The perceptual basis of the understanding of some spatial adjectives in primary school children

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Les quantifieurs flottants sont des attributs quantitatifs totalisants

This paper considers three features of Floating Quantifiers FQ) in French. FQs comprise a larger class of items than is usually recognised; criterial distribution within the verb phrase and adjoined to a relative pronoun apply not only to the equivalents of all and each, but also to only, them both, one another and related items. This extension leads to the question of what properties may be defining the class. The semantic property is that of commenting on the relation between the individual entities and the set of the noun they belong to. Akin to focus particles in this respect, FQs are optional complements. These complements relating semantically to a nominal argument belong to the category of attributive complements. The dissociation between the QF and the noun referred to is the syntactic property of the class. An attributive function with a semantic commentary on the make-up of the nominal set in question defines Floating Quantifiers.

Group consensus in social influence:type of consensus information as a moderator of majority and minority influence

Three experiments investigated the effect of consensus information on majority and minority influence. Experiment 1 examined the effect of consensus expressed by descriptive adjectives (large vs. small) on social influence. A large source resulted in more influence than a small source, irrespective of source status (majority vs. minority). Experiment 2 showed that large sources affected attitudes heuristically, whereas only a small minority instigated systematic processing of the message. Experiment 3 manipulated the type of consensus information, either in terms of descriptive adjectives (large, small) or percentages (82%, 18%, 52%, 48%). When consensus was expressed in terms of descriptive adjectives, the findings of Experiments 1 and 2 were replicated (large sources were more influential than small sources), but when consensus was expressed in terms of percentages, the majority was more influential than the minority, irrespective of group consensus.