In Study 1, English-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds heard a novel adjective used to label one of two objects and were asked for the referent of a different novel adjective. Children were more likely to select the unlabeled object if the two adjectives appeared prenominally (e.g., "a very DAXY dog") than as predicates (e.g., "a dog that is very DAXY"). Study 2 revealed that this response occurred on...

This paper will argue the following points. 1) What is a semantic status of prepositional phrases in such sentences as "Tom is good at tennis," "It is wise of Tom to go there," "This book is easy for John to read. "? 2) What is the semantic status of to infinitive (henceforth, to VP) in the following sentences : "He is honest to bring back the money," "He is sure to win." 3) Is there a semantic...

Three experiments examined the conditions under which infants acquiring English succeed in mapping novel adjectives, applied ostensively to individual objects, to other objects with the same property (color or texture). Twenty-one-month-old infants were introduced to a target (e.g., a yellow object) and asked to choose between (1) a matching test object (e.g., a different yellow object) and (2)...

English has a large and diverse class of adjectives which allow for an infinitival clause as a complement. These have been the subject of a great deal of experimental and theoretical research in linguistics, and have a number of different syntactic and semantic properties (Bresnan 1971, Lasnik and Fiengo 1974, Hartman 2012, among others). All of these adjectives can appear in the frame 'Subject...