1. INTRODUCTION. This paper discusses whether there are elements in colloquial Sinhala that can be appropriately labeled AUXILIARY verbs, and what evidence there is to motivate such a label. While auxiliaries are thought of as a nearly universal lexical category (Steele 1978), the term is not mentioned in standard works on Sinhala (Gair & Paolillo 1997, Gair 1998), which warrants a closer exami...

Categories are not invariant. This paper attempts to explore the dynamic nature of semantic category, in particular, that of fashion language, based on the cognitive theory of Dawkins’ memetics, a new theory of cultural evolution. Semantic attributes of linguistic memes decrease or proliferate in replication and spreading, which involves a dynamic development of semantic category. More specific...

Balota and Chumbley's studies led them to conclude that category verification, lexical decision, and pronunciation tasks involve combinations of processes that cause them to produce differing estimates of the relation between word frequency and ease of lexical identification. Monsell, Doyle, and Haggard challenged Balota and Chumbley's empirical evidence and conclusions, provided empirical evid...

This thesis proposes an extended version of the Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) formalism, with the following features: 1. grammars incorporate inheritance hierarchies of lexical types, defined over a simple, feature-based constraint language 2. CCG lexicons are, or at least can be, functions from forms to these lexical types This formalism, which I refer to as ‘inheritance-driven’ CCG (I-...

Cross-linguistic research has shown that boundaries for lexical categories differ from language to language. The aim of this study is to explore these differences between languages in relation to the categorization differences within a language. Monolingual Dutch(N=400) and French-speaking (N=300) Belgian adults provided lexical category judgments for three lexical categories that are roughly e...

There exists an increasing body of research demonstrating that language processing is aided by context-based predictions. Recent findings suggest that the brain generates estimates about the likely physical appearance of upcoming words based on syntactic predictions: words that do not physically look like the expected syntactic category show increased amplitudes in the visual M100 component, th...

By merging syntactic categories of word classes, lexical categories were obtained. By demonstrating combination and type raising rules respectively from curried and uncurried perspectives, a category combination algorithm was presented, in which application, composition and type raising rules were sequentially examined, and the first available rule was selected. A Chinese CCG parser was develop...

The study investigated the neuronal basis of the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon. The semantic category interference effect was used to locate lexical retrieval processes in time and space. This effect reflects the finding that, for overt naming, volunteers are slower when naming pictures out of a sequence of items from the same semantic category than from different categories. Parti...