A precisely controlled automated procedure confirms a developmental decalage: Infants acquiring English link count nouns to object categories well before they link adjectives to properties. Fourteen- and 18-month-olds (n= 48 at each age) extended novel words presented as count nouns based on category membership rather than shared properties. When the same words were presented as adjectives, inf...

Recent work on argument taking deverbal zero nouns in English has shown that they are more present language than was previously thought. In this paper the presence and productivity of zero-derived French is investigated. It to determine which can count as nouns, several decisions have be made. This concerns their gender (do both masculine feminine included research?), determination what counts ...

In Construction Morphology (CM), a compound is treated as a construction at the word level with a systematic correlation between its form and meaning, in the sense that any change in the form is accompanied by a change in the meaning. Compound words are coined by compounding templates which are called abstract schemas in CM. These abstract constructional schemas generalize over sets of existing...

A controversial question is whether language acquisition is the result of domain-general or domain-specific principles. Focusing on word-learning, Markson and Bloom (Nature 385(6619) (1997) 813) recently argued that the ability to learn and retain new words (count nouns) is the result of abilities that are not specific to language. In the current experiment, we replicate their empirical finding...

It is often claimed that grammatical categories are initially acquired via their semantic properties. In the case of the count/mass distinction, semantic correlations should predispose the child to acquire the countlmass subcategories as a distinction between names for objects vs. substances. This proposal is tested in three experiments. The first two experiments with 3to 5-year-olds employ a w...

HALL, D. GEOFFREY, and WAXMAN, SANDRA R. Assumptions about Word Meaning: Individuation and Basic-Level Kinds. GHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1993,64,1550-1570. In 2 experiments, 3V2-year-old children interpreted a novel count noun (e.g., "This is a murvil") applied to an unfamiliar stuffed animal as referring to a basic-level kind, rather than to a kind that individuates its members by type of situation (c...

Picture-word interference experiments conducted with Italian speakers investigated how determiners are selected in noun phrase (NP) production. Determiner production involves the selection of a noun's syntactic features (mass or count, gender), which specify the type of determiner to be selected, and the subsequent selection of a particular phonological form (e.g., the/a in English). The resear...

“justice” is a fine adjective to which various nouns may be attributed. these nouns can be divided into three universal categories: individual person, social situation, and society. each of these nouns has a particular characteristic feature based on which one may not use any given definition for justice. the purpose of this essay is to argue that taking the noun of justice into consideration i...

This paper defends the hypothesis that number and classifiers behave differently in nominal and in verbal structures. When numerals are used in order to ‘count’ a number of objects or events, they interact differently with nouns and verbs (compare three visits with to visit three *(times)). Degree modifiers, on the other hand, behave rather similarly in the nominal and in the verbal domains (co...