Abstract We present a number of puzzles arising for the interpretation modified numerals. Following Büring and others we assume that main difference between comparative superlative modifiers is only latter convey disjunctive meanings. further argue inference patterns triggered by disjunction are hard to capture in existing semantic pragmatic analyses these phenomena (neo-Gricean or grammatical ...

How do the languages we speak shape the way we think? In a series of studies, Boroditsky, Schmidt, and Phillips (2003) investigated the effect of grammatical gender on people’s responses to questions about the properties and similarity relations among objects. Here, we use a connectionist network to simulate these findings and find a possible mechanism for linguistic relativity effects (such as...

Evolutionary Programming (EP) seems a promising methodology to automatically find programs to solve new computing challenges. The Evolutionary Programming techniques use classical genetic operators (selection, crossover and mutation) to automatically generate programs targeted to solve computing problems or specifications. Among the methodologies related with Evolutionary Programming we can fin...

We describe a natural language parser that uses type information to determine the grammatical structure of simple sentences and phrases. This stands in contrast to studies of type inference where types and grammatical structure play opposite roles, the former being determined by the latter. Our parser is implemented in Haskell and is based on a linguistic theory called applicative universal gra...

Aspect contributes important temporal information for the construction of situation models in the human mind. Previous studies examining the effect of grammatical aspect on accomplishment verbs (e.g. bake a cake) show that perfective sentences/utterances are processed faster than imperfective ones (Madden & Zwaan, 2003; Chan et al., 2004; Yap et al., 2004, in press). The present study, however,...

What kinds of knowledge underlie the use of language and how is this knowledge acquired? Linguists equate knowing a language with knowing a grammar. Classic "poverty of the stimulus" arguments suggest that grammar identification is an intractable inductive problem and that acquisition is possible only because children possess innate knowledge of grammatical structure. An alternative view is eme...

This article presents a rationale and description of GCS, or Grammatical Coding System. GCS is a general-use grammatical coding system designed for research on the language of normal and language-impaired children or adults and is especially useful for studies in which a relatively large number of participants are involved. It implements recent theoretical developments in linguistics to charact...

The complexity of different components of the grammars of human languages can be quantified. For example, languages vary greatly in the size of their phonological inventories, and in the degree to which they make use of inflectional morphology. Recent studies have shown that there are relationships between these types of grammatical complexity and the number of speakers a language has. Language...