Scalar inference (SI), e.g., utterances containing the quantifier some being enriched to mean but not all, is a central topic in semantics-pragmatics. Of recent interest experimental literature phenomenon of scalar diversity: that different lexical scales exhibit variation how likely they are lead SI. However, studies diversity have almost exclusively relied on particular task: task. In this pa...

Abstract Recent research has identified language development in school-age heritage children as an important yet missing link between child early bilinguals and adult speakers. This study investigates the Mandarin ba -construction ([(NP1)- -NP2-VP]) through elicited narration among ( n = 27, aged 4–14) their parents 18) UK. The results showed considerable similarities a number of key structural...

This  qualitative  study  investigates  the  uses  of  be  in  Contemporary  English.  Based  on  this  study, one  easy  claim  and  one  more  difficult  claim  are  proposed.  The  easy  claim  is  that  the  traditional distinction between be as a lexical verb and be as an auxiliary is faulty. In particular, 'copular-be', traditionally considered to be a lexical verb, is in fact a prototypi...

The notion of expectancy grammar as a key to understanding the nature of psychologically real processes that underlie language use is introduced by Oller (1979). A central issue in this notion is that expectancy generating systems are constructed and modified in the course of language acquisition. Thus, one of the characteristics of language proficiency is that it consists of such an expectancy...

This paper proposes a novel approach in clustering texts automatically into coherent segments. A set of mutual linguistic constraints that largely determines the similarity of meaning among lexical items is used and a weight function is devised to incorporate the diversity of linguistic bonds among the text. A computational method of extracting the gist from a higher order structure representin...

Young children learn language from the speech they hear. Previous work suggests that greater statistical diversity of words and of linguistic contexts is associated with better language outcomes. One potential source of lexical diversity is the text of picture books that caregivers read aloud to children. Many parents begin reading to their children shortly after birth, so this is potentially a...

Semantically enriched multimedia information is crucial for equipping the kind of multimedia search potentials that professional searchers need. But the semantic interpretation of multimedia is obsolete without some mechanism for understanding semantic content that is not explicitly available. Manual annotation is the only source to overwhelming this, which is not only time consuming and costly...