By the time children begin to rapidly acquire new word meanings they are already able to determine the grammatical category of novel words based on syntactic and morphological cues. Here we test whether children can leverage this knowledge when inferring the meaning of a novel word. Through a novel word learning experiment we determine that children can use this information, drawing different c...

We consider boolean circuits computing n-operators f : {0, 1} n → {0, 1} n. As gates we allow arbitrary boolean functions; neither fanin nor fanout of gates is restricted. An operator is linear if it computes n linear forms, that is, computes a matrix-vector product A x over GF (2). We prove the existence of n-operators requiring about n 2 wires in any circuit, and linear n-operators requiring ...

According to the realistic approach to semantics the meaning of an expression is something out there in the world. In technical terms, a semantics for a language is seen as a mapping from the grammatical structures to things in the world (or in several possible worlds). Often meanings are defined in terms of truth conditions. A consequence of this approach is that the meaning of an expression i...

Words such as what-d’you-call-it raise issues at the heart of the semantics/pragmatics interface. Expressions of this kind are conventionalised and have meanings which, while very general, are explicitly oriented to the interactional nature of the speech context, drawing attention to a speaker’s assumption that the listener can figure out what the speaker is referring to. The details of such me...

The article analyzes the concept of “stylistic competence”, which is defined as ability to learn stylistic system language at phonetic, lexical-semantic, phraseological and grammatical levels. main concepts stylistics have been clarified. object subject studying characterized. Such sections language, speech fiction studied. “language style” “speech has distinguished. problem compliance with nor...

This special issue assembles empirical work on second language teaching and learning from a generative linguistic perspective. The focus is on properties that constitute grammar– meaning interaction, that differ in the native and target language grammars, and that have not been highlighted in the pedagogical literature so far. Common topics address whether and how learners acquire grammatical m...

This comprehension study on aspectual form-to-meaning correspondences set out to see if the presence of aspect as morphological category in a language makes the acquisition of aspectual form-meaning pairs relatively easy in comparison to a language that lacks such an aspect category. In Polish, aspect is a grammatical category—all verbs are marked as perfective or imperfective—and tense is mark...