How do infants map words to their meaning? How do they discover that different types of words (e.g. noun, adjective) refer to different aspects of the same objects (e.g. category, property)? We have proposed that (1) infants begin with a broad expectation that novel open-class words (both nouns and adjectives) highlight commonalities (both categoryand property-based) among objects, and that (2)...

Recent research suggests that, although young children appreciate many different kinds of conceptual relations among objects, they focus specifically on taxonomic relations in the context of word learning. However, because the evidence for children's appreciation of this linkage between words and object categories has come primarily from children who have made substantial linguistic and concept...

In the above examples, only nominal inflection shows opacity (i.e. it resists general phonological processes (2) or allows additional phonological contrasts (4)). Thus previous approaches commonly assume that nouns have a special status in phonology and propose constraints that are only effective for evaluation of nouns so as to explain opacity in nominal inflection. Such constraints include No...

What do terms such as the committee, the league, and the group of women denote? Pretheoretically, group terms have a dual personality. On the one hand, the committee corresponds to an entity as ideosyncratic in its properties as any other object; for instance, two otherwise identical committees can vary with respect to the purpose for which they were formed. Call this aspect the group-as-indivi...

Plurality of mass nouns and the notion of 'semantic parameter'. The logical analysis of plurals and mass terms: a lattice theoretical approach .

this research has studied the language disorders of persian-speaking aphasic patients to evaluate their comprehension abilities of simple and compound nouns, and to specify the categories having the largest number of vulnerabilities. the subjects were 3 monolingual patients (2 broca’s and 1 transcortical motor aphasics) referring to speech therapy clinics of shafa hospital and welfare rehabilit...

In the formation of extended noun phrases, expressions are used that describe some dimension. Weight is described by each of the prenominal expressions in heavy rock, too much ballast, 2 lb rock, 2 lbs of rocks. The central claim of this paper is that the position of these types of expressions within the noun phrase limits the kinds of dimensions they may describe. The limitations have to do wi...

This paper investigates the type of systematic sense alternation that rests on the count-mass distinction in English. Computational semantic approaches often suggest treating such sense alterations as being generated on the basis of a set of lexical inference rules, yielding, for instance, for an animal-denoting term, a meat sense ( ̳We‘re having rabbit for dinner‘), a fur sense ( ̳Annie is weari...