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This article gives an explanation of how recent results on ambiguity logics are relevant to the linguistic and philosophical theory of ambiguity. To this aim, some fundamental definitions and results are explained. We formulate and provide evidence for three main hypotheses: Firstly, ambiguity is not a vague notion. Secondly, in (explicit) reasoning with ambiguity, we always have to consider the parameter ±trust. Thirdly, ambiguous propositions exist, but they cannot have the same rights and properties as unambiguous propositions; rather they should be considered "second class". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that bilingual speakers may be more tolerant to ambiguity, they might perceive situations of ambiguity more interesting, challenging and desirable (e.g., Dewaele & Li, 2013). To our knowledge, no data are available addressing the question whether the language in use can have an effect on the personality trait of tolerance of ambiguity (ToA). This study investigated whether and how reading statements in a second language (L2), as opposed to the native language (L1), affects ToA. 387 Italian–English bilingual adults completed a questionnaire measuring levels of ToA either in English or Italian. Results revealed that processing information in L2 promoted higher scores of ToA overall and in sentences that were related to challenging perspectives and change. Age, gender and L2 proficiency were significant predictors of higher ToA scores. This study offers new evidence that processing information in a L2 can affect tolerance of ambiguous situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The talmudic narrative about a gentile who approaches Shammai and Hillel desiring to be taught the entire Torah "on one foot" (bShab 31a) has been claimed to be based on a bilingual (Hebrew-Latin) pun. This short-form essay examines this claim and demonstrates that the double entendre may be more elaborate than has been argued in the past, and may involve three languages rather than two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some words have more than one translation across languages. Such translation-ambiguous words are harder to learn, recognize, and produce for individuals across the language learning spectrum. Past research demonstrates that learning both translations of translation-ambiguous words on consecutive trials confers an accuracy advantage relative to learning them on separate sessions. We tested the proposal that presenting the two translations of translation-ambiguous words simultaneously on the screen could facilitate the formation of a more integrated mapping, because this would enable learners to make direct comparisons between them, whether implicitly or explicitly. We predicted that this facilitation would especially hold for translation-ambiguous words with related translations. Fifty native English speakers learned 48 German words with one or two translations that varied in the meaning similarity of their translations. Paired associate training took place on a Monday, and a first language (L1) to second language (L2) translation production test took place on Wednesday and Friday. Generally, higher translation similarity facilitated translation speed. In accuracy, training condition interacted with the similarity of the translations; translation accuracy was more affected by translation similarity in the simultaneous condition and went up as similarity increased. Overall, the consecutive condition demonstrated higher accuracy and faster reaction times than the simultaneous training condition, suggesting that learners may have been unable to successfully divide their study time between multiple words on the screen without explicit instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates native (L1) and second language (L2) processing of scope ambiguities in English sentences containing the universal quantifier every in subject NP and negation. Previous studies in L1 and L2 processing of scope ambiguities have found speakers to generally employ a 'minimal effort' principle that highly prefers the surface scope reading regardless of contextual support because accessing the inverse scope reading incurs significant processing cost. The present study compared L1 and L2 scope judgments and processing strategies of sentences such as Every horse didn't jump over the fence and examined whether the two groups differ in their speed and manner of analysis. Thirty native English speakers and 42 Korean learners of English participated in a self-paced reading/interpretation task that has context (ambiguous vs. unambiguous) and scope reading (surface vs. inverse) as variables. The results revealed significant differences in scope endorsement rates with L2 learners arriving at the surface scope as the dominant reading and L1 learners' judgments being highly dependent on contextual ambiguity. Moreover, L1 vs. L2 differences in processing strategies were found: L2 learners exhibited a strong tendency to arrive at the most economical interpretation while L1 speakers consulted detailed syntactic and semantic rules of computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive conflict is regarded as a crucial factor in triggering subsequent adjustments in cognitive control. Recent studies have suggested that the implementation of control following conflict detection might be domain-general in that conflict experienced in the language domain recruits control processes that deal with conflict experienced in non-linguistic domains. During language comprehension, humans often have to recover from conflicting interpretations as quickly and accurately as possible. In this study, we investigate how people adapt to conflict experienced during processing semantically ambiguous sentences. Experiments 1 to 3 investigated whether such semantic conflict produces the congruency sequence effect (CSE) within a subsequent manual Stroop task and whether Stroop conflict leads to adjustments in semantic processing. Experiments 4 to 6 investigated whether semantic conflict results in conflict adaptation in subsequent sentence processing. Although processing conflict was consistently experienced during sentence reading and in the Stroop task, we did not observe any within-task or cross-task adaptation effects. Specifically, there were no cross-task CSEs from the linguistic task to the Stroop task and vice versa (experiments 1–3)—speaking against the assumption of domain-general control mechanisms. Moreover, experiencing conflict within a semantically ambiguous sentence did not ease the processing of a subsequent ambiguous sentence (experiments 4–6). Implications of these findings will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adults often learn new meanings for familiar words, and in doing so they must integrate information about the newly-acquired meanings with existing knowledge about the prior meanings of the words in their mental lexicon. Numerous studies have confirmed the importance of sleep for learning novel word forms (e.g., "cathedruke") either with or without associated meanings. By teaching participants new meanings for familiar word forms, this is the first study to focus exclusively on the specific role of sleep on learning word meanings. In two experiments participants were trained on new meanings for familiar words through a naturalistic story reading paradigm to minimize explicit learning strategies. Experiment 1 confirmed the benefit of sleep for recall and recognition of word meanings, with better retention after 12 hours including overnight sleep than 12 hours awake. Experiment 2, which was preregistered, further explored this sleep benefit. Recall performance was best in the condition in which participants slept immediately after exposure and were tested soon after they woke up, compared with three conditions which all included an extended period of wake during which they would encounter their normal language environment. The results are consistent with the view that, at least under these learning conditions, a benefit of sleep arises due to passive protection from linguistic interference while asleep, rather than being due to active consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India, most of the Science and Technology resources available are in English. Developing an Automatic Language Translation Engine from English (source language) to Tamil (target language) is very essential for the people who need to get technical resources in their native language. The challenges in designing such engines using Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools include Lexical, Structural, and Syntax level ambiguity. To solve these challenges, the development of a Part- Of-Speech (POS) tagger is essential. The Verb-Framed languages like Tamil, Japanese, and many languages in Romance, Semitic, and Mayan languages families have high morphological richness but lack either a large volume of annotated corpora or manually constructed linguistic resources for building POS tagger. Moreover, the Tamil Language has a low resource, high word sense ambiguity, and word-free order form giving rise to challenges in designing Tamil POS taggers. In this paper, we postulate a Hybrid POS tagger algorithm for Tamil Language using Cross-Lingual Transformation Learning Techniques. It is a novel Mining-based algorithm (MT), which finds equivalent words of Tamil in English on less volume of English- Tamil bilingual unannotated parallel corpus. To enhance the performance of MT, we developed Tamil language-specific auxiliary algorithms such as Keyword-based tagging algorithm (KT) and Verb pattern-based tagging algorithm (VT). We also developed a Unique pair occurrence-tagging algorithm (UT) to find the one-time occurrence of Tamil-English pair words. Our experiments show that by improving Context-based Bilingual Corpus to Bilingual parallel corpus and after leaving onetime occurrence words, the proposed Hybrid POS tagger can predict 81.15% words, with 73.51% accuracy and 90.50% precision. Evaluations prove our algorithms can generate language resources, which can improve the performance of NLP tasks in Tamil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the hypothesis of parameters for the expression of comparison and degree constructions discussing data from Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Beck et alii (2009) and Beck, Oda and Sugisaki (2004) propose three parameters: i) the language has degree predicates (DSP -- Degree Structure Parameter); ii) the language has or does not have binding of degree variables in the syntax (DAP -Degree Abstraction Parameter); and iii) the language has a syntactic degree argument filled (DegPP -- Degree Phrase Parameter). Languages with negative setting in the DSP do not show any degree construction at all, especially comparative constructions with an expression like "more". The DAP explains structures with binding of degree variables in the syntax, like comparative clauses with scope ambiguities. At last, there is the impossibility of filling the syntactic degree argument of gradable adjectives with measure phrases (cf. *2 metros alto/2 meters tall). This fact is explained by a negative setting in the DegPP. It is shown that BP receives positive setting in the first ones but negative setting in the last. It is also discussed degree interrogatives and measure phrases like 2 metros de altura "2 meters of height". The paper concludes that these structures should be better discussed to understand their place in the degree parameter hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the computability and complexity of decision questions for Probabilistic Finite Automata (PFA) with sub-exponential ambiguity. We show that the emptiness problem for strict and non-strict cut-points of polynomially ambiguous commutative PFA remains undecidable, implying that the problem is undecidable when inputs are from a letter monotonic language. We show that the problem remains undecidable over a binary input alphabet when the input word is over a bounded language, in the noncommutative case. In doing so, we introduce a new technique based upon the Turakainen construction of a PFA from a Weighted Finite Automaton which can be used to generate PFA of lower dimensions and of sub-exponential ambiguity. We also study freeness/injectivity problems for polynomially ambiguous PFA and study the border of decidability and tractability for various cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines interactional management practices and narrative co-construction in lawyer-asylum seeker consultations in Flanders, Belgium. Drawing upon linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork, it presents a case study of a consultation between an Afghan applicant for international protection, his adviser, and his lawyer. The purpose of the consultation is to prepare the applicant for testifying at the upcoming asylum hearing. Data analysis focuses on (i) the reorientation of the asylum narrative from an authentic-experiential towards a more objectified formal-institutional account; (ii) the participants' positioning work that indexes this reorientation process; and (iii) their fluctuating alignment of local-interactional and translocal-gatekeeping perspectives. In the discussion, we analyse the consultation in terms of competing legal and experiential voices and views on participant roles/responsibilities. We reflect on how this ambiguity of roles and ideologies relates to the constructed character of credibility, which reveals the importance of adequate legal assistance in this linguistically challenging context. (Legal consultations, asylum procedure, linguistic ethnography, narrative performance, credibility assessment) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word vector representations enable machines to encode human language for spoken language understanding and processing. Confusion2vec, motivated from human speech production and perception, is a word vector representation which encodes ambiguities present in human spoken language in addition to semantics and syntactic information. Confusion2vec provides a robust spoken language representation by considering inherent human language ambiguities. In this paper, we propose a novel word vector space estimation by unsupervised learning on lattices output by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. We encode each word in Confusion2vec vector space by its constituent subword character n-grams. We show that the subword encoding helps better represent the acoustic perceptual ambiguities in human spoken language via information modeled on lattice-structured ASR output. The usefulness of the proposed Confusion2vec representation is evaluated using analogy and word similarity tasks designed for assessing semantic, syntactic and acoustic word relations. We also show the benefits of subword modeling for acoustic ambiguity representation on the task of spoken language intent detection. The results significantly outperform existing word vector representations when evaluated on erroneous ASR outputs, providing improvements up-to 13.12% relative to previous state-of-the-art in intent detection on ATIS benchmark dataset. We demonstrate that Confusion2vec subword modeling eliminates the need for retraining/adapting the natural language understanding models on ASR transcripts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a growing body of theoretical work on the music of George Crumb, surprisingly little has been said about his use of rhythm and metre, elements which are often more aurally accessible than complex pitch structures and which constitute a recognisable aspect of Crumb's style. Much of Crumb's output is characterised by a unique combination of metric ambiguity with clear and often recurrent rhythmic gestures whose use and juxtaposition creates varying levels of metricity. A significant portion of his music can then be situated in the middle of a spectrum that ranges from completely non-metrical to clearly metrical. The result is a unique rhythmic language that stringently avoids large-scale metrical structures but makes frequent use of localised metrical gestures and brief moments of metrical emergence. These rhythmic and metric structures are then used in different ways to create a range of temporal and formal effects. This paper focuses on the rhythmic and metric characteristics of motives from several pieces by George Crumb. Emphasis will be placed on a particularly interesting case in the final movement from Crumb's Vox Balaenae, where the repetition and shifting musical context of a small set of rhythmic motives results in a process of metrical emergence and dissolution that contributes to the arch form of the piece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Research on how patients with Broca's aphasia and concomitant agrammatism process dependency structures online offers a window into the understanding of how language is organized in the mind. Previous studies have shown that patients evince differential performances on dependency structures generated at different levels of linguistic representation. The present study extends this line of research to investigate patients' online processing of referential dependencies involving ambiguous pronominal interpretations. Aims: Mandarin, unlike English, allows the object to be missing (null) in some contexts, rendering these null pronominal forms as ambiguous between two interpretations (strict vs. sloppy), which are generated in different levels of linguistic representation. This study examined Mandarin-speaking healthy and agrammatic aphasic participants' processing of the two interpretations of the null pronominal form such as Zhangsan qile ta de ma, Lisi ye qile e "literally: Zhangsan rode his horse and Lisi rode, too", where Lisi rode either Zhangsan's horse (strict) or Lisi's horse (sloppy). Methods & Procedures: Two experiments, employing a Cross-Modal Picture Priming paradigm, manipulated three probe picture conditions (strict, sloppy, control) and two probe positions (at the verb phrase offset and 400 ms afterwards). Experiment 1 tested neurologically unimpaired controls in order to establish the time course of processing as a standard of comparison. Experiment 2 tested patients with agrammatic aphasia. Outcomes and Results: Immediately at the verb phrase offset where the null object is structurally licensed, unimpaired individuals primed both the strict and the sloppy interpretations, with no significant difference in reaction times between the two conditions. At the position 400 ms after the verb phrase offset; however, unimpaired participants did not show priming of either of the two interpretations. Patients showed the opposite pattern: at verb phrase offset, they did not show threshold-level priming of either of the two interpretations; 400 ms afterwards, they showed priming of both the strict and sloppy interpretations, with the strict interpretation eliciting significantly longer reaction times than the sloppy interpretation. Conclusions: Patients' delay in priming both the strict and the sloppy interpretations shows that patients evince a temporal delay when processing dependency structures, which may arise from patients' deficit with lexical integration. Additionally, patients spent significantly longer reaction times on the strict interpretation relative to the sloppy interpretation, which confirms the prediction that that the former, which is generated in the level of discourse, is computationally more costly than the latter, which is generated in the level of semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of cultural literacy as a dialogic social practice celebrates alternative perspectives. Navigating multiple perspectives in dialogue requires high 'tolerance of ambiguity' characterised by a positive, open and flexible attitude towards uncertainty. This article aims to explore how provisional language is used in classroom dialogue to enact tolerance of ambiguity and its associated democratic behaviours. It draws on data collected as part of a larger European-funded project in which children and young people used wordless texts as springboards to engage in discussions about cultural themes. We report findings from an in-depth qualitative analysis of two lessons (for 9-10-year-olds and 13-14-year-olds) chosen due to their use of provisional language and focus on multiple perspectives. We explore how the social element of provisional language enables students to enact key democratic behaviours as they learn to navigate multiple perspectives in small peer-group learning contexts. We find that teacher modelling and dual objectives in promoting such language are central to creating a safe dialogic space with inherent democratic potential that is not bound by solution-seeking goals. We consider the pedagogical implications of this by problematising the role of dialogue in enacting democratic behaviours through a critical exploration of the concept of 'voice'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law is a social-normative and linguistic phenomenon. For this reason it shares the characteristic of indeterminacy with language. The main manifestations of linguistic indeterminacy are ambiguity and vagueness, hence the need to resort to interpretation as the main tool for applying the Law. There are various theories on legal interpretation, as well as methods or interpretative canons to identify those interpretations that are valid, excluding arbitrary or irrational ones. In this article we have carried out a brief examination of the characteristic features of current law, the indeterminacy of law, legal interpretation and interpretive canons, as well as the main theories that have been proposed on the subject, to end by developing the interpretation criteria included in the Civil Code, in light of the doctrinal contributions found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I am going to analyze and criticize the proposal for conceptualizing the defeasibility of rules and the defeasibility of principles in the theses of Manuel Atienza and Juan Ruiz Manero. For this purpose, I will carry out a brief critical reconstruction of their proposal of distinction in order to indicate in a concise, clear and precise way how they understand the defeasibility of prescriptive norms. I will do that for the purpose of justifiying three points: a) the defeat of rules is better understood as a reinterpretative process of legal material; b) defeating rules is not equivalent to defeating principles; and c) the language of rules and principles presents the same operations and results as the language of recalcitrant experiences and axiological gaps, only that, unlike these, the first of the languages presupposes a prescriptive claim about how the language of the legal material should be understood. To achieve this objective, I will take the following steps: in section II, I will present critically the distinction between rules and principles, the notion of licit and illicit atypical act, and what it means to say that rules are resistant to principles. In section III, I will present that the reconstructed thesis suffer from ambiguity when they develop the notion of defeasibility. They present, on the one hand, a problem of superability between norms and, on the other, a problem of apparent relevance of a norm to solve an individual case. Likewise, I will offer a proposal to reformulate the defeat of rules from the theory of interpretation. Finally, I will end by showing that the language of rules and principles presupposes a normative thesis about how norms should be identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central thesis of the paper – that the seriously disordered patient's use of language is central to retrieving and containing split-off and dissociated aspects of mental life – is taken up in this discussion both with respect to its possible clinical utility and as a broader critique of contemporary trends in clinical theory. Certain questions are raised regarding the ambiguity inherent in our relation to language, the importance of shared perceptual and speech patterns in setting up a basis for linguistic communication, and the constant search for new ways to use words in the clinical situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bu makalenin temel amacı, Allah'ı bilmenin imkânı ve O'nun hakkında konuşmanın sınırlarını dile getirmeye çalışan alternatif bir yaklaşımı ortaya koymaktır. Düşünce tarihi içerisinde Tanrı hakkında dile getirilen ve birbirinden farklı unsurlara işaret eden pek çok anlayış bulunmaktadır. Metafizik boyutu ilgilendiren hususların dilin sınırları çerçevesinde ifade edilmesindeki zorluk, bu yaklaşımların büyük oranda eksiklikler taşımasına neden olmuştur. Ancak anlama ve ifade etme faaliyetlerinde, bütün alternatiflerin dikkate alınması elzem görünmektedir. Böylece, herhangi bir ifadede karşılaşılan sorunlar, bir diğerinin vasıtasıyla kısmen de olsa giderilebilir. Kimi çağdaş düşünürlerin belirttiği gibi, İslam düşünce geleneği zengin birikimiyle, salt ibarelerin bir tekrarı olmanın ötesine geçirilebildiği ve ilham verici yönleri ön plana çıkarıldığı zaman çağdaş dönemdeki anlamlandırmalara ciddi katkılar yapma potansiyeli taşımaktadır. Yine de özellikle böyle bir konuda her sorunun çözülmesinin bir garantisinin bulunmadığını belirtmek gerekir. Bu bağlamda, çalışmanın ilk aşamasında İslam düşünce ekolleri içerisinde önemli bir yere sahip olan ve irfan geleneğinin temsilcilerinden biri olarak kabul edilen Molla Sadrâ'nın görüşleri üzerine odaklanılmış ve onun ontolojik yaklaşımlarının çerçevesi belirlenmeye çalışılmıştır. Böyle bir temellendirmenin gerekçesi, ontoloji ile epistemoloji arasındaki derin ilişkinin vurgulanması ve Sadrâ'nın bu konudaki hassasiyetinin ve üslubundaki maharetin tespit edilmesidir. Varlığı asıl kabul eden ve bütün sistemini bu düşünce üzerine konumlandıran Sadrâ'nın bu sürecin sonunda ulaştığı nihai gerçek, Allah hakkında tenzihî bir dilin kullanılmasının zorunlu olduğu ifadesidir. Bu noktada onun kendisinden önceki dönemlerde böyle bir dili kullanan düşünürlerden ciddi bir şekilde etkilenmekle birlikte, özgün olarak nitelendirilebilecek yanlarıyla dikkat çekici bir düşünür olduğu gösterilmeye çalışılmıştır. Ö zellikle onun felsefe, kelam ve tasavvufun tartıştığı konuların kesişim noktasında yer alması ve ahenkli bir yapı inşa etme gayreti büyük bir önem arz etmektedir. Dolayısıyla çalışmanın ilk başlığı Sadrâ'nın tenzihî dilinin dayanaklarını ve çerçevesini içermektedir. Ö zellikle teşbihî dilin doğurduğu sorunların kapsamlı bir şekilde dile getirilmesi ve temsilî dilde aşırıya kaçmanın hakikati yansıtmaktan uzaklaşmaya yaptığı etkiye dair eleştirileri dikkate değer görünmektedir. Ardından, insanların varlık alanına girişlerinden tekrar Gerçek Varlığa dönüşlerine kadar geçirdikleri bilişsel süreç irdelenmiştir. Böylece Sadrâ'nın varlık anlayışı ile bilgi anlayışı arasındaki bağ daha açık bir şekilde ortaya konulmaya çalışılmış; varlıktaki ve insani boyuttaki hiyerarşik yapılanmaya dair söylemleri üzerinde durulmuştur. The main purpose of this article is to put forward an alternative approach that tries to express the possibility of knowing Allah and the limits of talking about him. In the history of thought, there are many ideas expressed about God that point to different elements. The difficulty in expressing issues related to the metaphysical dimension within the boundaries of language has caused these approaches to be largely incomplete. However, it seems essential to consider all alternatives in comprehension and expression activities. Thus, the deficiencies encountered in any statement can be partially corrected by the means of another. As some contemporary thinkers have noted, the İslamic tradition of thought, with its rich experience, has the potential to make serious contributions to meaning in the modern era, when it can go beyond simply repeating phrases and its inspirational aspects are brought to the fore. However, it should be noted that there is no guarantee that every problem will be solved, especially in such a matter. İn this context, at the first stage of the study, the views of Mullah Sadra, who has an important place in İslamic thought schools and who is accepted as one of the representatives of the tradition of knowledge, were focused on and the framework of his ontological approaches were tried to be determined. The rationale for such a justification is to emphasize the deep relationship between ontology and epistemology and to determine the sensitivity and skill of Sadra on this issue. The ultimate truth that Sadra, who accepts existence and positions his entire system on this thought, reached at the end of this process, is the statement that the use of an apophatic language about Allah is mandatory. At this point, it was tried to show that although he was seriously influenced by the thinkers who used such a language in the previous periods, he was a remarkable thinker with his unique aspects. İt has great importance that he is located at the intersection of the topics discussed especially by philosophy, theology and Sufism, and his effort to build a harmonious structure. Therefore, the first title of the work includes the foundations and framework of Sadra's apophatic language. Particularly, his criticisms of the comprehensive articulation of the problems caused by the simile language and the effect of excessive exaggeration in the representational language on moving away from reflecting the truth seem noteworthy. Then, the cognitive process that people go through from their entry into the realm of being to their return to the real being is examined. Thus, the connection between Sadra's understanding of existence and understanding of knowledge was tried to be put forward more clearly, in other words his discourses on the hierarchical structuring in existence and human dimension are emphasized. İt is possible to understand this hierarchy as a tightly linked chain that reflects divine wisdom. Although Sadra argues that apophatic language is finite, he is aware that one cannot remain completely silent about Allah. For this reason, in the third stage of the study, the opinions of Sadra about the bases such as text (nass), wisdom, science and unveiling (muqâshafah) on which people can utilize while talking about Allah are discussed. İn this respect, his thoughts can be seen as an important alternative for approaches that both completely ignore the hierarchy of existence and deny the special position of the human being in the world, and ignore the ties that facilitate a better understanding of the relationship between beings. İn the last part, how the representative language that people necessarily use can be used is examined in the context of the approaches expressed by Sadra. İn this way, in the last two stages, it was attempted to show how the existence and knowledge focused on the first two stages affect the boundaries of discourse. Throughout the study, the works of Sadra, especially Esfar, were taken as a central reference and in order to make more in-depth analysis of some subjects, it was tried to benefit from the sources that have increased in number and published in Turkish in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is shown that for every language family that is a trio containing only semilinear languages, all bounded languages in it can be accepted by one-way deterministic reversal-bounded multicounter machines (DCM). This implies that for every semilinear trio (where these properties are effective), it is possible to decide containment, equivalence, and disjointness concerning its bounded languages. A condition is also provided for when the bounded languages in a semilinear trio coincide exactly with those accepted by DCM machines, and it is used to show that many grammar systems of finite index — such as finite-index matrix grammars (M fin) and finite-index ET0L (ET0L fin) — have identical bounded languages as DCM. Then connections between ambiguity, counting regularity, and commutative regularity are made, as many machines and grammars that are unambiguous can only generate/accept counting regular or commutatively regular languages. Thus, such a system that can generate/accept a non-counting regular or non-commutatively regular language implies the existence of inherently ambiguous languages over that system. In addition, it is shown that every language generated by an unambiguous M fin has a rational characteristic series in commutative variables, and is counting regular. This result plus the connections are used to demonstrate that the grammar systems M fin and ET0L fin can generate inherently ambiguous languages (over their grammars), as do several machine models. It is also shown that all bounded languages generated by these two grammar systems (those in any semilinear trio) can be generated unambiguously within the systems. Finally, conditions on M fin and ET0L fin languages implying commutative regularity are obtained. In particular, it is shown that every finite-index ED0L language is commutatively regular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Restrictive contextual information has been found to bias syntactic disambiguation, when only one alternative leads to a meaningful interpretation. The current study tests whether disambiguation can be influenced by nonrestrictive cues – when several alternatives are equally plausible. We first evaluated if modifier number biased the disambiguation of number- and case-ambiguous nouns in Basque. In a noun phrase comprehension paradigm, ambiguous noun number judgments were biased by preceding modifier number. Then, using a preamble completion paradigm, we examined whether headnoun disambiguation and thus sentence completion was also biased by modifier number. Our results suggest that nonrestrictive information (singular and plural number) can affect disambiguation. We also report task differences in the overall interpretation of ambiguous Basque nouns, as well modifier-induced agreement errors. We suggest that the parser uses any available context information when there is ambiguity, including preceding modifier markings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns have been expressed over standards of statistical interpretation. Results with P <0.05 are often referred to as 'significant' which, in plain English, implies important. This leads some people directly into the misconception that this provides proof that associations are clinically relevant. There are calls for statistics educators to respond to these concerns. This article provides novel plain English interpretations that are designed to deepen understanding. Experience teaching postgraduates at Imperial College is discussed. A key issue with focusing on 'significance' is the common inappropriate practice of implying no association exists, simply because P >0.05. Referring to strengths of association in 'study participants' gives them gravitas, which may help to avoid this. This contrasts with the common practice of focusing on imprecision, by referring to the 'sample' and to 'point estimates'. Unlike formal statistical definitions, interpretations developed and presented here are rooted in the application of statistics. They are based on one set of study participants (not many random samples). Precision of strengths of association are based on using strengths in study participants to estimate strengths of association in the population (from which participants were selected by probability random sampling). Reference to 'compatibility with study data, dependent on statistical modelling assumptions' reminds us of the importance of data quality and modelling assumptions. A straightforward graph shows the relationship between P-values and test statistics. This figure and associated interpretations were developed to illuminate the continuous nature of P-values. This is designed to discourage focus on whether P <0.05, and encourage interpretation of exact P-values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay attempts to explore the links between politics, poetry, and collective, embodied readings and discussion in the classroom. When my Year 12 class were asked 'What is Poetry?', their answers suggested something in the Romantic tradition – of poetry as expressive, individual and emotional. My experience studying poetry with my Year 9 class suggests something altogether different – that studying poetry allows students to have an embodied and collective reading. In the sense that politics concerns the control of bodies, poetry allows the class to read in an embodied sense, thus politically, in a way that assessment criteria and the demands of high-stakes testing, with their focus on individual understanding, do not. Thus, I argue for the study of poetry as essential in terms of recognising students' political agency – not primarily as exam-takers but as citizens of a country and an Earth they will, to put it grandly, inherit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their diversity, languages around the world share a consistent set of properties and distributional regularities. For example, the distribution of word frequencies, the distribution of syntactic dependency lengths, and the presence of ambiguity are all remarkably consistent across languages. We discuss a framework for studying how these system‐level properties emerge from local, in‐the‐moment interactions of rational, pragmatic speakers and listeners. To do so, we derive a novel objective function for measuring the communicative efficiency of linguistic systems in terms of the interactions of speakers and listeners. We examine the behavior of this objective in a series of simulations focusing on the communicative function of ambiguity in language. These simulations suggest that rational pragmatic agents will produce communicatively efficient systems and that interactions between such agents provide a framework for examining efficient properties of language structure and use more broadly. Despite their diversity, human languages share consistent properties and regularities. Wherefrom does this consistency arise? And does it tell us something about the problem that all languages need to solve? The authors provide an intriguing analyses which focuses on the "communicative function of ambiguity" whose resolution entailed an equally intriguing "speaker–listener cross‐entropy objective for measuring the efficiency of linguistic systems from first principles of efficient language use." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the class REC of recognizable picture languages, UREC its unambiguous variant and co-REC the complement class of REC. The aim of this paper is two-fold: First, the paper focuses on some necessary conditions for a language to be recognizable. Such conditions have already been identified in several works [1–5]. Here, we revisit them in the light of communication complexity arguments. Second, we use communication complexity measures in order to construct a language which is a recognizable and co-recognizable language but not an unambiguous one. This answers a question raised in [6]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined eye movements and comprehension of temporary syntactic ambiguities in individuals with dyslexia, as few studies have focused on sentence-level comprehension in dyslexia. We tested 50 participants with dyslexia and 50 typically developing controls, in order to investigate (a) whether dyslexics have difficulty revising temporary syntactic misinterpretations and (b) underlying cognitive factors (i.e., working memory and processing speed) associated with eye movement differences and comprehension failures. In the sentence comprehension task, participants read subordinate-main structures that were either ambiguous or unambiguous, and we also manipulated the type of verb contained in the subordinate clause (i.e., reflexive or optionally transitive). Results showed a main effect of group on comprehension, in which individuals with dyslexia showed poorer comprehension than typically developing readers. In addition, participants with dyslexia showed longer total reading times on the disambiguating region of syntactically ambiguous sentences. With respect to cognitive factors, working memory was more associated with group differences than was processing speed. Conclusions focus on sentence-level syntactic processing issues in dyslexia (a previously under-researched area) and the relationship between online and offline measures of syntactic ambiguity resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In linguistics and in the philosophy of language it is standardly assumed that know is a factive verb, meaning that a sentence such as X knows that p , when uttered in its positive declarative form, presupposes, in fact entails, the truth of its complement. A problem for this analysis is the fact that the verb know can be used non-factively in contexts where it is evident that the proposition expressed by the subordinate clause is not true. In order to account for non-factive uses of know , two main solutions have been advanced in the literature. Hazlett (2009, 2010, 2012) proposes that know is not semantically factive and a sentence such as X knows that p does not entail, but only pragmatically implies p. On the other hand, Tsohatzidis (2012) argues that know is lexically ambiguous between a factive and a non-factive sense: when know is used in its factive sense, a sentence such as X knows that p entails p , whereas, when know occurs in its non-factive sense, it does not. As shown in recent works by Colonna Dahlman (2015, 2016, 2017b), the phenomenon at issue—the possibility for a speaker to use know in cases where the proposition expressed by the clause embedded under 'knows' is not true—is not unique to English, but occurs, for instance, also in Italian. We carried out a Truth Judgment Task to test the hypothesis that the Italian lexical item 'sa' (' knows ') is ambiguous. Our findings are consistent with the lexical ambiguity hypothesis, and cannot be explained by Hazlett's pragmatic solution. Highlights • Italian sapere is lexically ambiguous between a factive and a non-factive sense. • The results of a Truth Judgment Task confirm the lexical ambiguity hypothesis. • Our findings are not compatible with the predictions outlined by a pragmatic view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that there is nothing "differential" in the licensing conditions of Differential Object Marking and outlines an analysis that unifies dom with dative object marking and with a broader set of "derived object"-marking configurations. We show that neither morphological nor syntactic distinctiveness can be the driving force for dom: accounts of dom as a morphological distinctiveness device are inadequate diachronically and very unefficient functionally. Syntactic analyses that postulate DP-internal differences or construction-specific double-licensing conditions fail to capture the basic fact that dom is a relation between the objects and the predicates selecting them. Precisely, the burden of our unified explanation falls on the checking requirements imposed to the DP complements by the structural heads selecting them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication in cross-disciplinary (and thus in inter- , multi- and transdisciplinary ) projects is frequently challenged by problematically ambiguous terms (henceforth ‘PATs’), i.e. terms that have multiple meanings and for which it is not always clear what meaning is used, thereby generating communication problems. The reason why communication in cross-disciplinary projects is so sensitive to PATs, is that they often involve disciplines that share one or more terms, yet attribute different meanings to them in an implicit and/or unsystematic manner. The teams of such projects are in need of a PAT resolution procedure , i.e. a procedure that helps them to identify and resolve PATs, as they are generally not trained to do this themselves. A first attempt to provide such a procedure consists in the identification of existing candidate procedures and an evaluation of their capacity to resolve PATs in cross-disciplinary communication contexts using a new set of task and performance criteria. It is shown that none of them sufficiently meets all criteria. It also becomes clear that the realization of an efficient PAT resolution procedure requires the ability to automatically process large quantities of linguistic data. Hence, input from the field of applied (computational) linguistics seems necessary. With this need for automation in mind and against the background of the new set of task and performance criteria, a theoretical characterisation of a new PAT resolution procedure called ‘SenseDisclosure’ is presented. SenseDisclosure is meant to be applicable to all kinds of cross-disciplinary projects (by an external facilitator). Its characterisation incorporates multiple techniques from Natural Language Processing to realize several critical automations. As the techniques were not specifically developed for PAT resolution, some of them require further research and development before they can be reliably integrated. Finally, it is argued that, if this extra research and development yields positive results, SenseDisclosure can be a truly effective PAT resolution procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper demonstrates the non-closure of the family of unambiguous linear languages (that is, those defined by unambiguous linear context-free grammars) under complementation. To be precise, a particular unambiguous linear grammar is presented, and it is proved that the complement of this language is not defined by any context-free grammar. This also constitutes an alternative proof for the result of Hibbard and Ullian ("The independence of inherent ambiguity from complementedness among context-free languages", JACM , 1966) on the non-closure of the unambiguous languages under complementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple (simple) context-free tree grammars are investigated, where “simple” means “linear and nondeleting”. Every multiple context-free tree grammar that is finitely ambiguous can be lexicalized; i.e., it can be transformed into an equivalent one (generating the same tree language) in which each rule of the grammar contains a lexical symbol. Due to this transformation, the rank of the nonterminals increases at most by 1, and the multiplicity (or fan-out) of the grammar increases at most by the maximal rank of the lexical symbols; in particular, the multiplicity does not increase when all lexical symbols have rank 0. Multiple context-free tree grammars have the same tree generating power as multi-component tree adjoining grammars (provided the latter can use a root-marker). Moreover, every multi-component tree adjoining grammar that is finitely ambiguous can be lexicalized. Multiple context-free tree grammars have the same string generating power as multiple context-free (string) grammars and polynomial time parsing algorithms. A tree language can be generated by a multiple context-free tree grammar if and only if it is the image of a regular tree language under a deterministic finite-copying macro tree transducer. Multiple context-free tree grammars can be used as a synchronous translation device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speech carries accent information relevant to determining the speaker’s linguistic and social background. A series of web-based experiments demonstrate that accent cues can modulate access to word meaning. In Experiments 1–3, British participants were more likely to retrieve the American dominant meaning (e.g., hat meaning of “bonnet”) in a word association task if they heard the words in an American than a British accent. In addition, results from a speeded semantic decision task (Experiment 4) and sentence comprehension task (Experiment 5) confirm that accent modulates on-line meaning retrieval such that comprehension of ambiguous words is easier when the relevant word meaning is dominant in the speaker’s dialect. Critically, neutral-accent speech items, created by morphing British- and American-accented recordings, were interpreted in a similar way to accented words when embedded in a context of accented words (Experiment 2). This finding indicates that listeners do not use accent to guide meaning retrieval on a word-by-word basis; instead they use accent information to determine the dialectic identity of a speaker and then use their experience of that dialect to guide meaning access for all words spoken by that person. These results motivate a speaker-model account of spoken word recognition in which comprehenders determine key characteristics of their interlocutor and use this knowledge to guide word meaning access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The commitment of the European Union to promulgate laws in 24 equally authentic versions brings with it a set of daunting challenges. Among them are the risk that one's own native language version may be rejected by the courts as inconsistent with other versions, or with the law's purpose, creating a problem of inadequate notice of one's legal rights and obligations, the impossibility of complete equivalence of meaning across languages, and the risk that some language versions will, over time receive preferential treatment. In principle, however, the goal of retaining the members' cultural identity by recognizing Europe's linguistic diversity is a lofty one. This article acknowledges many of the risks that multilingual legislation carries with it, but argues further that the simultaneous enactment of laws in many languages reduces the risk of linguistic gamesmanship in construing the laws, increasing the likelihood that courts will construe laws consistent with their purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss responses to their paper about the inclusion of interactive language use within the remit of grammars. Topics covered include the debate over split utterances, factors influencing linguistic creativity, and differentiating between ambiguity and underspecification. Also mentioned are Dynamic Syntax (DS) procedures, the development and change of child or adult grammars in interaction with other agents, and the viability of DS as a grammar formalism.

To successfully comprehend a sentence that contains a homonym, readers must select the ambiguous word's context-appropriate meaning. The outcome of this process is influenced both by top-down contextual support and bottom-up, word-specific characteristics. We examined how these factors jointly affect the neural signatures of lexical ambiguity resolution. We measured the similarity between multi-voxel patterns evoked by the same homonym in two distinct linguistic contexts: once after subjects read sentences that biased interpretation toward each homonym's most frequent, dominant meaning, and again after interpretation was biased toward a weaker, subordinate meaning. We predicted that, following a subordinate-biasing context, the dominant yet inappropriate meaning would nevertheless compete for activation, manifesting in increased similarity between the neural patterns evoked by the two word meanings. In left anterior temporal lobe (ATL), degree of within-word pattern similarity was positively predicted by the association strength of each homonym's dominant meaning. Further, within-word pattern similarity in left ATL was negatively predicted by item-specific responses in a region of left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) sensitive to semantic conflict. These findings have implications for psycholinguistic models of lexical ambiguity resolution, and for the role of left VLPFC function during this process. Moreover, these findings demonstrate the utility of item-level, similarity-based analyses of fMRI data for our understanding of competition between co-activated word meanings during language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical ambiguity is pervasive in language, and often systematic. For instance, the Spanish word dedo can refer to a toe or a finger, that is, these two meanings colexify in Spanish; and they do so as well in over one hundred other languages. Previous work shows that related meanings are more likely to colexify. This is attributed to cognitive pressure towards simplicity in language, as it makes lexicons easier to learn and use. The present study examines the interplay between this pressure and the competing pressure for languages to support accurate information transfer. We hypothesize that colexification follows a Goldilocks principle that balances the two pressures: meanings are more likely to attach to the same word when they are related to an optimal degree-neither too much, nor too little. We find support for this principle in data from over 1200 languages and 1400 meanings. Our results thus suggest that universal forces shape the lexicons of natural languages. More broadly, they contribute to the growing body of evidence suggesting that languages evolve to strike a balance between competing functional and cognitive pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human languages evolve to make communication more efficient. But efficiency creates trade-offs: what is efficient for speakers is not always efficient for comprehenders. How do languages balance these competing pressures? We focus on Zipf's meaning-frequency law, the observation that frequent wordforms have more meanings. On the one hand, this law could reflect a speaker-oriented pressure to reuse frequent wordforms. Yet human languages still maintain thousands of distinct wordforms, suggesting a countervailing, comprehender-oriented pressure. What balance of these pressures produces Zipf's meaning-frequency law? Using a neutral baseline, we find that frequent wordforms in real lexica have fewer homophones than predicted by their phonotactic structure: real lexica favor a comprehender-oriented pressure to reduce the cost of frequent disambiguation. These results help clarify the evolutionary drive for efficiency: human languages are subject to competing pressures for efficient communication, the relative magnitudes of which reveal how individual-level cognitive constraints shape languages over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humor plays an essential role in human interactions. Precisely what makes something funny, however, remains elusive. While research on natural language understanding has made significant advancements in recent years, there has been little direct integration of humor research with computational models of language understanding. In this paper, we propose two information-theoretic measures-ambiguity and distinctiveness-derived from a simple model of sentence processing. We test these measures on a set of puns and regular sentences and show that they correlate significantly with human judgments of funniness. Moreover, within a set of puns, the distinctiveness measure distinguishes exceptionally funny puns from mediocre ones. Our work is the first, to our knowledge, to integrate a computational model of general language understanding and humor theory to quantitatively predict humor at a fine-grained level. We present it as an example of a framework for applying models of language processing to understand higher level linguistic and cognitive phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on concern regarding relationship between reality and language for understanding belongingness of uncertainty in novels of author Javier Marías. Topics discussed include presence of ambiguity in plot of stories written by him, vary in perception of truth which depends on occurrence of events and ever presence element of uncertainty in Maria's fiction which is created through number of reflections.

Category ambiguous words (like hug and swing ) have the potential to complicate both learning and processing of language. However, uses of such words may be disambiguated by acoustic differences that depend on the category of use. This article uses an event-related potential (ERP) technique to ask whether adult native speakers of English show neural sensitivity to those differences. The results indicate that noun and verb tokens of ambiguous words produce differences in the amplitude of the ERP response over left anterior sites as early as 100 ms following stimulus onset and persisting for over 400 ms. Nonsense words extracted from noun and verb contexts do not show such differences. These findings suggest that the acoustic differences between noun and verb tokens of ambiguous words are perceived and processed by adults and may be part of the lexical representation of the word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human language defines the most complex outcomes of evolution. The emergence of such an elaborated form of communication allowed humans to create extremely structured societies and manage symbols at different levels including, among others, semantics. All linguistic levels have to deal with an astronomic combinatorial potential that stems from the recursive nature of languages. This recursiveness is indeed a key defining trait. However, not all words are equally combined nor frequent. In breaking the symmetry between less and more often used and between less and more meaning-bearing units, universal scaling laws arise. Such laws, common to all human languages, appear on different stages from word inventories to networks of interacting words. Among these seemingly universal traits exhibited by language networks, ambiguity appears to be a specially relevant component. Ambiguity is avoided in most computational approaches to language processing, and yet it seems to be a crucial element of language architecture. Here we review the evidence both from language network architecture and from theoretical reasonings based on a least effort argument. Ambiguity is shown to play an essential role in providing a source of language efficiency, and is likely to be an inevitable byproduct of network growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the problem of legal vagueness in Islamic legal hermeneutics. In particular, it examines al-Risāla's (attributed to al-Šāfi'ī) approach to use language as an argument for the clarity of legal discourse. It argues that ambiguity, although recognized as a legal hermeneutic problem, was not tolerated within Islamic legal discourse. It also makes the case that al-Risāla's stance develops early reverse pragmatics or pragmatics-for-apologetics in Islamic legal theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been a growing consensus that speakers store large numbers of preconstructed phrases and low-level patterns, even when these can be derived from more abstract constructions, and that ordinary language use relies heavily on such relatively concrete, lexically specific units rather than abstract rules or schemas that apply 'across the board'. One of the advantages of such an approach is that it provides a straightforward explanation of how grammar can be learned from the input; and in fact, previous work (e.g. Dąbrowska and Lieven 2005) has demonstrated that the utterances children produce can be derived by superimposing and juxtaposing lexically specific units derived directly from utterances that they had previously experienced. This paper argues that such a 'recycling' account can also explain adults' ability to produce complex fluent speech in real time, and explores the implications of such a view for theories of language representation and processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present study was to identify general and syndrome-specific deficits in the lexical processing of individuals with non-fluent and fluent aphasia compared to individuals without cognitive, neurological or language impairments. The time course of lexical access, as well as lexical selection and integration was studied using a visual-world paradigm in three groups of Russian speakers: 36 individuals in the control group, 15 individuals with non-fluent aphasia and eight individuals with fluent aphasia. Participants listened to temporarily ambiguous sentences wherein the context biased the interpretation of an ambiguous word toward one of its two meanings. In half of the experimental sentences, a reanalysis was needed upon encountering the disambiguating phrase. The effect of the length of the intervening material between the ambiguous word and the disambiguation point was additionally monitored. All groups of participants showed intact lexical access under slowed speech rate, but non-fluent participants experienced difficulties with timely activation of multiple referents. At later stages of lexical processing, they additionally demonstrated a specific impairment of reanalysis. The deficit in participants with fluent aphasia was not focalized at any specific stage of lexical processing. Rather, the breakdown of lexical processes in fluent aphasia was likely related to difficulties with the inhibition of irrelevant lexical activation, which is further supported by the finding that increased phonological distance between the ambiguous word and ambiguity resolution was influential to the offline performance in this group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Recent findings suggest that the right hemisphere plays a key role when readers comprehend figurative language. However, it is currently unclear how specific types of figurative language, such as idioms (e.g., “to bury the hatchet”), are processed in the right and left cerebral hemispheres. Prior research suggests that a reader's previous exposure to an idiomatic phrase (i.e., the level of familiarity) and the plausibility of an idiom (i.e., the level of ambiguity) influence how idioms are processed. To investigate how familiarity influences the hemispheric processing of idioms (Experiment 1), participants read texts containing familiar or less familiar idioms and made lexical decisions to related target words presented to the left visual field-right hemisphere or to the right visual field-left hemisphere. To investigate how ambiguity influences the hemispheric processing of idioms (Experiment 2), participants read texts containing high or low ambiguity idioms and completed a lexical decision task to related target words presented to each visual field-hemisphere. For both familiar and less familiar idioms, greater facilitation was evident in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere. Additionally, greater facilitation was evident in the left hemisphere for low ambiguity idioms than for high ambiguity idioms, and greater facilitation was evident in the right hemisphere for high ambiguity idioms than for low ambiguity idioms. These findings suggest that the right hemisphere has an advantage when readers process ambiguous idioms, whereas the left hemisphere has an advantage when readers process low ambiguity idioms, and both familiar and less familiar idioms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In the multinational corporation (MNC) context the crossing of linguistic boundaries and the fast-paced change of linguistic ecologies due to market trends and new business activities is the rule rather than the exception. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to discuss language policy and language practice in one consortium of three multinational companies and to problematise the extent to which the dynamics of language use are reflected in the companies' language policy. The paper draws on interview and questionnaire data and discusses the employees' perceptions of language practices in their workplace context and the perceived implications of the companies' official policy. The analysis shows that the language policy in these MNCs is constructed as beingflexiblewhere both employees and managers typically take a ‘what works’ approach regarding language practice. Special attention is paid here to the use of local languages in relation to English which is the official working language. The analysis shows that employees construct multilingualism as a ‘given reality’ and as an ‘opportunity’ and foreground the social aspect of non-L1 language use in the workplace. The paper closes by problematising the concept ofde jurelanguage policy and its strategic (non)implementation in the case discussed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Second language (L2) learners have been found to experience difficulty in tasks that require the integration of discourse–pragmatic properties with syntactic and semantic properties (Sorace and Serratrice, 2009; Tsimpli and Sorace, 2006; Valenzuela, 2006). The present article investigates the sources of L2 difficulty in a phenomenon where multiple components of linguistic analysis are involved. The study examines L1-Korean L2-English adult learners’ interpretation of English sentences with the universally quantified object NP (every NP) and negation using an offline contextualized acceptability judgment task. The results suggest that the sources of L2 variability reflect L2 adults’ focus on content and meaning access and L1 transfer of interpretive preferences in initial to intermediate stages of acquisition but are replaced by the difficulty of integrating L2 pragmatic properties with other aspects of linguistic analysis in the advanced stages, a difficulty which can nevertheless be overcome in ultimate attainment. The study posits pragmatic information to be one of the last considerations for L2 learners when multiple types of information need to be integrated to calculate meaning despite the fact that L2 adults possess mature cognitive mechanisms and pragmatic abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]