This article presents the results of a study on the interpretation and acceptance of adjectival resultatives of German children between 6 and 9 years of age and adults. These results brought to light significant differences, due to age, in the interpretation and acceptance of these resultatives, that is to say, sentences with an adjective in the final position. The youngest participants were pr...

I'm all for pragmatics. But I don't think it helps the cause to blur the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. The purpose of this chapter is to explain why. The basic reason is this. Even though, as people have been pointing out for some years now, the linguistic meaning of a given sentence generally underdetermines what a speaker means in uttering it, it does not follow that linguistic m...

This paper investigates the phonetic correlates of interrogative prosodic features in Paiwan, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. An attempt has been made to capture the typology of the Paiwan interrogative prosody. The interrogative sentence in Paiwan consists of one or more prosodic words which are usually larger than a verb stem. Yes/no, tag and alternative questions are characteristi...

We present a technique for reading sentences and producing sets of hypothetical relations that the sentence may be expressing. The technique uses large amounts of instance-level background knowledge about the relations in order to gather statistics on the various ways the relation may be expressed in language, and was inspired by the observation that half of the linguistic forms used to express...

How do people transform the surface structure of a sentence into the sentence’s intended meaning? Word order is an important cue used by people in sentence comprehension (Bates et al., 1982; Ferreira, 2003). Another important cue is the meaning of individual words (i.e. nouns and verbs) which we refer to as “content words”. In these and many approaches in sentence processing studies, the focus ...

Through the manipulation of the syntactic cue of word order and the semantic cues of noun animacy and noun size order, this study explores how different cue strength affects a child’s interpretation of a sentence. Subjects included 36 children [Mean age=50.72 mo.; SD=7.3 mo.]. A sentence interpretation test was administered to participants who would choose the “doer” of the sentence. Significan...

The interpretation of speech can be dealt with in terms of grammar, if grammatical categories are extended beyond the sentence. After briefly reviewing speech acts, discourse acts and relevance, two units are thus posited, the discourse and the text, and they are defined in strictly linguistictheoretical terms, by means of a principle of connection. Following this principle, sentences are linke...

This paper provides support for the hypothesis that comprehenders form online expectations for upcoming verbal arguments using their knowledge of typical events. We test this hypothesis in a self-paced reading experiment and an experiment measuring event-related brain potentials. In both experiments, we use materials in which the likelihood of the verbal patient depends on event knowledge about...