Primitive Directionality and Diachronic Grounding

Optimality and diachronic adaptation

In this programmatic paper, I argue that the universal constraints of Optimality Theory (OT) need to be complemented by a theory of diachronic adaptation. OT constraints are traditionally stipulated as part of Universal Grammar, but this misses the generalization that the grammatical constraints normally correspond to constraints on language use. As in biology, observed adaptive patterns in lan...

Money Pumps, Diachronic and Synchronic

Diachronic Manuscript Registration and Visualization

This paper presents a software framework for the registration and visualization of layered image sets. To demonstrate the utility of these tools, we apply them to the St. Chad Gospels, relying on images of each page of the manuscript as it appeared over time. An automated registration pipeline is used to perform nonrigid registration on each series of images. To visualize the differences betwee...

Physical Emergence, Diachronic And Synchronic

This paper explicates two notions of emergence which are based on two ways of distinguishing levels of properties for dynamical systems. Once the levels are defined, the strategies of characterizing the relation of higher level to lower level properties as diachronic and synchronic emergence are the same. In each case, the higher level properties are said to be emergent if they are ‘novel’ or ‘...

Quasi-Primitive Rings and Density Theory