has seen it and used in various contexts, possesses sufficient expertise in that semantic area; as such, the mention of "ominous" sends activation (i.e., nerve impulses) to all the possible conceptions of "ominous", be they single words like "foreboding" or whole phrases such as "a looming danger". The most highly activated "node" will be the one which is subsequently produced by the speaker; expertise, in this example, switches "foreboding" from a somewhat muddled node (which would be passed over because the connection wouldn't be quick enough to counteract the production of a more easily activated node) to an easily activated node just like all the others. Everything else thus being relatively equal, mental economy factors come into play (which are beyond the scope of this post, seeing as how I'm about to head out to see "I, Robot"
), and these dictate that the most succinct and applicable word is produced.
Hope this explained things somewhat, even if you didn't specifically ask why certain things were so.
