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The paper aims to compare musical language with verbal language, creating a new perspective on music and natural language. The three categories of linguistics, phonology, syntax and semantics are analyzed. Bernstein highlights the analogies between the linguistic categories and music, researching the same three components of linguistics in music. The possibility of applying the transformational grammar procedures to the musical text is studied. In the second part of the paper, the authors investigate the method of analysis based on harmony and counterpoint, differentiating several structural levels conceived by the theoretical musician H. Schenker. Schenkerian analyzes are a relatively recent appearance in the field of musical analysis, which proposes as an innovation in the field of musical analysis the structural vision of musical discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the framework of Generative Grammar, a standard (hypo)thesis has been that a (broad) wh-parameter may distinguish between two types of languages: those that front wh-elements (e.g., English) and those that realize them in situ (e.g., Chinese). Wh-fronting languages may also attest in situ arrangements, and a tacit (hypo)thesis, tied to the one above, is that in situ configurations translate to echo questions, while fronting configurations are genuine (information-seeking) questions. Neat as this taxonomy might look like, more recently it has been shown that, in Modem Greek, which is a typically wh-fronting language, each wh-configuration may map to either meaning. On the assumption that syntax mediates between form and meaning, mapping the former to the latter, the question that the Modern Greek evidence raises is to what extent syntax regulates the form-meaning associations under consideration. In other words, the question is "how much" of the relevant semantics is registered in the corresponding syntactic structures. Capitalizing on already documented evidence from distribution, interpretation, and intonation, the present paper argues that syntax encodes certain aspects of the relevant semantics, and pans out a formal system that attributes other aspects of this semantics to a direct interaction between PF and LF, thereby recognizing the existence of this interface area. The theoretical import(ance) of this analysis (part of which is prefigured elsewhere) is that it revisits the standard organization of the Grammar, as viewed from a Minimalist perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

. 'GSGM' builds no syntactic structures; rather, semantics and morphosyntax are both generative and run in parallel, and so have no need of mediating syntactic structure. In this environment, positing different modes of embedding for NPs and clauses, as in Williams 2003, affords new minimal accounts of movement, scope, agreement, and the bounds on them. Syntax/morphosyntax is instantiated as a single parameterized function ('Combine'). Combine derives both mirroring and nonmirroring structure, as any theory must, but in distinctive 'size-relative' patterns determined by its parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Chomskyan generative grammar has long been committed to the ‘double-interface’ assumption that the faculty of language (FL) serves two interfaces, PF and LF, and correlatively that expressions have phonological and semantic properties. The paper argues this gives rise to (a) a grounding problem for syntax – i.e. for the interpretable content of syntax – and (b) a problem for the assumption that FL is a generative computation. It is argued these problems are resolved if we think of syntax as grounded exclusively in semantic/conceptual properties. Since this implies that FL is phonology-free, it is argued that FL should not be distinguished from a generative computation describable as ‘the language of thought’ (LOT). The paper explores to what extent this (FL=LOT) thesis is consistent with Chomsky''s thinking. Chomsky''s recent work can be seen as pointing in that direction but it is not consistent with the double-interface assumption, which he continues to regard as conceptually necessary. In the light of discussion of the issues, the paper concludes with a speculation on the role of phonology in human cognition and its evolution. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this article I examine ditransitive verbs that can describe caused possession (e.g. give, throw, send) by looking at their lexical aspectual properties, a methodology that has proved fruitful for the exploration of (in)transitive verbs. I show that as a whole these ditransitives share a number of aspectual properties in common with (in)transitive verbs of change of state and motion, suggesting a single shared underlying analysis, which I outline in terms of the scalar analysis of change of Beavers (forthcoming b). However, a difficulty of such an analysis is that for many ditransitives, the putative result state (caused possession) is cancellable, which complicates how factors such as telicity are calculated on most models of aspect. To account for this, I show that all ditransitives nonetheless entail at least some non-cancellable result, though there is considerable micro-variation in what that result is. The result is an aspectually based classification of ditransitives quite similar to previously proposed classes of (in)transitives. I also show that the analysis I develop may shed some light on why certain classes of ditransitives only rarely participate in the dative alternation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Term-based summarization assumes that it is possible to determine the importance of a sentence on the basis of the words it contains. To achieve this, words are weighted using term-weighting measures which in turn are used to weight the sentences. This article presents a comparative evaluation of summaries produced using different term-weighting measures and different combinations of parameters which are used to calculate these measures. Comparative evaluation of summaries produced reveals that in many cases simple methods such as term frequency can produce informative summaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the systematic description of the most productive particle, which has been used in English phrasal verb construction "up" and aims to possibly highlight all possible ambiguity. Accordingly, the particle "up" appears to be used most of the time, as an intensifier or as an aspect marker, which is said to have changed the activity into one of accomplishment and has the chance to be deleted in almost 40% of the cases being scrutinized. It is being concluded that the subcategorization refinements would help mitigate ambiguity that involves English phrasal verbs and that some uncertainty still remains, when the ambiguity involves subject commutation.

Adger (2006) claims that the Minimalist Program provides a suitable theoretical framework for analysing at least one example of inherent variability: the variation between was and were after you and we in the Scottish town of Buckie. Drawing on the feature analysis of pronouns and the assumption that lexical items normally have equal probabilities, his analysis provides two 'routes' to we/you was, but only one to we/you were, thereby explaining why the former is on average twice as common as the latter. This comment points out four serious flaws in his argument: it ignores important interactions among sex, age and subject pronoun; hardly any social groups actually show the predicted average 2:1 ratio; there is no general tendency for lexical items to have equal probability of being used; the effects of the subject may be better stated in terms of the lexemes you and we rather than as semantic features. The conclusion is that inherent variability supports a usage-based theory rather than Minimalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cappelen & Lepore (2005, 2006a, 2007) note that linguistic communication requires 'shared content' and claim that Relevance Theory makes content sharing impossible. This criticism rests upon two important errors. The first is a flawed understanding of Relevance Theory, shown in the application of an omniscient third party perspective to parts of Relevance Theory that depend only upon subjective judgements made by the addressee of an utterance. The second is confusion about different definitions of content. Cappelen & Lepore's evidence actually involves the communication of what they term Speech Act content, which need not be perfectly 'shared' according to their own position. Looking beyond this flawed criticism, a general comparison of Relevance Theory with Cappelen & Lepore's semantic minimalism reveals significant parallels, pointing to a notable convergence of two distinct approaches - one cognitive-pragmatic, the other philosophical-semantic - on the rejection of currently dominant assumptions in linguistic semantics. The key remaining difference is Cappelen & Lepore's claim that shared content is propositional. This contradicts other claims made for such content and in any case plays no active role in the explanation of communication. Cappelen & Lepore's position thus poses no threat to Relevance Theory; rather, Relevance Theory can benefit from their philosophical analysis of the state of semantic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The two versions of the connectionist model of Dell and colleagues offer alternative explanations of aphasic naming disorders (Dell, Schwartz, Martin, Saffran, & Gagnon, 1997; Foygel & Dell, 2000). The semantic-phonological (SP) model hypothesises impairments in lexical-semantic or lexical-phonological connections, and the weight-decay (WD) model assumes global impairments in either connection weights or activation decay. In each version, a patient's error pattern in picture naming is simulated to assess the underlying disorder (connectionist "diagnosis"). A systematic comparison of both model versions in model-oriented naming therapy has not yet been performed. Moreover, if the normalisation of the error pattern during recovery is lesion-specific, as suggested in the SP model (Schwartz, Dell, Martin, Gahl, & Sobel, 2006), this should be observable in the patient data. Aims: Predictions were made and tested regarding the relation between (1) connectionist diagnosis and therapy outcome, and (2) connectionist diagnosis and error pattern development. For example, patients with phonological disorders in the SP model should (1) benefit more from phonological as compared to semantic therapy, and (2) present a decrease of nonwords in their naming responses. Methods & Procedures: The connectionist diagnosis and a 4-week therapy with cueing hierarchies (Howard, 2000; Wambaugh et al., 2001) were administered to 10 German-speaking aphasic patients with naming disorders. Six patients, who had been diagnosed by the SP model, received semantic and phonological therapy. The other four patients, diagnosed by the WD model, received increasing and vanishing therapy (Abel, Schultz, Radermacher, Willmes, & Huber, 2005). Outcomes & Results: Cueing therapy was generally effective for 9 of 10 patients. The trend of improvement was always found in the direction predicted by the connectionist diagnosis, except for two patients diagnosed by the SP model who presented a numerical trend in the opposite direction. Nevertheless, the SP model offered a more plausible explanation of lesion-specific therapy outcomes, and it properly predicted the error pattern development. Moreover, the errorless learning procedure applied in vanishing therapy was favourable for patients with phonological (SP model) or weight (WD model) lesions, and this may be attributed to their characteristic error types and an impairment of editorial processes. Conclusions: Models can be informative about the effectiveness of potential therapies and error pattern developments. Data from therapy studies can test competing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, control in generative grammar has fallen within the province of syntactic theory. One primary reason for this is that Mainstream Generative Grammar (MGG) has imposed a strong uniformity criterion on analyses as a measure of their explanatory adequacy. One aspect of this uniformity criterion, which we call Interface Uniformity, holds that the syntax-semantics interface is maximally simple, in that meaning maps transparently into syntactic structure, and that it is maximally uniform, so that the same meaning always maps into the same syntactic structure. It follows from Interface Uniformity that a nonfinite VP has a syntactic subject that is assigned its external θ-role. We argue that this view is most sustainable if one does not take into account the full richness and complexity of control phenomena, but treats control strictly in terms of complementation. When a fuller range of phenomena is taken into account, it appears that it is preferable to "turn over control" to the semantics, which is better equipped to capture the facts. We outline how to formulate the syntax-semantics interface so as to get the semantic facts to line up properly with the syntactic facts. This analysis of the interface extends naturally to raising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is it preferable to say "salt and pepper" over "pepper and salt?" Based on an analysis of 692 binomial tokens from online corpora, we show that a number of semantic, metrical, and frequency constraints contribute significantly to ordering preferences, overshadowing the phonological factors that have traditionally been considered important. The ordering of binomials exhibits a considerable amount of variation. For example, although "principal and interest" is the more frequent order, "interest and principal" also occurs. We consider three frameworks for analysis of this variation: traditional optimality theory, stochastic optimality theory, and logistic regression. Our best models—using logistic regression—predict 79.2% of the binomial tokens and 76.7% of types, and the remainder are predicted as less frequent—but not ungrammatical—variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present an experiment dealing with corpus-based construction of “differential ontologies”, which are organised according to semantic similarity and differential features. We argue that knowledge-rich defining contexts can be useful to help an ontology modeller in his task. We present a method, based on lexico-syntactic patterns, to spot such contexts in a corpus, then identify the terms they relate (definiendum and genus or “characteristics”) and the semantic relation that links them. We also show how potential co-hyponyms can be detected on the basis of shared words in their definiens. We evaluate the extracted defining sentences, semantic relations and co-hyponyms on a test corpus focusing on childhood and on an evaluation corpus about dietetics (both corpora are French). Definition extraction obtains 50% precision and recall of approximately 40%. Semantic relation identification reaches an average of 48% precision, and co-hyponyms 23.5%. We discuss the results of these experiments and conclude on perspectives for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a theory of the meaning-form relation based on ranked and violable constraints [A. Prince, P. Smolensky, 1993. Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and University of Colorado, Boulder], using the English genitive construction as a testing ground. Our main thesis is that partially ordered optimality-theoretic grammars allow us to relate four apparently independent empirical phenomena: (i) categorical grammaticality contrasts; (ii) variation and preferences in expression; (iii) ambiguity and preferences in interpretation; (iv) lexical organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this study is to reintegrate the theory of generative grammar into the cognitive sciences. Generative grammar was right to focus on the child's acquisition of language as its central problem, leading to the hypothesis of an innate Universal Grammar. However, generative grammar was mistaken in assuming that the syntactic component is the sole course of combinatoriality, and that everything else is "interpretive." The proper approach is a parallel architecture, in which phonology, syntax, and semantics are autonomous generative systems linked by interface components. The parallel architecture leads to an integration within linguistics, and to a far better integration with the rest of cognitive neuroscience. It fits naturally into the larger architecture of the mind/brain and permits a properly mentalistic theory of semantics. It results in a view of linguistic performance in which the rules of grammar are directly involved in processing. Finally, it leads to a natural account of the incremental evolution of the language capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article talks about universal semantic primitives as a basis for lexical semantics. It notes that the semantic system of a language is like a set of Lego blocks, of different shapes and sizes. The meanings of words are like objects constructed out of various Lego blocks. The purpose of lexical semantics is to study such objects, to deconstruct them into their constitutive building blocks, and to seek generalizations about the different types of building blocks and different ways of putting them together. The main difficulty of lexical semantics is that while it needs a solid foundation in the form of well justified semantic primitives, no set of such primitives is given at the outset, rather, the primitives themselves must be found through large-scale lexicographic investigations, both monolingual and cross-linguistic. This double task of finding the primitives via lexicographic description and basing lexicographic description on the primitives may seem self-contradictory and thus impossible to accomplish.

The article highlights the workshop on Computational and Computer-Assisted Terminology on May 25, 2005 in Lisbon, Portugal. The major themes discussed in the workshop were term extraction, semantic relation extraction, and terminology and knowledge organization and management. It also reflected the increasing development of terminological tools in a variety of languages.