Definiteness expresses a constellation of semantic, pragmatic, and discourse properties—the communicative functions—of an NP. We present a supervised classifier for English NPs that uses lexical, morphological, and syntactic features to predict an NP’s communicative function in terms of a language-universal classification scheme. Our classifiers establish strong baselines for future work in thi...

We provide a semantic account of the free ordering of NP-internal elements in Chinese and argue that this provides evidence for the lack of DP in Chinese. We also extend this account to the Mandarin plural marker –men, tying the definiteness of –men phrases and its number/definiteness interaction to the classifier status of –men and the lack of DP in Chinese. We show that the binding properties...

As the number of systems which offer annotations on digital documents increases, robust anchoring of annotations is a key challenge. It is especially important if the annotator lacks write-access to the document being annotated. For example, if someone makes an annotation on a web page today and the web page changes tomorrow, what happens to the annotation? One approach is simply to “orphan” th...

We establish the positive definiteness of some functions and of some matrices that arise as solutions of generalized Lyapunov equations. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000) : 42A82, 47A62, 15A24, 15A48.