Fluent speakers' representations of verbs include semantic knowledge about the nouns that can serve as their arguments. These "selectional restrictions" of a verb can in principle be recruited to learn the meaning of a novel noun. For example, the sentence He ate the carambola licenses the inference that carambola refers to something edible. We ask whether 15- and 19-month-old infants can recru...

We treat nouns that behave adjectively, which we call adjectival nouns, extracted from large corpora. For example, in “financial world” and “world of finance,” “financial” and “finance” are different parts of speech, but their semantic behaviors are similar to each other. We investigate how adjectival nouns are similar to adjectives and different from non-adjectival nouns by using self-organizi...

The paper points to an apparent paradox in the science of language. It regards the semantics of nouns and consists of a set of together incompatible, but individually well confirmed propositions about the evolution and development of language, the semantics of word classes and the cortical realization of word meaning. Theoretical and empirical considerations support the view that the concepts e...

The paper looks into the expression of intensification with parametric nouns such as PRICE, COST, FEE, RATE, etc., focusing on collocations these nouns form with intensifying adjectives, inchoative and causative intensifying verbs and corresponding de-verbal nouns. Degrees of intensification possible with these nouns are discussed, as well as analytical vs. synthetic expression of intensificati...

In computational linguistics, a large body of work exists on distributed modeling lexical relations, focussing largely relations such as hypernymy (scientist -- person) that hold between two categories, expressed by common nouns. contrast, linguistics has paid little attention to entities denoted proper nouns (Marie Curie, Mumbai, ...). These have investigated in detail the Knowledge Representa...

Combining information from adjectives with the nouns they modify is essential for comprehension. Previous research suggests that preschoolers do not always integrate and nouns, may instead over-rely on noun when processing referring expressions (Fernald, Thorpe, & Marchman, 2010; Baumgartner, Fernald, 2006). This disjointed has implications pragmatics, apparently preventing under-fives making c...

We report on the expression of singular nominals in Burmese, an articleless language, from original elicitation work. Bare nouns are interpreted as definites, to which numeral tiq 'one' is added form indefinites. propose that restricts domain nominal a singleton, and its addition subject Non-Vacuity constraint; this source anti-uniqueness inference furthermore investigate availability anaphoric...

In the native language, abstract and concrete nouns are represented in distinct areas of the cerebral cortex. Currently, it is unknown whether this is also the case for abstract and concrete nouns of a foreign language. Here, we taught adult native speakers of German 45 abstract and 45 concrete nouns of a foreign language. After learning the nouns for 5 days, participants performed a vocabulary...