Understanding how linguistic cues map to the environment is crucial for early language comprehension and may provide a way for bootstrapping and learning words. Research has suggested that learning how plural syntax maps to the perceptual environment may show a trajectory in which children first learn surrounding cues (verbs, modifiers) before a full mastery of the noun morpheme alone. The Span...

In Mexico City Spanish, plural morphology is always overtly realized but in Chilean Spanish, due to a lenition process that targets syllable-final [s], plural morphology is not always realized, and the conditions of overt realization of plural morphology are subject to both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. In this paper we show that variability in the input for grammatical morphology ca...

BACKGROUND In low-resource settings, patients' use of multiple healthcare sources may complicate chronic care and clinical outcomes as antiretroviral therapy (ART) continues to expand. However, little is known regarding patterns, drivers and consequences of using multiple healthcare sources. We therefore investigated factors associated with patterns of plural healthcare usage among patients tak...

Background: The animal is tremendously challenged to maintain calcium homeostasis. Those that fail can develop milk fever, a clinical disorder that is life threatening to the cow and predisposes the animal to a variety of other disorders. Calcium defi ciency disease is often accompanied with a defi ciency in phosphorus in clinical cases. Blood phosphorus status has also been researched because ...

In order to formulate truth-conditionally satisfactor* semantics in a compositional. manner, model-iiieoretic semanticists sometimes posit morphology-semantics mismatches. Among them are Kamp and Reyle (1993), who occasionally ignore English plural morphology in constructing their analysis of anaphora. Our goal in this paper is to demonstrate that natural language morphology is a better guide f...

This paper discusses the structure that incorporates information from discourse to derive distributivity. Following a proposal by López (2009) to account for the interpretation shown in the canonical focus structure using the notion “contrast”, I suggest that the feature “contrast” assigned to the edge of CP results in distributivity to the extent that distributivity occurs if and only if predi...

When using existential constructions to introduce plural NPs (e.g., there are dishes in the sink), speakers have the option of using a plural or singular form of the verb. In other words, speakers can use agreeing (plural) or non-agreeing (singular) forms of the verb when the NP is plural. Previous research reveals that non-agreement under existential there is the norm, even in standard varieti...

This paper presents an integration of centering theory ([GJW95]) into incremental dynamic logic. The formalism is based on an idea found in [vE00a], where contexts are permutable in order to model salience. Building on this idea, centering theory is restated as a formalism on contexts. Subsequently the system is used to consider some problems centering theory has once plurality is taken into ac...