The most predominant language processing theories have, for some time, been based largely on structured knowledge and relatively simple rules. These symbolic models intentionally segregate syntactic information processing from statistical information as well as semantic, pragmatic, and discourse influences, thereby minimizing the importance of these potential constraints in learning and process...

This study investigated the role of language in the development of theory of mind. It was hypothesized that the acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties of sentential complements would facilitate the development of a representational theory of mind. Sixty preschoolers who failed false belief and sentential complement pretests were randomly assigned to training on false belief, sente...

This paper annotates the English corresponding units of Chinese clauses in Chinese-English translation and statistically analyzes them. Firstly, based on Chinese clause segmentation, we segment English target text into corresponding units (clause) to get a Chinese-to-English clause-aligned parallel corpus. Then, we annotate the grammatical properties of the English corresponding clauses in the ...

Potts (2005, 2007) claims that Grice’s ‘conventional implicatures’ offer a powerful argument in favor of a multidimensional semantics, one in which certain expressions fail to interact scopally with various operators because their meaning is located in a separate dimension. Focusing on NonRestrictive Relative Clauses (= NRRs), we explore an alternative to Potts’s bidimensional account. In our a...

There is now general agreement about the optionality of scalar implicatures: the pragmatic interpretation will be accessed depending on the context relative to which the utterance is interpreted. The question, then, is what makes a context upper- (vs. lower-) bounding. Neo-Gricean accounts should predict that contexts including factual information will enhance the rate of pragmatic interpretati...

In Bach and Cooper (1978) a semantics is proposed for adjoined relative clauses in Hittite and for the NP S analysis of English relatives within the general framework of Montague (1974). The aim of their analysis is to show that a potentially serious set of counterexamples to the compositionality thesis the thesis that the interpretation of a construction is a function of the interpretations of...

Hackl, Koster-Hale & Varvoutis (2012; HKV) provide data that suggest that in a null context, antecedent-contained-deletion (ACD) relative clause structures modifying a quantified object noun phrase (NP; such as every doctor) are easier to process than those modifying a definite object NP (such as the doctor). HKV argue that this pattern of results supports a ‘quantifier-raising’ (QR) analysis o...