To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, two-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns ("The boy is gonna pilk a balloon"). But, they have difficulty with pronominal frames ("He is gonna pilk it") (Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010). We hypothesized that adver...

This paper explores the relationship between cultural knowledge and the specific meaning of a pronominal adverb in legal English where Chinese translators need to get the correct translation in their venture into translating the language of law. On the one hand, relying on the relevant legal cultural knowledge functioning as domain-general reference within a community or jurisdiction, tra...

Abstract Demonstratives are cross-linguistically widespread expressions. The use of demonstratives is flexible due to their semantic elasticity, which allows them describe more or less extensive regions referents in a communicative scenario. constant remapping between and might lead restructuring the deictic system itself accordance with parameters affecting its use. To that end, we analyzed st...

This paper discusses the word order of object shift and so-called subject shift constructions in Norwegian child language. Corpus data from young children (up to the age of approximately 3) show that they produce non-target-consistent word order in these contexts, failing to move pronominal subjects and objects across negation or sentence adverbs. Furthermore, the findings show that target-like...

This paper presents work on the corpus-based acquisition of predicatively used German adverbs by means of a statistical grammar model. The predicative use of adverbs is lexically restricted to local adverbs, temporal adverbs, and to a limited number of other adverbs, some of which are part of idiomatic phrases. Besides listing local and temporal adverbs we are mainly interested in identifying t...