This research concerns how children learn the distinction between substance names and object names. Quine (1969) proposed that children learn the distinction through learning the syntactic distinctions inherent in count/mass grammar. However, Soja et al. (1991) found that English-speaking 2-year-olds, who did not seem to have acquired count/mass grammar, distinguished objects from substances in...

A central finding in experimental research identified with Embodied Cognition (EC) is that understanding actions involves their embodied simulation, i.e. executing some processes involved in performing these actions. Extending these findings, I argue that reenactment – the overt embodied simulation of actions and practices, including especially communicative actions and practices, within uttera...

To use natural language, speakers must map the participants in events or states in the world onto grammatical roles. There remains considerable disagreement about the nature of these so-called linking rules (Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 2005). In order to probe the nature of linking rules, we investigate verbs of psychological state, which demonstrate complex linking patterns both within and betwee...

This thesis has two main goals. First, we provide an analysis of language means which together form an emotional meaning of written utterances in Czech. Second, we employ the findings concerning emotional language in computational applications. We provide a systematic overview of lexical, morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of emotional meaning in Czech utterances. Also, we propose ...

This thesis will talk about ambiguity by classifying it into sound ambiguity and meaning ambiguity. In the first part, the author will discuss the theories in ambiguity namely the Q-and R-principle and IC-analysis which are the most basic and important in the analysis of ambiguity. In the following part, the author will analyze the sound ambiguity and meaning ambiguity in detail. Polysemy and h...

We investigate a possible universal constraint on spatial meaning. It has been proposed that people attend preferentially to the endpoints of spatial motion events, and that languages may therefore make finer semantic distinctions at event endpoints than at event beginnings. We test this proposal. In Experiment 1, we show that people discriminate the endpoints of spatial motion events more read...

language is a system of overlapping relations, in a way that the concept of a component would not be transferred except in relation with other components and elements. there are two types of relationship between the linguistic structures: verbal and semantic relationships which are intimately linked to each other, because the word holds the meaning and is a means to express it.  considering the...

This paper aims to show how we can make progress in elucidating how people understand speech by changing our focus of inquiry from abstraction of formal units of linguistic analysis to a detailed analysis of global aspects of the communicative situation, of which speech is just one part. It uses evidence of (a) the communicative importance of fine phonetic detail and (b) exemplar memory for spe...

This paper aims to show how we can make progress in elucidating how people understand speech by changing our focus of inquiry from abstraction of formal units of linguistic analysis to a detailed analysis of global aspects of the communicative situation, of which speech is just one part. It uses evidence of (a) the communicative importance of fine phonetic detail and (b) exemplar memory for spe...