One of the most important properties of human languages is their ability to convey intricate meanings. The vastness and effectiveness of those meanings for everyday communication and reasoning transcends all known non-human languages, including other animal languages and artificial languages. For studying communication and reasoning in language, an indispensable empirical concept is entailment:...

We explored relationships between positive symptoms of schizophrenia and neurocognitive functions (language and memory). The semantic and phonemic associations among words produced in a verbal fluency task by 26 participants diagnosed with DSM-III-R schizophrenia were examined. Formal thought disorder was associated with producing fewer contextually related words and with producing more unrelat...

Nested words, a model for recursive programs proposed by Alur and Madhusudan, have recently gained much interest. In this paper we introduce quantitative extensions and study nested word series which assign to nested words elements of a semiring. We show that regular nested word series coincide with series definable in weighted logics as introduced by Droste and Gastin. For this we establish a ...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded as subjects read semantically meaningful, syntactically legal but nonsensical and random word strings. The constraints imposed by formal sentence structure alone did not reduce the amplitude of the N400 component elicited by open-class words, whereas semantic constraints did. Semantic constraints also eliminated the word-frequency effect of a larger...

We generalize the word problem for groups, the formal language of all words in the generators that represent the identity, to inverse monoids. In particular, we introduce the idempotent problem, the formal language of all words representing idempotents, and investigate how the properties of an inverse monoid aer related to the formal language properties of its idempotent problem. In particular,...

While classical approaches to unsupervised morphology acquisition often rely on metrics based on information theory for identifying morphemes, we describe a novel approach relying on the notion of formal analogy. A formal analogy is a relation between four forms, such as: reader is to doer as reading is to doing. Our assumption is that formal analogies identify pairs of morphologically related ...

Semantics is composed meaning of language expressions and perceptions at the levels of words, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and essay. The basic unit of formal semantics is a concept as a formal model of words in a natural language. Cognitive linguistics focuses on cognitive semantics and its interaction with underlying syntactic structures. A denotational mathematics known as semantic algebra i...

An orbit pattern $$\alpha $$ is said to force an $$\beta , if any continuous interval map which admits also . Among the patterns that only eventually fixed trajectories, we completely describe forcing relation, by answering question: others? We provide two different ways enlist them through formal languages. One constructed words and another derived words.

The notion of a primitive word, one that is not a power of another word, is useful in many areas including coding theory, combinatorics on words, formal language theory, and text algorithms. The proportion of such words turns out to be very high. We investigate operations that preserve the primitivity of partial words with one hole, or words that have an undefined position. As a result, all pri...