The dichotomy of topic and focus, based, in the Praguean Functional Generative Description, on the scale of communicative dynamism, is relevant not only for a possible placement of the sentence in a context, but also for its semantic interpretation. An automatic identification of topic and focus may use the input information on word order, on the systemic ordering of kinds of complementations (...

Conclusions This paper estimates component reliability from masked series-system life data, viz, data where the exact component causing system failure might be unknown. It focuses on a Bayes approach which considers prior information on the component reliabilities. In most practical settings, prior engineering knowledge on component reliabilities is extensive. Engineers routinely use prior know...

Normally is not intended to incite the listener to speak ill of those people who are not his or her friends An accent on our friends does however change the meaning of the sentence in this direction In the aforementioned textbooks a remark on accent such as this one is usually presented as part of a discussion on informal logic which which bears little or no relation to the material on formal p...

Plural nouns do not strictly refer to more than one object, which suggests that they are not semantically marked to mean “more than one” and that plurality inferences are made via a scalar implicature. Consistent with that hypothesis, recent evidence using a picture-matching paradigm supports founds that participants were equally fast to respond to a picture of a single object as a picture of m...

According to Li & Thompson (1981), Chinese serial verb constructions consisting of two verb phrases denoting two separate events can be classified into those having alternating, consecutive, purpose or circumstance relations. These classifications may overlap and a serial verb construction may be ambiguous between different interpretations. It has been argued in a recent study (Chan 1996) that ...

We propose a model of semantic interpretation of comparatives which is based on a mechanism for semantic copying. Besides common phrasal and clausal forms of comparatives, our model also incorporates the analysis of referential and textual phenomena that interact with the interpretation of comparatives, viz. metonymies and omitted complements. In order to allow for efficient processing, guidanc...

'Could have done otherwise', action sentences and anaphora HELEN STEWARD What does it mean to say of a certain agent, S, that he or she could have done otherwise? Clearly, it means nothing at all, unless the anaphoric devices within the sentence have been anchored to definite antecedents. In this paper, I shall argue that there may be more ways of effecting this anchoring than is commonly suppo...

This paper presents conflicting evidence on trends in private sector union and nonunion wages. The BLS quarterly Employment Cost Index (ECI), constructed from establishment surveys, uses fixed weights applied to wage changes among matched job quotes. The ECI shows a substantial decrease in wage growth for union relative to nonunion workers. The annual Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (E...

I propose that the characteristics of the scope disamhiguation process observed in the literature can be explained in terms of the way in which the model of the situation described by a sentence is built. The model construction procedure I present builds an event structure by identifying the situations associated with the operators in the sentence and their mutual dependency relations, as well ...

understanding allegories, helps us to give a clear and accepted interpretation of complex and complicated thoughts, and this is said to be a cultural need. the purpose of this research is to find and recognize the allegories used by meibodi in his mystic interpretation of kashf-ol-asraar. the results of the study show that different kinds of allegories are used in this interpretation; and this ...