There is an emerging view according to which countability is not an integral part of the lexical meaning of singular count nouns, but is ‘added on’ or ‘made available’, whether syntactically, semantically or both. This view has been pursued by Borer and Rothstein among others in order to deal with classifier languages such as Chinese as well as challenges to standard views of the mass-count distinction such as object mass nouns such as furniture. I will discuss a range of data, (...) partly from German, that such a grammar-based view of countability receives support when applied to verbs with respect to the event argument position. Verbs themselves fail to specify events as countable in English and related languages; instead countability is made available only by the use of the event classifier time or else particular lexical items, such as frequency expressions, German beides ‘both’, or the nominalizing light noun -thing. The paper will not adopt or elaborate a particular version of the grammar-based view of countability, but rather critically discuss existing versions and present two semantic options of elaborating the view. (shrink)

What is the relationship between language and event cognition? Past work has suggested that linguistic/aspectual distinctions encoding the internal temporal profile of events map onto nonlinguistic event representations. Here, we use a novel visual detection task to directly test the hypothesis that processing telic versus atelic sentences (e.g., “Ebony folded a napkin in 10 seconds” vs. “Ebony did some folding for 10 seconds”) can influence whether the very same visual event is processed as containing distinct temporal stages including a well‐defined (...) endpoint or lacking such structure, respectively. In two experiments, we show that processing (a)telicity in language shifts how people later construe the temporal structure of identical visual stimuli. We conclude that event construals are malleable representations that can align with the linguistic framing of events. (shrink)

Word learning depends critically on the use of linguistic context to constrain the likely meanings of words. However, the mechanisms by which children infer word meaning from linguistic context are still poorly understood. In this study, we asked whether adults (n = 58) and 2‐ to 6‐year‐old children (n = 180) use discourse coherence relations (i.e., the meaningful relationships between elements within a discourse) to constrain their interpretation of novel words. Specifically, we showed participants videos of novel animals exchanging objects. (...) These videos were accompanied by a linguistic description of the events in which we manipulated a single word within a sentence (and vs. because) in order to alter the causal and temporal relations between the events in the discourse (e.g., “One animal handed the baby to the other animal [and/because] the baby started crying in the talfa's arms”). We then asked participants which animal (the giver or the receiver) was the referent of the novel word. Across two experiments, we found evidence that young children used the causal and temporal relations in each discourse to constrain their interpretations of novel words. (shrink)