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The Lambek calculus with the unit can be defined as the atomic theory (algebraic logic) of the class of residuated monoids. This calculus, being a theory of a broader class of algebras than Heyting ones, is weaker than intuitionistic logic. Namely, it lacks structural rules: permutation, contraction, and weakening. We consider two extensions of the Lambek calculus with modalities—the exponential, under which all structural rules are permitted, and the relevant modality, under which only permutation and contraction rules are allowed. The Lambek calculus with a relevant modality is used in mathematical linguistics. Both calculi are algorithmically undecidable. We consider their fragments in which the modality is allowed to be applied to just formulas of Horn depth not greater than 1. We prove that these fragments are decidable and belong to the NP class. To show this, in the case of a relevant modality, we introduce a new notion of ℛ-total derivability in context-free grammars, i.e., existence of a derivation in which each rule is used at least a given number of times. It is stated that the ℛ-totality problem is NP-hard for context-free grammars. Also we pinpoint algorithmic complexity of ℛ-total derivability for more general classes of generative grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Technology and the Lifeworld (1990), Don Ihde advances what he calls "formalisms" for the ways in which we experience or relate to technology. In this article, I seek to clarify the grammar of Ihde's formalisms. Ihde's formalisms have not been the focus of scrutiny. Rather, they have largely been received in the literature as merely aphoristic or epigrammatical devices serving to clarify what can be explained in prose. My hypothesis is that Ihde's formalisms do not merely serve an epigrammatical function but rather admit of a generative grammar that extends his postphenomenological framework. I propose a notation that adheres to six rules of syntax that can be derived from Ihde's framework. I show that the proposed notation makes explicit the inter-relations among hidden dimensions of human–technology relations. Relying on my notation, I also suggest that the so-called cyborg turn is actually a turn away from the unharnessed syntax of Ihde's formalisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Generalized LR parsing algorithm for context-free grammars is notable for having a decent worst-case running time (cubic in the length of the input string, if implemented efficiently), as well as much better performance on 'good' grammars. This paper extends the Generalized LR algorithm to the case of 'grammars with left contexts' (M. Barash, A. Okhotin, 'An extension of context-free grammars with one-sided context specifications', Inform. Comput., 2014), which augment the context-free grammars with special operators for referring to the left context of the current substring, along with a conjunction operator (as in conjunctive grammars) for combining syntactical conditions. All usual components of the LR algorithm, such as the parsing table, shift and reduce actions, etc., are extended to handle the context operators. The resulting algorithm is applicable to any grammar with left contexts and has the same worst-case cubic-time performance as in the case of context-free grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Kuhnian and Post-Kuhnian Philosophy of Science, it is widely accepted that scientific revolutions always involve the replacement of an old paradigm by a new paradigm. This article attempts to refute this assumption by showing that there are paradigm-constellations that conform to the relation of a scientific revolution in a Kuhnian sense without a paradigm-replacement occurring. The paradigms investigated here are the linguistic paradigms of Generative Grammar and Construction Grammar that, contrary to Kuhn's conception of a sequence of paradigm-replacements, are reconstructed as coexisting competing paradigms. By choosing linguistic paradigms, Kuhn's assumption that paradigm-led research takes place only in the natural sciences is implicitly challenged, and an insight into linguistic theory-construction largely underrepresented in the philosophy of science is given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Built on the basis of the methods developed for Princeton WordNet and EuroWordNet, Arabic WordNet (AWN) has been an interesting project which combines WordNet structure compliance with Arabic particularities. In this paper, some AWN shortcomings related to coverage and usability are addressed. The use of AWN in question/answering (Q/A) helped us to deeply evaluate the resource from an experience-based perspective. Accordingly, an enrichment of AWN was built by semi-automatically extending its content. Indeed, existing approaches and/or resources developed for other languages were adapted and used for AWN. The experiments conducted in Arabic Q/A have shown an improvement of both AWN coverage as well as usability. Concerning coverage, a great amount of named entities extracted from YAGO were connected with corresponding AWN synsets. Also, a significant number of new verbs and nouns (including Broken Plural forms) were added. In terms of usability, thanks to the use of AWN, the performance for the AWN-based Q/A application registered an overall improvement with respect to the following three measures: accuracy (+9.27 % improvement), mean reciprocal rank (+3.6 improvement) and number of answered questions (+12.79 % improvement). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Picture naming shows a cumulative semantic interference effect: Latency for naming a target picture increases as a function of the number of pictures semantically similar to the target that have previously been named (Howard, Nickels, Coltheart, & Cole-Virtue, Cognition 100:464-482, ). Howard and colleagues, and also Oppenheim, Dell, and Schwartz (Cognition 114:227-252, ), argued that this occurs because of the joint presence in the picture-naming system of three critical properties: shared activation, priming, and competition. They also discussed the possibility that whenever any cognitive system possesses these three properties, a cumulative similarity-based interference effect from repeated use of that cognitive system will occur. We investigated this possibility by looking for a cumulative lexical interference effect when the task is reading aloud: Will the latency of reading a target word aloud increase as a function of the number of words orthographically/phonologically similar to the target that have previously been read aloud? We found that this was so. This supports the general idea that cumulative similarity-based interference effects will arise whenever any cognitive system that possesses the three key properties of shared activation, priming, and competition is repeatedly used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the extent to which parameters of environmental shape - namely the major and minor principal axes of space which pass through the centroid and approximate length and width of the entire space, respectively, were subject to similar psychophysical principles as those involved in distance discriminations. We developed an orientation task that allowed us to manipulate the ratio of the major to the minor principal axes of an enclosure during training and control for orientation by alternative cues other than principal axes such as wall lengths or corner angles during testing. Participants trained in an environment with a larger hypothetical discriminability ratio allocated more responses to locations specified by the principal axes of space across novel enclosure types compared to a group trained with a smaller hypothetical discriminability ratio. Results suggest that psychophysical principles may operate on the discrimination of environmental shape parameters and delineate a potential mechanism for experiential and developmental changes in orientation ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to correctly classify sentences that describe events is an important task for many natural language applications such as Question Answering (QA) and Text Summarisation. In this paper, we treat event detection as a sentence level text classification problem. Overall, we compare the performance of discriminative versus generative approaches to this task: namely, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier versus a Language Modeling (LM) approach. We also investigate a rule-based method that uses handcrafted lists of ‘trigger’ terms derived from WordNet. Two datasets are used in our experiments to test each approach on six different event types, i.e., Die, Attack, Injure, Meet, Transport and Charge-Indict. Our experimental results show that the trained SVM classifier significantly outperforms the simple rule-based system and language modeling approach on both datasets: ACE (F1 66% vs. 45% and 38%, respectively) and IBC (F1 92% vs. 88% and 74%, respectively). A detailed error analysis framework for the task is also provided which separates errors into different types: semantic, inference, continuous and trigger-less. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses varieties of German with respect to noun pluralisation, with a focus on the status of final plural schwa as in Fisch-e ‘fish, pl.’. By analysing the much-discussed plural morphology of Standard German by means of both prosodic as well as morphological principles, it is argued that final schwa in plural nouns of Standard German is not, as generally assumed, an inflectional suffix. As an alternative, an optimality-theoretic constraint-based analysis of final schwa in plurals leads to the proposal that this segment in noun plurals of Standard German arises as an inserted vowel, which is in turn the result of a specific constraint interaction. In the second part of this paper, related noun plurals are studied in a sample of diverse non-standard dialects of German. Morphological and prosodic constraints, through the well-known mechanism of differences in constraint-ranking in Optimality Theory, derive the (non-)appearance of word-final plural schwas in these dialects which are minimally different from Standard German and from each other. The constraints will include those which refer to properties of whole paradigms of word forms, not just to phonological properties of individual words. As an overall descriptive result, a micro-typology of plural formation in varieties of German emerges, and the prosodic phonology of German is demonstrated to play a crucial role in the formation of word forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In three experiments, we explored the basis of adults' judgments of individual object persistence through transformation. Participants watched scenarios in which an object underwent a transformation into an object belonging to the same or a different basic-level kind. Participants were queried about the object's persistence through the transformation as an individual (indexed by its proper name) and as a member of the original kind (indexed by its basic-level count noun in Experiments 1 and 2, or by its superordinate-level noun in Experiment 3). In all experiments, participants rated objects that were altered in a way that maintained basic-level kind to be less likely to retain their proper name than those that were altered in a way that changed basic-level kind. These findings suggest that shared basic-level kind membership serves as a dimension of similarity over which objects' unique individual identities are highlighted. We discuss the implications of the results for existing theoretical accounts of adults' judgments of individual object persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participants were 2 typically developing children, aged 9 and 10 years, and 1 child, aged 4 years, with a reported severe speech delay. Five specific mand functions were trained such that participants learned to mand for the delivery or removal of tokens to the value of -2, -1, 0, +1, and +2, by presenting an arbitrary stimulus (A1, A2, A3, A4, and A5, respectively). The A stimuli were then incorporated into a series of interrelated conditional discriminations (A1-B1, B1-C1, A2-B2, B2-C2, A3-B3, B3-C3, A4-B4, B4-C4, A5-B5, B5-C5). Subsequent tests determined if participants derived 5 specific mands, presenting C1, C2, C3, C4, and C5 as mands for -2, -1, 0, +1 and +2 tokens. Three participants demonstrated derived manding, and derived manding altered in accordance with newly trained relations across two reversal procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  It is shown that a rectangular ungrounded current-bearing loop can be used for the metrological certification of electromagnetic search systems designed to locate and examine underground conductors. Criteria are formulated for choosing the sizes of such loops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  Design principles are considered for a data-acquisition system for the physicochemical composition and properties of substances. General principles are formulated for synthesizing a system with the required economic parameters no matter what the purpose or the area of application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recursive descent parsing method for the context-free grammars is extended for their generalization, Boolean grammars, which include explicit set-theoretic operations in the formalism of rules and which are formally defined by language equations. The algorithm is applicable to a subset of Boolean grammars. The complexity of a direct implementation varies between linear and exponential, while memoization keeps it down to linear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting the hypothesis that both NP-movement of subjects and scrambling of objects are instances of A-movement, this article aims at accounting for the similarities and differences between these movements within the so-called derivation-and-evaluation framework, which combines certain aspects from the minimalist program and optimality theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that Early Modern Dutch allowed pro drop, despite the fact that the language has only poor agreement. This provides a direct counterexample to the standard view that Italian-style pro drop is subject to a condition of grammatical recoverability (in that the features of pro must be indexed on the verb). However, pro drop in Early Modern Dutch is subject to very strict pragmatic conditions, and this, we argue, does follow from the lack of rich agreement. Basing ourselves on Mira Ariel’s Accessibility Theory, we argue that if fewer features of an omitted subject are grammatically recoverable, its antecedent must be more salient in discourse. Consequently, there is an indirect relation between rich agreement and pro drop: rich agreement facilitates pro drop in more contexts. Since a very limited distribution of pro drop implies that the rule is vulnerable in diachronic development, the familiar cross-linguistic generalization can be derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reynolds and Besner (2005) presented a computational account of six effects that emerge when readers are asked to pronounce pseudohomophones (nonwords—e.g., brane—that sound like words when pronounced). In the dual route cascaded (DRC) model of reading, they varied a parameter controlling the rate of inhibition from letter units to the orthographic lexicon to mimic strategic control over the extent of specific lexical processing. In this article, we provide an account in which the effects are simulated by varying the DRC's reading-aloud criterion—a parameter that sets the minimal level of phonemic activation required to pronounce a letter string. We show that varying this parameter provides another means of controlling lexical contributions to reading aloud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partly due to disagreement on acceptability judgements, there is little agreement on the possibility of PP-internal and DP-internal focus particles in languages such as Dutch, English, and German. Our large-scale corpus investigation reveals that PP-internal focus particles are a genuine possibility, not only in English, but also in Dutch and, to a lesser extent, German. These results seem to be incompatible with a number of existing syntactic theories of bound focus in German. However, our investigation also provides evidence for a strong dispreference for focus particles to follow a preposition, although the dispreference is less strong in Dutch than in German. Qualitative analysis of the corpus data shows that the variational patterns found in English, Dutch, and German are highly similar, and are influenced by lexical-semantic as well as syntactic factors. We sketch an alternative analysis, couched in the framework of stochastic Optimality Theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a demonstration by Parks (1983) of failure to notice the reflection ofa letter of an inverted word, two experiments were conducted to test a hypothesis about the process of recognizing inverted words that is termed here invariant cues only (ICO)-a letter-by-letter identification process based only on orientation-invariant letter features. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented with whole strings-words and nonwords, either upright or inverted-in which either all the letters were normal or one of the letters was reflected, and they were asked to make lexical decisions In Experiment 2, subjects made a reflection judgment about an upright or inverted letter within a string immediately after they had been presented with the other, nonreflected string letters, again either upright or inverted. The results do not support the ICO hypothesis: Lexical decisions were greatly affected by the reflection of a letter in upright and inverted stimuli alike. Reflection judgments were considerably facilitated by word context in the upright and the inverted modes alike. The results are accommodated better by the notion that recognition of disoriented words requires some correction used to restore orientation-sensitive features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the introduction of the X-bar principles in syntax it is commonly assumed that adpositions are complement-taking heads of PPs. While this treatment is well motivated for many adpositions in many languages, there are some which – in some of their uses – would be better treated as nonhead daughters of verbal or nominal projections. These exceptional adpositions, which I will henceforth call 'minor', are the central topic of the article: I will provide criteria for their identification, propose a detailed treatment of the constructions which contain them, and address the question of whether they form a natural class. The wider significance of the analysis consists in the evidence which it provides against the wide-spread practice of treating function words as heads of phrasal projections. This practice, which is mainly associated with Chomsky (1986) and which has led to the postulation of a plethora of functional projections, including CP, DetP, and InflP, is not well suited to a treatment of the minor adpositions and should be replaced with an alternative in which these adpositions are treated as functor daughters in verbal or nominal projections. The analysis draws on various types of descriptive and formal grammar, as well as on corpus-based research, but the format in which it is cast is the constraint-based lexicalist one of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar; see Pollard and Sag (1994). A brief introduction to the HPSG notation is provided in section 2.2. The exemplification will be based on Dutch, but at various points comparisons will be made with English and German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In five experiments, we examined lexical competition effects using the phonological priming paradigm in a shadowing task. Experiments lA and lB replicate and extend Slowiaczek and Hamburger's (1992) observation that inhibitory effects occur when the prime and the target share the first three phonemes (e.g., /bRiz/--/bRik/) but not when they share the first two phonemes (e.g,,/bR∊z/-/bRik/). This observation suggests that lexical competition depends on the length of the phonological match between the prime and the target. However, Experiment 2 revealed that an overlap of two phonemes is sufficient to cause an inhibitory effect provided that the primes mismatched the targets only on the last phoneme (e.g.,/bol/-/bot/). Conversely, with a three-phoneme overlap, no inhibition was observed in Experiment 3 when the primes mismatched the targets on the last two phonemes (e.g., /bag∊t//bagaz/). In Experiment 4, an inhibitory effect was again observed when the primes mismatched the targets on the last phoneme but not when they mismatched the targets on the last two phonemes when the time between the offset of overlapping segments in the primes and the onset of overlapping segments in the targets was controlled for. The data thus indicate that what essentially determines prime-target competition effects in word-form priming is the number of mismatching phonemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Korean Combinatory Categorial Grammar (KCCG) is an extended combinatory categorial grammar formalism to capture the syntax and interpretation of a ``relative free'' word order, long distance scrambling, and other specific characteristics of Korean. KCCG formalism can uniformly handle word order variations among arguments and adjuncts within a clause, as well as in complex clauses and across clause boundaries, i.e. long distance scrambling. The approach we develop takes advantage of the ability of CCG for type raising and composition along with the ability of variable categories and unordered argument modeling for relatively free word order treatment (Lee et al., 1994; Lee et al., 1997). We apply a probability model and heuristics using Korean characteristics to our KCCG parser. Results of the experiments on various text genre show that the KCCG parser performs at 87.67/87.03% constituent precision/recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates genitive compounds, a special type of NN compound found in West Frisian and some other languages/dialects on the North Sea littoral. Genitive compounds show a number of properties distinguishing them from normal NN compounds, the most striking of which is the obligatory definiteness/specificity of their first element and, as a consequence, of the compound as a whole. These properties can be accounted for if genitive compounds are analyzed as phrases moving towards word status. Historically they derive from the Old Frisian prenominal genitive construction, and it is shown that they still are a kind of prenominal genitive construction today, albeit heavily lexicalized, i.e., subject to lexical principles and containing specifically lexical elements. Since some of the phrasal elements in genitive compounds do not occur in syntax proper and since their definiteness produces a blocking effect on normal NN compounds, they seem to provide evidence for the concept of lexical phrases, potentially productive phrasal patterns in the lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. Synchronized extension systems (SE-systems, for short) are 4-tuples G = (V, L[sub 1], L[sub 2], S), where V is an alphabet and L[sub 1], L[sub 2] and S are languages over V. They generate languages extending L[sub 1] by L[sub 2] to the left or to the right, and synchronizing on words in S. Such systems appear naturally when considering stacks, queues, grammar-like generative devices, splicing systems, zigzag-codes etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes minimalism and truth-value gaps. Minimalism about truth has two parts, one negative and one positive. It is tempting to start with an attempt to characterize the negative. The author's aim here is to find a middle path, a compromise that sees the best in both positions. On one side there are the compatibilists who hold that one can quite consistently embrace a minimalist theory of truth, whilst isolating a set of meaningful declarative sentences which do not have truth-values. Opposed to them are the incompatibilists. The incompatibilists hold that once one accepts a minimalist account of truth, one is forced to say that all the meaningful declarative sentences possess truth-values.

The Baysian Iterated Learning approach to language is consistent with generative grammar, but needs to be supplemented with specific cognitive constraints for empirical adequacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]