This study investigated and examined linking constructions in Mayrinax Atayal. Although in the literature, linkers are categorized as either complementizers or aspectual heads, their syntactic behaviors and statuses have not been fully probed and analyzed. From minimalist and cartographic viewpoints, this paper will divide Mayrinax linking constructions into three classes with respect to their ...

Inspired by Hintikka’s treatment of question embedding verbs in [8] and the variations of noncontingency operator, we propose a logic with strong noncontingency operator N as the only primitive modality. A proposition is strongly noncontingent, if no matter whether it is true or false, it does it necessarily; otherwise, it is weakly contingent. This logic is not a normal modal logic, since N(φ ...

In multi-agent systems, the knowledge of agents about other agents’ knowledge often plays a pivotal role in their decisions. In many applications, this knowledge involves uncertainty. This uncertainty may be about the state of the world or about the other agents’ knowledge. In this thesis, we answer the question of how to model this probabilistic knowledge and reason about it efficiently. Modal...

On the semantic level, epistemic modal operators encode modal force (necessity or possibility) and get interpreted against a conversational background which is a function from possible worlds into sets of propositions. In the case of epistemic modality, the conversational background is given by the speaker’s beliefs or the available evidence. Necessity in a given world encodes truth in all alte...

Numerous studies conducted on the Iraq War have consistently highlighted ongoing controversy surrounding its justification, even to this day. In response, several political and linguistic delved into issue, seeking understand how George W. Bush managed persuade global community support removal of Iraqi government. This particular study focuses analyzing speeches, specifically State Union Speech...

Starting from the observation that a sentence like ??a dog is intelligent is difficult in the generic domain in the same way as ??a student is shy is in the existential one, this paper argues that as for the existential reading, the generic interpretation of the indefinites also needs a “context”. Adopting an explicit modal interpretation of GEN, our account builds on Greenberg (2002) insight t...

Traditionally, the estimation of modal parameters from a set of measured data has required significant experience. However, as the technology has matured, increasingly, analysis is being performed by less experienced engineers or technicians. To address this development, frequently software solutions are focusing upon either wizard-based or autonomous/semiautonomous approaches. A number of auto...

Verbs are important in semantic understanding of natural language. Traditional verb representations, such as FrameNet, PropBank, VerbNet, focus on verbs’ roles. These roles are too coarse to represent verbs’ semantics. In this paper, we introduce verb patterns to represent verbs’ semantics, such that each pattern corresponds to a single semantic of the verb. First we analyze the principles for ...