Compositionality and Statistics in Adjective Acquisition: 4-year-olds Interpret Tall and Short Based on the Size Distributions of Novel Noun Referents

Four experiments investigated 4-year-olds' understanding of adjective-noun compositionality and their sensitivity to statistics when interpreting scalar adjectives. In Experiments 1 and 2, children selected tall and short items from 9 novel objects called pimwits (1-9 in. in height) or from this array plus 4 taller or shorter distractor objects of the same kind. Changing the height distributions of the sets shifted children's tall and short judgments. However, when distractors differed in name and surface features from targets, in Experiment 3, judgments did not shift. In Experiment 4, dissimilar distractors did affect judgments when they received the same name as targets. It is concluded that 4-year-olds deploy a compositional semantics that is sensitive to statistics and mediated by linguistic labels.Psycholog

The syntax and semantics of degree expressions in Spanish

This article provides an overview of the syntax and semantics of degree in Spanish, eventually suggesting that degree structure should be viewed as equivalent to aspect in the verbal domain. §1 introduces several of the themes that will be discussed in the article, while §2 introduces the semantics of degree. §3 discusses the basic syntactic properties of degree, particularly with adjectives. §4 introduces the notion of scale, which we will argue should correspond to Aktionsart in the verbal domain. §5 analyses positive degree, and explains how it differs from a scale both in syntax and in semantics. §6-§8 discuss comparative and superlative degrees, first their morphological facts (§6), then the specific properties of comparatives (§7) and finally those of superlatives (§8). The article ends with some conclusions in §9

Hidden nominal structures in Japanese clausal comparatives

Recent studies of Japanese clausal comparatives have yielded several competing theoretical views of their syntax and semantics that have different implications for the issue of crosslinguistic variation in comparative constructions. This paper aims at contributing to this debate by offering a novel syntactic analysis of Japanese clausal comparatives. The main proposal is that despite their appearance, Japanese clausal comparatives involve a nominal structure whose nominal head is deleted by a syntactic deletion operation, and therefore are underlyingly phrasal comparatives. It is demonstrated that this analysis explains peculiar syntactic and semantic properties of Japanese (seemingly) clausal comparatives, some of which have been unidentified in the previous literature. The proposed account also allows us to dispense with the previously proposed semantic variation specific to degree constructions, and entertain a more conservative view of crosslinguistic variation where the differences between Japanese-type and English-type comparative constructions are solely attributed to their morphosyntactic properties

Scientific pluralism and semantics

This project is a case study in Scientific Pluralism focused on formal natural language semantics. The case study presents a novel characterization of Scientific Pluralism while arguing for a Pluralist approach to semantics. I begin by describing the plural state of the field. I show the lack of consensus among five different types of background constraints that govern semantic theorizing. Semantics consists of a set of more-or-less distinct projects partially defined by the background constraints practitioners adhere to. With this description in hand, I present a Pluralist view with two main parts. First, I briefly argue that semantics should maintain multiple projects and discuss consequences of doing so. Since this ground has been covered extensively in the Scientific Pluralism literature, the bulk of the discussion centers around the second part of the view. I extend typical Pluralisms by arguing that semantic background constraints should be viewed as soft. A soft background constraint may remain vague, and it may be overridden without being rejected when it conflicts with other background constraints. I apply my Pluralist view to Taxonomic Monism, a background constraint commonly expressed in some form throughout the literature. Taxonomic Monism provides a goal for semantic theorizing, saying that semantic theories should aim to state the meaning of every expression in the language. I argue that we should view Taxonomic Monism as a soft constraint in several ways, and I discuss the consequences of doing so.Philosoph

The Roots of Verbal Meaning

This book explores possible and impossible word meanings, with a specific focus on the meanings of verbs. It adopts the now common view that verb meanings consist at least partly of an event structure, made up of an event template describing the verb’s broad temporal and causal contours that occurs across lots of verbs and groups them into semantic and grammatical classes, plus an idiosyncratic root describing specific, real world states and actions that distinguish verbs with the same template. While much work has focused on templates, less work has addressed the truth conditional contributions of roots, despite the importance of a theory of root meaning in fully defining the predictions event structural approaches make. This book addresses this lacuna, exploring two previously proposed constraints on root meaning: The Bifurcation Thesis of Roots, whereby roots never introduce the meanings introduced by templates, and Manner/Result Complementarity, which has as a component that roots can describe either a manner or a result state but never both at the same time. Two extended case studies, on change-of-state verbs and ditransitive verbs of caused possession, show that neither hypothesis holds, and that ultimately there may be no constraints on what a root can mean. Nonetheless, the book argues that event structures still have predictive value, and it presents a new theory of possible root meanings and how they interact with event templates that produces a new typology of possible verbs, albeit one where not just templates but also roots determine systematic semantic and grammatical properties