American Sign Language famously disambiguates pronoun antecedents with the use of space. In ASL, both referential and quantificational NPs can be signed at different locations (‘loci’) in the signing space. Pronouns can later retrieve these NPs by pointing at the same locus. Many analyses of ASL pronouns assume that these spatial loci are the overt realization of formal variables (Lillo-Martin ...

The scalar particle mo in Japanese gives rise to ambiguity in negative contexts. In this paper we argue that the ambiguity cannot be accounted for as a scopal ambiguity, and propose a lexical ambiguity account. In particular, we observe that the distribution of the small reading of mo is limited to a subset of NPI licensing environments, and is sensitive to presuppositions, from which we conclu...

Consider the following choice problem, known as “Ellsberg’s three-color urn example”, or simply the “Ellsberg Paradox” (Ellsberg [7]). An urn contains 30 red balls, and 60 green and blue balls, in unspecified proportions; subjects are asked to compare (i) a bet on a red draw vs. a bet on a green draw, and (ii) a bet on a red or blue draw vs. a bet on a green or blue draw. If the subject wins a ...

The increased sensitivity of engineered products to external forces requires new computer-based design tools that can express the richness and complexity of product knowledge. This paper is a progress report of the author's research towards the development of such a knowledge-based design tool, called the Design Knowledge Speciication Language (DKSL). A key goal is to ensure the maximum possibl...

BACKGROUND Biological databases store data about laboratory experiments, together with semantic annotations, in order to support data aggregation and retrieval. The exact meaning of such annotations in the context of a database record is often ambiguous. We address this problem by grounding implicit and explicit database content in a formal-ontological framework. METHODS By using a typical ex...

Abstract We empirically show that sample information not only moderates prospects’ outcome ambiguity but also decision makers’ revealed aversion of them. Since most natural prospects permit at least some inference, accounting for their degree improves prediction aversion. The special case full ambiguity, as in Ellsberg-type designs, is typically averted—yet many makers systematically like low d...