A precisely controlled automated procedure confirms a developmental decalage: Infants acquiring English link count nouns to object categories well before they link adjectives to properties. Fourteen- and 18-month-olds (n= 48 at each age) extended novel words presented as count nouns based on category membership rather than shared properties. When the same words were presented as adjectives, inf...

In the systemic framework, lexis has received little attention in comparison to grammar. The paper compares existing systemic approaches to lexis and outlines a model for describing lexical items from the viewpoint of realization of communicative intentions by lexical items using the systemic network of lexical choices. As an example of the approach, the paper attempts to describe contrastive l...

Experimental and cross-linguistic evidence suggests that certain speech sounds are associated with size, especially high front vowels ‘small’ low back ‘large’. However, empirical statistically magnitude across words within a language has been mixed open to methodological critique. Here, we used random-forest analysis of near-exhaustive set English size adjectives (e.g.,tiny, gargantuan) determi...

Wordnets are semantic networks containing nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs organized according to linguistic principles, by means of semantic relations. In this work, we adopt a complex network perspective to perform a comparative analysis of the English and Polish wordnets. We determine their similarities and show that the networks exhibit some of the typical characteristics observed in o...

This paper investigates the computational complexity of reasoning with English sentences featuring temporal prepositions, temporal subordinating conjunctions and the order-denoting adjectives ‘first’ and ‘last’. A fragment of English featuring these constructions, called TPE, is defined by means of a context-free grammar. The phrasestructures which this grammar assigns to the sentences it recog...

Adjective ordering preferences stand as perhaps one of the best candidates for a true linguistic universal: When multiple adjectives are strung together in service modifying some noun, speakers different languages—from English to Mandarin Hebrew—exhibit robust and reliable concerning relative order those adjectives. More importantly, despite diversity languages investigated, very same surface o...

In this study we introduce AdjScales, a method for scaling similar adjectives by their strength. It combines existing Web-based computational linguistic techniques in order to automatically differentiate similar adjectives that describe the same property by strength. Though this kind of information is rarely present in most of the lexical resources and dictionaries, it might be useful for langu...

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...