Chinese compounds exhibit word order variations that have so far not been well understood. In this article I propose that the word order variation is motivated by metrical requirements. I also propose that the mechanism for word movement is Nonhead Fronting, an operation that is similar to XP movement by adjunction in syntax.

We investigate automatic presentations of infinite words. Starting points of our study are the works of Rigo and Maes, and Carton and Thomas concerning the lexicographic presentation, respectively the decidability of the MSO theory of morphic words. Refining their techniques we observe that the lexicographic presentation of a (morphic) word is canonical in a certain sense. We then go on to gene...

Partial words are sequences over a finite alphabet that may have some undefined positions, or “holes,” that are denoted by ’s. A nonempty partial word is called bordered if one of its proper prefixes is compatible with one of its suffixes (here is compatible with every letter in the alphabet); it is called unbordered otherwise. In this paper, we investigate the problem of computing the maximum ...