The resurgence of continental trading blocs throughout the 1980s will influence the nature and evolution of the world economy in the 1990s and beyond. In this paper, we argue that classical economic analysis of trading blocs is inconclusive, and regionalism cannot be understood in economic terms alone. We focus on an examination of the relationship that exists between trading bloc formation and...

We show the potential contribution of time series models (TSM) to the analysis of high frequency (less than monthly) time series of economic activity. The evolution of the series is induced by stable patterns of behavior of economic agents; but these patterns are so complex that simple smoothing techniques or subjective forecasting can not consider all underlying factors and TSM are needed if a...

This study explores boundary pitch movements in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) by investigating pitch variations of final particles. Based on annotation research on the pitch targets of final particles in a 117-minute spontaneous speech corpus, it is proposed that instead of viewing such pitch variations as lexical tones, these variations should be referred to as three types boundary pitch movements...

* This paper grew out of the Panel Discussion of the workshop " SDGE Models and their use in monetary policy " , held at the European Central Bank, June 5-6, 2001. I would like to thank the participants of the TSM conference in Touluse for comments and suggestions.

In this paper, we consider sentence simplification as a special form of translation with the complex sentence as the source and the simple sentence as the target. We propose a Tree-based Simplification Model (TSM), which, to our knowledge, is the first statistical simplification model covering splitting, dropping, reordering and substitution integrally. We also describe an efficient method to t...

The goal of this study is to examine if there is a word superiority effect on perception of three-way contrast of stops in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM). Based on Ganong’s (1980) findings that English participants showed a significant lexical effect in phonetic perception, I hypothesize that there exists a difference in perception between real words and nonwords in TSM. The prediction is that the c...

This article investigates the use of distal demonstrative Hitlo in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) from a discourse-pragmatic perspective. The analysis is based on a 5-hour corpus of spoken data, including daily conversations, radio interviews, TV drama series, and some random examples. A total of 172 tokens of Hitlos are identified in the data. They can be divided into six categories according to...