Acquiring the meaning of free relative clauses and plural definite descriptions

Acquiring the meaning of free relative clauses and plural definite descriptions

Plural definite descriptions (e.g. the things on the plate) and free relative clauses (e.g. what is on the plate) have been argued to share the same semantic properties, despite their syntactic differences. Specifically, both have been argued to be nonquantificational expressions referring to the maximal element of a given set (e.g. the set of things on the contextually salient plate). We provi...

On the acquisition of maximality in free relative clauses and plural definite descriptions

Plural definite descriptions (e.g. the things on the plate) and free relative clauses (e.g. what is on the plate) have been argued to share the same semantic properties, despite their syntactic differences: both are non-quantificational expressions referring to the maximal element of a given set (e.g. the set of things on the plate). Experimental support to this semantic analysis is provided by...

Acquiring maximality in free relatives and definite descriptions

Connecting the Exhaustivity of Clefts and the Homogeneity of Plural Definite Descriptions in Acquisition

Various views exist on the kind of meaning that the exhaustivity component of clefts corresponds to, and therefore on the status that clefts have when exhaustivity is violated. In particular, two semantic theories have recently been spelled out in some detail. According to Velleman et al. (2012), (1) carries the presupposition that it’s not the case that both the truck and something else are bl...

on the comparison of keyword and semantic-context methods of learning new vocabulary meaning

the rationale behind the present study is that particular learning strategies produce more effective results when applied together. the present study tried to investigate the efficiency of the semantic-context strategy alone with a technique called, keyword method. to clarify the point, the current study seeked to find answer to the following question: are the keyword and semantic-context metho...