This paper offers an account of the semantics of count nous. I show that neither the atomic/nonatomic distinction nor the homogeneous/non-homogeneous distinction is sufficient to explain the semantic contrast between mass and count nouns, since there are mass nouns which are atomic, and there are count nouns which are homogeneous. Starting from a version of Chierchia's 1998a account of the sema...

Three experiments explored the semantics of the mass-count distinction in young children and adults. In Experiments 1 and 2, the quantity judgments of participants provided evidence that some mass nouns refer to individuals, as such. Participants judged one large portion of stuff to be "more" than three tiny portions for substance-mass nouns (e.g. mustard, ketchup), but chose according to numbe...

items. Paivio and Yuille (1967) compared the two mediation set conditions with a control condition in which 5s were instructed to use rote repetition and found that the imaginal and verbal sets produced much better learning than did the repetition set, but the predicted interaction with concreteness did not occur. That is, the imagery set was no less effective than the verbal even with abstract...

Abstract Copredication is the phenomenon whereby two or more predicates seem to require that their argument denotes different things. The denotation of words copredicate has been broadly discussed. In this paper, I investigate metaphysics behind question. Thus, mereological theories dot objects claim these nouns denote complex entities; Asher (Lexical meaning in context, Cambridge University Pr...

This paper examines the syntactic and semantic properties of a set of nouns recently called "Relational Nouns" like mother, neighbor, etc. Relational nouns denote relations between individuals, rather than sets of individuals regular nouns denote, and are referentially dependent on individual-denoting expressions. In Japanese relational nouns may appear 'bare' with no genitive possessors in the...

On some accounts, word-meanings are organized in the human-brain according to their sensory-motor attributes. We tested an alternative hypothesis: word-meanings are neuroanatomically dissociable along abstract conceptual dimensions (entities vs. events). We measured brain activity in the left middle temporal gyrus (lMTG), a brain region that has previously been shown to respond more to verbs th...

In this paper I argue in favour of a collocation extraction approach to the acquisition of relational nouns in German. We annotated frequency-based best lists of nounpreposition bigrams and subsequently trained different classifiers using (combinations of) association metrics, achieving a maximum Fmeasure of 69.7 on a support vector machine (Platt, 1998). Trading precision for recall, we could ...

In this paper, we present a computational model of conceptual combination that introduces a new representation for the meaning of compounds: the relations used to interpret compounds are represented as points or vectors in a high-dimensional relation space. Such a representational framework has many advantages over other approaches. Firstly, the high-dimensionality of the space provides a detai...