Adults conceptualize the world in terms of enduring physical objects...

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The present studies investigate infants reliance on object kind information in solving the problem of object individuation. Two experiments explored whether adults, 10- and 12month -old infants could use their knowledge of ducks and cars to individuate an ambiguous array consisting of a toy duck perched on a toy car into two objects. A third experiment investigated whether 10-month-old infants could use their knowledge of cups and shoes to individuate an array consisting of a cup perched on a shoe into two objects. Ten-month-old infants failed to use object kind information alone to resolve the ambiguity with both pairs of objects. In contrast, infants this age succeeded in using spatiotemporal information to segment the array into two objects, i.e. they succeeded if shown that the duck moved independently relative to the car, or the cup relative to the shoe. Twelve-month-old infants, as well as adults, succeeded at object individuation on the basis of object kind information alone.

In this paper, I explore the relation between methods of lexical representation involving decomposition and the theory of types as used in linguistics and programming semantics. I identify two major approaches to lexical decomposition in grammar, what I call parametric and predicative strategies. I demonstrate how expressions formed with one technique can be translated into expressions of the other. I then discuss argument selection within a type theoretic approach to semantics, and show how the predicative approach to decomposition can be modeled within a type theory with richer selectional mechanisms. In particular, I show how classic Generative Lexicon representations and operations can be viewed in terms of types and selection. 1

English and French are configurational languages, in the sense that the grammatical functions of subject and object consistently appear in particular phrase structure configurations. Thus, virtually every English clause must have some kind of syntactically expressed subject, and clauses with transitive verbs must have syntactically

This paper presents a novel theory of concealed questions (CQs). The theory is the first to provide a unified and principled account of definite, indefinite, and quantified CQs and CCQs (CQ-containing CQs). It also explains Greenberg’s (1977) observation and some related facts. 1

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Various theories propose that count nouns are distinguished from mass nouns by their specification of individuation. We present evidence that, while 3-year-old children acquiring language extend words differentially on the basis of masscount syntax, they quantify over individuals for both novel mass and count nouns. We suggest that children may begin acquisition with an underspecified representation of mass noun semantics, permitting quantification over both individuals and continuous quantities. Also, children may rely on ontologically based biases to guide quantification.

In this paper I present experimental data showing that the interpretation of donkey sentences is influenced by certain aspects of world knowledge that seem to elude introspective observation, which I try to explain by reference to a scale ranging from prototypical individuals (like children) to quite marginal ones (such as railway lines). This ontological cline interacts with the semantics of donkey sentences: as suggested already by the anecdotal data on which much of the literature is based, the effect of world knowledge is by and large restricted to donkey sentences with non-intersective determiners. I outline a psychological model which incorporates both ontological and logical factors, and suggest that there may be something wrong with the standard assumption that a statement’s receiving a truth value requires that it have a definite reading.