Chapter 6 gives an overview of the properties of schwa and schwa syllables. Schwa has sometimes been analyzed as non-phonemic: It is the epenthetic vowel in German and it is the only non-moraic vowel of German. Moreover, it is featurally underspecified and does not fit the lax–tense dichotomy of the full vowels. The chapter starts with a review of the distributional properties of both schwa and syllabic sonorants in simplex and complex words. Both schwa and syllabic sonorants are often suffixal inflectional morphemes, but they also regularly appear in monomorphemic words. A part of the chapter is dedicated to sequences of sonorants that can be syllabic, and how different choices are made in different morphological environments. Again, OT analyses are provided and it is shown how syllable structure, morphological constraints and the different sonorants all play a role in the distribution of the syllabic and non-syllabic versions of the sonorants.

This chapter examines reference used by and with children and explores creative and playful uses of reference. Following an overview of how uses of reference develop as children’s language skills develop, we discuss the significance of the tendency for children to underspecify their intended referent in the use of referring expressions as compared to adults who do not do this, but who will sometimes overspecify the referent. Drawing on a broad range of examples, we examine evidence of how children quickly get to a stage where they can exploit reference for their own purposes or just to have fun. The atypical use of referring expressions in children’s literature is discussed and we examine the reasons for the authors’ deliberate exploitations of known conventions in relation to reference.

Stage 4 of the journey follows with an example of how implementation of a formal metalanguage helps with, but also hinders, the analysis of meaning of natural-language expressions. In particular, it addresses operations on sentences and introduces the connectives of propositional logic, assessing the degree of fit between them and their natural-language counterparts. In the process, it addesses the question of ambiguity and/or underspecification of the latter and concludes with some ‘food for thought’ on the usefulness of a formal semantic analysis.

This chapter discusses three central phenomena of interest in sentence processing: reanalysis, underspecification, and capacity-based differences in sentence comprehension. The model's quantitative predictions are evaluated against two benchmark data-sets that investigate reanalysis and underspecification.

Linguistic theory has provided different formalizations regarding the issue of countability, but it has hardly ever measured the occurrence of nouns as mass and as count in language use. This work illustrates a rating study on subjective frequency of Italian nouns inflected in the singular and in the plural. The rating scores were compared to the corpus frequency of nouns in mass and count contexts. The results suggest that in Italian almost every noun can occur as countable. Moreover, negative correlations were never found between the count use and the mass use of nouns. These results are discussed with respect to the different theoretical accounts.