In a series of publications, we have proposed a foundational system of ontological categories which has been used to evaluate and improve the quality of conceptual modeling languages and models. In this article, we continue this work by employing theories from Formal Ontology, Cognitive Psychology and Philosophical Logic to systematically investigate some important modal aspects of the ontologi...

articles in general and definite articles in particular can create problems even long after all other aspects of english have been mastered. the present article investigated the learnability problems related to the acquisition of count-mass distinction of english nominals by persian l2 learners. the theoretical underpinning of the study is the interpretability hypothesis (tsimpli & dimitrak...

In this paper, we argue that the metaphor form of a comparison (i.e., a topic-vehicle pair) is preferred over, and more comprehensible than, the simile form when the interpretive diversity for that comparison is high. Interpretive diversity refers to the richness of the figurative meaning of a comparison; it is high to the extent that more features or properties are related to the figurative me...

This paper aims at demonstrating that the cognitive mechanisms underlying certain tropes (e.g. metaphor or metonymy) may assume variable degrees of conventionalisation, thereby giving rise to a range of phenomena along either side of the semantics/ pragmatics distinction. Examining specifically cases of metonymy, I propose a pragmatic account of creative, one-off metonymic expressions using the...