Across languages, certain logically natural concepts are not lexicalized, even though they can be expressed by complex expressions. This is for instance the case quantifier all. In this paper, we propose an explanation fact based on following idea: logical lexicon of languages partly shaped a tradeoff between informativity and cost, inventory expressions tends to maximize average minimize cost....

The question of how children learn the meanings of words has long puzzled philosophers and psychologists. As Quine famously pointed out, simply hearing a word in context reveals next to nothing about its meaning. How then do children learn to understand and use words correctly? Here, we show how learning theory can offer an elegant solution to this seemingly intractable puzzle in language acqui...

This paper deals with a newly observed phenomenon which lies at the interface of the semantics and pragmatics of aspectual still (as in John is still asleep), namely the fact that still is systematically infelicitous when the time described by the sentence (or more technically, the reference time) is not given a specific characterization by a temporal adverbial or the utterance context. The mai...