The world contains not only objects and features (red apples, glass bowls, wooden tables),
but also relations holding between them (apples contained in bowls, bowls supported by …

How abstract is language? We show that abstractness pervades every corner of language,
going far beyond the usual examples of freedom and justice. In the light of the ubiquity of …

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on
representations of beliefs, which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic …

The UCLA Loneliness Scale (ULS-20) and its short version (ULS-8) are widely used to
measure loneliness. However, the question remains whether or not previous studies using …

This thesis addresses the lexical and psycholinguistic properties of copredication. In
particular, it explores its acceptability, frequency, crosslinguistic and electrophysiological …

Emoji have become a prominent part of interactive digital communication. Here, we ask the
questions: does a grammatical system govern the way people use emoji; and how do emoji …

The status of thematic roles such as Agent and Patient in cognitive science is highly
controversial: To some they are universal components of core knowledge, to others they are …

A crucial component of event recognition is understanding event roles, ie who acted on
whom: boy hitting girl is different from girl hitting boy. We often categorize Agents (ie the …

This book proposes a new two-step approach to the evolution of language, whereby syntax
first evolved as an auto-organizational process for the human conceptual apparatus (as a …

The ability to combine individual concepts of objects, properties, and actions into complex
representations of the world is often associated with language. Yet combinatorial event-level …