The main goal of this paper is to present a systematic methodology for selecting general ontological categories to be used for multiple practical purposes. After a brief overview of our basic assumptions concerning the way a useful top-level ontology should be linked to language and cognition, we present a set of primitive relations that we believe play a foundational role. On the basis of thes...

BACKGROUND Injured children represent 25% of all injured patients in the United States and have unique needs that may require treatment at a pediatric trauma center or a trauma center with pediatric commitment. This work attempts to determine if there is existing evidence that pediatric trauma centers, trauma centers with pediatric commitment, or trauma systems have improved the care of injured...

This study reports the results of a study in which participants were asked to repeat a sentence and produce a tag question (e.g. The girl behind the headmaster got punished, didn't she?). Holding the head noun phrase constant, three properties of the noun phrase within the modifier were manipulated: number (e.g., headmaster, headmasters), gender (e.g., headmaster, headmistress), and animacy (e....

This paper specifically addresses the question of polysemy with respect to verbs, and whether or not the sense distinctions that are made in on-line lexical resources such as WordNet are appropriate for computational lexicons. The use of sets of related syntactic frames and verb classes are examined as a means of simplifying the task of defining different senses, and the importance of concrete ...

Sentences like these are special insofar as their utterance in appropriate circumstances amounts to performing the action identified by the finite verb. The typical formal properties of such sentences in English include first person subjects, second person indirect objects, a present tense non-progressive active form of a speech act verb and the deictic adverb hereby, but performative sentences...

How do we observe an observer? We know, as George Spencer-Brown has put it, “that the first distinction, the mark, and the observer are not only interchangeable, but, in the form, identical.”2 So we watch the distinctions drawn by the observer. We turn them into what they (i.e., she and he) are observing. We make them active players in their world who bring forth this world through the distinct...