Grammatical gender is one of the most difficult aspects to acquire in a latelearned second language (L2), especially for learners whose first language does not have grammatical gender, e.g. English (Franceschina, 2005). There are two aspects of gender that present challenges to learners: First, learners need to learn the target gender of individual nouns, i.e. they need to assign a noun (e.g. S...

Polysemous adjectives seem to make irregular contributions to the meaning of adjective-noun phrases. This thesis provides a systematic explanation of this problem. Polysemous adjectives are considered semantically underspecified. The underspecified semantic meaning has to be pragmatically enriched with due consideration of world-knowledge and linguistic context. The treatment follows Blutner’s ...

Introduction A Swedish version of WordNet was created and around 300 Swedish adjectives, mainly from the semantic field of strength, were implemented. This paper is a documentation of the implementation. The purpose of the study was to investigate the possibilities of applying WordNet to Swedish and to illuminate general problems with WordNet as well as specific problems in the handling of adje...

Two studies demonstrate that children have knowledge of scalar distinctions between three sub-classes of gradable adjectives: relative (big, long), absolute with a maximal standard (full), and absolute with a minimal standard (spotted). Performance on these adjectives is compared with controls (shape, color, mood). Children appropriately shift the standard of comparison with context-dependent, ...

This work belongs to a family of research efforts, called microtheories and aimed at describing the static meaning of all lexical categories in several languages in the framework of the MikroKosmos project on computational semantics. The latter also involves other static microtheories describing world knowledge and syntax-semantics mapping as well as dynamic microtheories connected with the act...

Following an extensive overview of the subject, this study explores the relationships between secondlanguage (L2) explicit/implicit knowledge sources, embedded in the declarative/procedural memory systems, and L2 working memory (WM) capacity. It further examines the relationships between L2 reading comprehension and L2 WM capacity as well as those between L2 reading comprehension and L2 explici...

Talmy‘s (1985) crosslinguistic typology of lexicalization patterns of motion events have been extensively used in second language acquisition (SLA) research as a means to examine how second language (L2) learners map form, meaning, and function. These studies have yielded some conflicting results regarding the learnability of L2 lexicalization patterns  arguably the oversimplification over and...

We present a gold standard for evaluating scale membership and the order of scalar adjectives. In addition to evaluating existing methods of ordering adjectives, this knowledge will aid in studying the organization of adjectives in the lexicon. This resource is the result of two elicitation tasks conducted with informants from Amazon Mechanical Turk. The first task is notable for gathering open...