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This paper addresses the semantics of the present form (known as the -ru form) of activity verbs in Japanese and examines the effect of these verbs in contrast to that of the inflected form (the -ta form). Garden-path sentences involving an ambiguity between a simple sentential reading and a relative clause reading generally show a preference for the former reading; when the preferred reading proves to be inconsistent with the correct reading of the sentence, the ensuing processing difficulty is known as the 'garden-path effect.' Interestingly, it has been observed that the effect is reduced in sentences that contain activity verbs in the present -ru form in the adnominal clause. One major problem that arises in the interpretation of the -ru form in subordinate clauses is that it is temporally ambiguous, and may be interpreted as belonging to the matrix clause instead. To date, no uniform analysis has been developed to characterize the semantic nature of the -ru form in subordinate clauses. This study will develop a semantics of the -ru form. The data revealed some interesting findings suggesting some logical characteristics of the -ru form. The results help to clarify how the semantic nature of the -ru form exerts an effect on the processing of garden-path sentences, and to show that, contrary to what had been assumed in the absence of semantic research into the embedding verb, the activity verbs ending in the -ru form extend the worlds against which a given proposition is evaluated, which has the effect of reducing the GP effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to substantiate the claim that the semantic feature of homogeneity manifests itself differently in different languages. By contrasting data from Spanish and Danish it is shown that homogeneity is lexically coded in Danish nouns, whereas Spanish nouns are lexically neutral to homogeneity. In Spanish the homogeneity interpretation of nouns is determined when they are inserted into a syntactic structure. The empirical relevance of this assumption is assessed by investigating syntactic and semantic aspects related to the occurrence of bare nominals in object position in the two languages under scrutiny. It is well-known that Spanish as a canonical pattern does not semantically license bare singular nouns with count interpretation (BNs) in object position, viz. #Juan repara coche [Juan repairs car], while in Danish the occurrence of BNs in object position is both possible and normal, viz. Ole maler hus [Ole paints house]. It is argued that this contrast is a predictable consequence of the premise that, in Spanish, transitive activity verbs impose a mass reading on any bare object noun whereas, in Danish, BNs maintain their lexically encoded denotation as inhomogeneous entities. However, contrasting with the leading pattern, the so-called HAVE-verbs (Borthen, 2003) actually license Spanish BNs in object position (cf., e.g., Espinal, 2010; Espinal & Mcnally, 2011), viz. Juan tiene perro [Juan has dog]. It is claimed that the occurrence of BNs in these cases is strongly related to the assumption that HAVE-verbs, contrary to activity verbs, are functionally noneventive and, therefore, do not impose a specific homogeneity reading on the bare noun in object position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]