In the following we deal with a special type of phrasal idiom, called gurative-compositional idiom. Idioms of this class have semantically autonomous components that shows a certain degree of independence. We propose an adequate manner of formal semantic representation of their idiomatic meaning: we map the referents of the semantically autonomous components into the formal representation. The ...

We study the implications for the expressive power of call/cc of upward continuations , speciically the idiom of using a continuation twice. Although such control eeects were known to Landin and Reynolds when they invented J and escape, the forebears of call/cc, they still act as a conceptual pitfall for some attempts to reason about continuations. We use this idiom to refute some recent conjec...

There is a tension between the idea that idioms can be both listed in the lexicon, and the idea that they are themselves composed of the lexical items which seem to inhabit them in the standard way. In other words, in order to maintain the insight that idioms actually contain the words they look like they contain, we need to derive them syntactically from these words. However, the entity that s...

This paper presents yet another argument for the view that both the causative and inchoative verbs in the Japanese causative alternation are syntactically equally complex, derived independently from common bases. While morphological considerations alone suggest that such an approach must be taken to account for cases involving equipollent alternations, which have overt morphemes for both the ca...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the identification of one’s idiom is feasible through only prosodic information. As an experimental approach of this theory, we attempt to study whether native Greek adults can identify their mother idiom from synthesized stimuli which contain only prosodic melodic and rhythmic information. In the first section we present the main idea behind ...

Mathematicians routinely lift operators to structures. For instance, almost every textbook on calculus lifts addition pointwise to functions: ( f + g)(x) = f (x)+ g(x). In this particular example, the lifted operator inherits the properties of the base-level operator. Does this hold in general? In order to approach this problem, one has to make the concept of lifting precise. I argue that lifti...

We query Web Image search engines with words (e.g., spring) but need images that correspond to particular senses of the word (e.g., flexible coil). Querying with polysemous words often yields unsatisfactory results from engines such as Google Images. We build an image search engine, IDIOM, which improves the quality of returned images by focusing search on the desired sense. Our algorithm, inst...

Cooper and Shallice (1995) raise many issues regarding the unified theories of cognition research program in general, and Soar in particular. In this paper, we examine one specific criticism of Newell’s (1990) treatment of immediate behavior and use it to explain the notion of the modeling idiom within a cognitive architecture. We compare a dual-task model using Newell’s architecture and idiom ...

The purpose of this study was to learn how transparency and ambiguity affect idiom learning. To start, 157 French idioms were translated to English and normed for familiarity, transparency, and ambiguity. Experiment 1 was a training study in which 32 of these idioms were taught to 25 native English speakers over two days of training. A cued recall test during a third session showed a reliable e...