Cross-Linguistic Evidence for Semantic Countability

Countability Distinctions and Semantic Variation

To what extent are countability distinctions subject to systematic semantic variation? Could there be a language with no countability distinctions–in particular, one where all nouns are count? I argue that the answer is no: even in a languagewhere all NPs have the core morphosyntactic properties of English count NPs, such as combining with numerals directly and showing singular/plural distincti...

Enriching Lexical Transfer With Cross - Linguistic Semantic

Cross-linguistic Projection of Role-Semantic Information

This paper considers the problem of automatically inducing role-semantic annotations in the FrameNet paradigm for new languages. We introduce a general framework for semantic projection which exploits parallel texts, is relatively inexpensive and can potentially reduce the amount of effort involved in creating semantic resources. We propose projection models that exploit lexical and syntactic i...

Cross-linguistic Discovery of Semantic Regularity

The question of whether metonymy carries across languages has always been interesting for language representation and processing. Until now attempts to answer this question have always been based on small-scale analyses. With the advent of EuroWordNet (Vossen 1998), a multilingual thesaurus covering eight languages and organized along the same lines as WordNet (http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~...

Integration of syntactic and semantic information in predictive processing: cross-linguistic evidence from German and English.

Two visual-world eyetracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether, how, and when syntactic and semantic constraints are integrated and used to predict properties of subsequent input. Experiment 1 contrasted auditory German constructions such as, "The hare-nominative eats ... (the cabbage-acc)" versus "The hare-accusative eats ... (the fox-nom)," presented with a picture containing ...