by 2,000 3,000 people. Thanks to Pamela Munro and members of the audience at LexicalFunctional Grammar 2003 for comments on this paper. Special thanks to Luisa Martínez, who provided all the SDZ data. An earlier version of this paper was presented at Lexical-Functional Grammar 2003. The orthography for SDZ is adapted from the practical orthographies for other Zapotec languages spoken in the Val...

One relevant way to structure the domain of lexical knowledge (complex terms, or relations between lexical units) acquisition from corpora is to oppose numerical versus symbolic techniques. Numerical approaches of acquisition exploit the frequential aspect of data, and use statistical techniques, while symbolic approaches exploit the structural aspect of data, and use structural or symbolic inf...

Childhood socioeconomic status (SES) has a broad impact on cognitive development including nearly every aspect of language ability. In infancy, lower SES is associated with delays in real-time language processing skills, but it is not known whether or how this relationship carries into adulthood. We explore these questions by assessing the timecourse of anticipatory sentence interpretation in a...

Lexical choices in descriptions of the spatial world around us are affected not only by geometry, but also by variables such as situational context and the extent to which the spatial relations between the objects referred to are seen as consistent with their typical function. In a study of how people describe complex scenes with multiple objects we examined whether descriptive choices (both lo...

We present a study that investigates that factors that determine what makes a good lexical substitution. We begin by observing that there is a correlation between the corpus frequency of words and the number of WordNet senses they have, and hypothesise that readers might prefer common, but more ambiguous words over less ambiguous but also less common ones. We identify four properties of a word ...

In languages such as Japanese, the use of zeros, unexpressed arguments of the verb, in utterances that shift the topic involves a risk that the meaning intended by the speaker may not be transparent to the hearer. However, this potentially undesirable conversational strategy often occurs in the course of naturally-occurring discourse. In this chapter, I report on an empirical study of 250 utter...

Accounts of spatial language aim to address both the meaning of a spatial term and its usage patterns across diverse cases, but do not always clearly distinguish these from one another. Focusing on the case of English prepositions in and on, we set out to disentangle spatial language meaning from spatial language use by comparing judgments on a series of linguistic tasks designed to tap each as...

Previous research shows that readers judge inherently unbounded actions to be bounded when (a) a verb describes the irreversible consumption of an object, and (b) the grammatical object is a count noun, rather than a mass noun. We seek to extend these findings by examining whether the mass/count distinction will affect readers’ interpretations of verbs from additional aspectual classes. Partici...