Aviv Schoenfeld’s research while affiliated with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and other places

This article is about the cross-linguistic universality of the so-called Universal Sorter, where a noun N means ‘kind of N’. We discuss two restrictions in two Slavic languages which are absent from English, pertaining to perfective verbs and numerically modified count nouns. We establish, first with introspective judgments (for Czech) and then experimentally (for Slovak), that both restrictions are present in a way which supports our analysis of the first restriction as stemming from Slavic, unlike English, having perfective verbs which force a completive reading of an incremental theme.