Scholars often speak of ancient Greek masculinity and manhood as if there were a single, monolithic, simple conception. I will show that the ancient Greeks, like us today, had competing models or constructions of gender and that what it meant to be a man was different in different contexts. I will focus on three constructions of the masculine gender in ancient (classical and post-classical) Gre...

This paper considers a set of presupposition triggers including focus, questions, ‘contrastive’ statives, and an ‘affirmation/negation’ construction involving and not, where presuppositions are cancelable. It is proposed that these constructions, rather than having strict semantic presuppositions, have representations involving alternative sets in the sense of alternative semantics of questions...

Abstract This article outlines the strategies for expressing focus in Northern Amis (Formosan). Three types of constructions are examined: cleft constructions, markers and emphatic lengthening. Focus by clefting is subject to well-known nominative-only constraint on extraction relativization found Formosan Philippine type languages (Keenan & Comrie 1977), such that a clefted constituent mus...

A central focus of modern cryptography is the construction of efficient, “high-level” cryptographic tools (e.g., encryption schemes) from weaker, “low-level” cryptographic primitives (e.g., one-way functions). Of interest are both the existence of such constructions, and their efficiency. Here, we show essentially-tight lower bounds on the best possible efficiency of any black-box construction ...

Coordination is a complex phenomenon that poses many problems for the parsing of English by computer. This paper examines some of these problems and suggests solutions within the framework of ATN parsing. Examples of complex coordination phenomena, extracted from texts translated by ENGSPAN, the Pan American Health Organization's English-Spanish machine translation system, are presented. Schema...

We present constructions of countable two-dimensional subshifts of finite type (SFTs) with interesting properties. Our main focus is on properties of the topological derivatives and subpattern posets of these objects. We present a countable SFT whose iterated derivatives are maximally complex from the computational point of view, constructions of countable SFTs with high CantorBendixson ranks, ...

Abstract Structural priming is a promising tool for testing similarity relations between constructions, but its applicability to larger-scale models of constructional networks still limited. This article outlines the following two limitations previous studies: first, they largely focus on alternating constructions; and second, often test instances same construction rather than different constru...

Evaluation is one of the three basic forms of disciplined inquiry, the others being research and policy analysis. It is that form of inquiry whose focus is some evaluand (program, process, organization, person, etc.) and which results in “merit” and/or “worth” constructions (judgments) about it. Merit constructions converge on the intrinsic quality of an evaluand, irrespective of the setting in...