Timothy Knowlton

Biographic Data

ID166405
NAMETimothy Knowlton
GIVEN NAMESTimothy
FAMILY NAMEKnowlton
SIGNATUREKNOWLTON T
AFFILIATIONSCalifornia University of Pennsylvania
ORCID0000-0002-8207-0656
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS8
TOTAL CITATIONS2
AUTHOR COUNT8
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2012
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX1

  • The strength of conservativity

    Open AccessTimothy Knowlton, John C Trueswell et al.ARTICLEProceedings of the Linguistic…2025

    One of the best-known semantic universals is determiner conservativity, roughly, the idea that the truth of sentences like most fish swim depends only on the things named by the determiner’s first argument (fish). Conservativity has been argued to reflect a fundamental property of grammatical architecture, a conclusion bolstered by evidence that adults (and children) can pair novel determiners with conservative meanings but not with minimally-dif…

  • Thematic Content, Not Number Matching, Drives Syntactic Bootstrapping

    Open AccessLaurel Perkins, Timothy Knowlton et al.ARTICLELanguage Learning and Development2025

    Children use correlations between the syntax of a clause and the meaning of its predicate to draw inferences about word meanings. On one proposal, these inferences are underwritten by a structural similarity between syntactic and semantic representations: learners expect that the number of clause arguments exactly matches the number of participant roles in the event concept under which its referent is viewed. We argue against this proposal, and i…

  • Cross-linguistic comparisons on distributive universal quantification

    Open AccessShi-Zhe Huang, Timothy Knowlton et al.ARTICLEProceedings of the Linguistic…2024

    This paper discusses differences between each and every with regard to (a) pair-list readings; (b) subject/object asymmetries seen with every but not with each; and (c) the long-held intuition that each is more individualistic whereas every is friendlier to groups. We propose that these phenomena can be captured by prior accounts of the Mandarin Chinese distributive universal quantifier mei. In particular, we consider the Double Variable Hypothes…

  • Keeping quantifier meaning in mind

    Open AccessTimothy Knowlton, John C Trueswell et al.ARTICLECognitive Psychology2023

  • Psycholinguistic evidence for restricted quantification

    Open AccessTimothy Knowlton, Paul Pietroski et al.ARTICLENatural Language Semantics2023References: 62

  • Linguistic and non-linguistic cues to acquiring the strong distributivity of each

    Open AccessTimothy Knowlton, Victor Gomes et al.ARTICLEProceedings of the Linguistic…2022

    The universal quantifier each is more strongly distributive than its counterparts every and all. It forces predicates to apply to individuals, it more often supports pair-list readings, it’s unfriendly to genericity, and, in psycholinguistic tasks, it encourages encoding and remembering individual properties. But what information leads learners to acquire this aspect of em>each’s meaning? We explore the hypothesis that, because of its meaning, pa…

  • The mental representation of universal quantifiers

    Open AccessTimothy Knowlton, Paul Pietroski et al.ARTICLELinguistics and Philosophy2022

  • Ethnicity, God Concepts, and the Indigenization of a Guatemalan Popular Saint

    Timothy W Knowlton, Timothy KnowltonARTICLEJournal of Anthropological Research2012Cited by: 2References: 15

    How do we understand debates regarding the ethnicity of supernatural agents in societies that have recently given rise to ethnic social movements? This article addresses this question through ethnographic research among indigenous and non-indigenous devotees of the popular saint San Simón in Guatemala's central highlands. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of the religious field and Taussig's history of mimesis and alterity, I note the ethnicity of sa…