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Abstract Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their conceptual representations, children lack the processing skills to immediately individuate entities in a given domain, or children cannot readily access relevant linguistic alternatives for the target count noun. We advance a new account, appealing to theoretical proposals about underspecification in nominal semantics and the role of the discourse context. Our results demonstrate that there are limits to which children allow partial objects to serve as wholes, and that under certain conditions, adult performance resembles that of children by allowing in partial objects. We propose that children's behavior is in fact licensed by the inherent context dependence of count nouns. 

Asking questions is a fundamental aspect of human nature. Languages all around the world encode interrogative constructions. It is therefore incumbent upon semanticists to capture the meaning of questions. However, achieving this goal faces a challenge under a truth conditional approach to meaning, since questions cannot easily be assigned a truth value. Moreover, it is not sufficient to focus only on the questions themselves; one must also determine what counts as a felicitous and informative answer, and how this relates to a speaker's intention in posing a question in a discourse context. How then do semanticists approach an investigation of questions? In this article, we present the core issues inherent to question‐answer dynamics, review the main approaches to question‐answer meaning, highlight how questions are situated in a discourse context, and explore extensions of questions that highlight the connection between semantics, pragmatics, and human reasoning.