CARIN theory reanalysis reanalyzed: a comment on Maguire, Devereux, Costello, and Cater (2007)

P. Maguire, B. Devereux, F. Costello, and A. Cater discussed the Gagné and Shoben (1997) CARIN theory of conceptual combination and, after presenting a sample drawn from the British National Corpus and comparing the two corpora, concluded that the Gagné and Shoben corpus is too small and unrepresentative. They then discussed the mathematical model presented by Gagné and Shoben and claimed that the model does not incorporate relational competition. In this article, the authors present critical aspects of the mathematical model not considered by Maguire et al. and show that the mathematical instantiation of CARIN presented by Gagn and Shoben is, in fact, very sensitive to the number of strong competing relations. The authors then present some new comparisons between the corpora, showing that they correspond surprisingly well.