Current models of story comprehension have three major deficiencies: (1) lack of experimental support for the inference processes they involve (e.g. reliance on prediction); (2) indifference to 'kinds' of coherence (e.g. local and global); and (3) inability to find interpretations at variable depths. I propose that comprehension is driven by the need to find a representation that reaches a 'coh...

We suggest that the impact of metaphoric language does not depend entirely on the conceptual metaphor that is evoked, nor on the form the metaphoric language takes, but also on the steps involved in evoking a given metaphor. This is especially apparent in minimalist poetry. Readers are given hints, cultural conventions, or no guidance at all, on how to fill in missing metaphoric domains and map...

This article offers a conception of semantics, and of what makes the human language faculty distinctive, based on five theses: Meanings are instructions to build concepts; concatenation calls for conjunction of monadic concepts; grammatical relations invoke certain thematic relations and a kind of existential closure; lexicalization is a partly creative process of abstraction; and meanings are ...

In the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1992) it is assumed that there are diierent types of projections (lexical and functional) and therefore diierent types of heads. This paper explains why functional heads are not treated as head-corners by the minimalist head-corner parser described here.

Minimalist analyses typically treat quantifier scope interactions as being due to movement, thereby bringing constraints thereupon into the purview of the grammar. Here we adapt De Groote’s continuation-based presentation of dynamic semantics to minimalist grammars. This allows for a simple and simply typed compositional interpretation scheme for minimalism.

Substantially agreeing with Hornstein (2009: 81), “it is fair to say that what adjuncts are and how they function grammatically is not well understood”. I refer the reader to, e.g., Hornstein 2009: chapter 4, Hornstein & Nunes 2008, Hunter 2010 or most recently Hunter 2015 for a catalog of properties and problems adjuncts raise in general, and in particular for all previous proposals including ...