The morphosyntactic categories of tense, aspect and mood are traditionally considered to be properties of verbs. However, the morphological expression of these categories within the nominal system is attested across a range of languages. Drawing on data from a number of languages, we provide a preliminary sketch of the phenomenon of nominal tense with nominal scope that is, cases in which nomin...

We present a simplified version of nominal terms with improved properties. Nominal terms are themselves a version of first-order terms, adapted to provide primitive support for names, binding, capturing substitution, and alpha-conversion. Nominal terms lack certain properties of first-order terms; it is always possible to ‘choose a fresh variable symbol’ for a first-order term and it is always ...

We present a formal correspondence between Laird’s trace semantics and the nominal game model of Murawski and Tzevelekos for RefML, a callby-value language with higher-order references. This gives an operational flavor to game semantics, where denotation of terms is generated via an interactive reduction, which allows to reduce terms with free functional variables, and where pointer structure i...

In this paper we have described the construction of a graded naming test that makes the distinction between object and proper names. This distinction was prompted by a single case study of a patient who showed a specific naming impairment for a particular class of proper names. Naming vocabulary was found to be highly correlated with other measures of verbal intelligence and we have discussed t...

This thesis investigates and proposes models for programming and verifying adaptive software at different abstraction levels. First, we design the kernel of a programming language, endowed with primitives for programming the adaptation to different working environments. We provide the language with a type and effect system that allows us to statically prove properties of the behaviour of the pr...

We define a type inference system for Nominal Rewriting where the types associated to terms are polymorphic (built from a set of base data sorts, type variables, and user-defined type constructors). In contrast with standard term rewriting systems or the λ-calculus, a typing environment for nominal rewriting includes type information for atoms, variables and function symbols. We give a syntax-d...