A major challenge of literature is that it is stubbornly indeterminate. Both a vice and a virtue, the indeterminateness of literary language has acquired the status of an impasse, one which was perhaps most directly and resolutely faced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Stéphane Mallarmé. The question of whether the indeterminateness of literary language is a vice or a virtue, however, has rarely been tr...

Farkas (1994, 2002a) points out that the concept of specificity with indefinites is notoriously non-specific, and serves as a cover term for at least three separate phenomena, namely scopal specificity, epistemic specificity, and partitivity (see also the summary in Ionin 2009). The focus of the present paper is on the first two types of specificity, leaving aside partitivity (also known as pre...

Traditional approaches to quantifier scope typically need stipulation to exclude readings that are unavailable to human understanders. This paper shows that quantifier scope phenomena can be precisely characterized by a semantic representation constrained by surhce constituency, if the distinction between referential and quantificational NPs is properly observed. A CCG implementation is describ...

Self-reference is used to denote any situation in which someoneor something refers to itself. Self-reference is an important issuein philosophy, mathematics and computer science amongst oth-ers. In the philosophy of language the naive theory of truth hasbeen challenged by the Liar Paradox. The Liar Paradox is thecontradiction that emerges from trying to determine whether...

This paper identifies the problem of analyses of message content as one of making specific inferences from recorded text to characteristics of a source that are not directly observable. The problem is common to a variety of analytical situations in the humanities and in the social sciences; and the way adequate solutions are found therefore deserves systematic attention. Choices among investiga...

Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) solve various cognitive tasks and acquire and use English speech in ways that often resemble those of very young children. Given that the psittacine brain is organized very differently from that of mammals, these results have intriguing implications for the study and evolution of vocal learning, communication, and cognition. For 25 years, I have taught Grey pa...

A Maya Universe in Stone focuses on Laxtunich Lintel 1, an ancient relief sculpture. Such intensive examinations of singular works remain rare publications related to the Americas, yet objects as complex this lintel, with layered iconographic and hieroglyphic content a rich social life, warrant thorough exposition. The authors convincingly argue that sculpture three additional lintel reliefs we...

In this paper, we discuss issues connected to the phenomenon of linguistic FOCUS or INFORMATION DISTRIBUTION in the sentence in the context of the multi-lingual machine translation project EUROTRA. We shall present some of the arguments why a consideration of FOCUS phenomena is important for the determination of linear order and for semantic interpretation. We shall proceed, in sections 2 and 3...

The quality of an object localization depends essentially on the adequate selection of a suitable reference. In most computational approaches developed so far only the distance between the located object and a potential reference object has been used as a decision criterion. However many other criteria have to be considered for a cognitively plausible selection of adequate reference points. In ...

After an eventful decade of live-coding activities, this article seeks to explore the practice with the aim of situating it in the history of contemporary arts and music. The article introduces several key points of investigation in live-coding research and discusses some examples of how live-coding practitioners engage with these points in their system design and performances. In light of the ...