Recent theories of metrical structure in Optimality Theory differ starkly in whether feet can be aligned gradiently (McCarthy and Prince 1993, Gordon 2002, Hyde 2002) or only categorically (Kager 2001, 2005, McCarthy 2003, Buckley 2009). Particularly challenging for categorical theories are certain apparent cases of the initial-dactyl effect, where all feet align rightward except for the leftmo...

1 Two kinds of phonotactics I contrast the notions of “absolute phonotactics” and “comparative phonotactics.” Absolute phonotactics is the study of well-formedness in phonology. The topic has a long history, but was laid out with particular cogency by Chomsky and Halle (1965), who noted that speakers have phonotactic judgments even of words they have never heard before; thus blick [blɪk] is non...

This thesis advocates a modular and parallel grammar architecture with declarative constraints on the syntactic, semantic, prosodic, and pragmatic structures which are derived in parallel while mutually constraining one another as proposed by Jackendoff (1997, 2002). The main claim of this thesis is that because of the many conflicting requirements among modules, the interfaces cannot employ cr...

Traditionally language models have been evaluated by testing their ability to mark sentences as grammatical or ungrammatical. But with the emergence of probabilistic, connectionist models etc. on the computational side and magnitude estimation tests etc., on the linguistic side, it might make sense to go all the way and evaluate the models graded predictions. We present a language acquisition a...

Honorific agreement is one of the main properties of languages like Korean or Japanese, playing an important role in appropriate communication. This makes the deep processing of honorific information crucial in various computational applications such as spoken language translation and generation. We argue that, contrary to the previous literature, an adequate analysis of Korean honorification i...

BACKGROUND Clinically, elderly patients with unresectable bulky hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) are difficult to manage, especially in those with co-infections of hepatitis B and C virus. Herein, we reported such a case treated with radiotherapy (RT) by using combined simultaneously integrated inner-escalated boost and volumetric-modulated arc radiotherapy (SIEB-VMAT). After RT, significant symp...

Recent theories of metrical structure differ starkly in whether feet can be aligned gradiently Particularly challenging for categorical theories are apparent cases of the initial-dactyl effect, where all feet align rightward except for the leftmost, combined with End Rule Right (1-3). In long words, medial feet have to be forced rightward, but they are not adjacent to an edge and categorical al...

Noisy Harmonic Grammar (NHG) is a framework for stochastic grammars that uses the GEN-cum-EVAL system originated in Optimality Theory. As a form of Harmonic Grammar, NHG outputs as winner the candidate with the smallest harmonic penalty (weighted sum of constraint violations). It is stochastic because at each “evaluation time,” constraint weights are nudged upward or downward by a random amount...

It has been shown on several occasions that speech perception in a second language (L2) is often tainted by the phonetic and phonological structures of a listener’s native language (L1). As languages vary in their phonological inventories, listeners often have to develop new phonological categories during acquisition in order to recognize words and phonemes in their L2. Recent evidence on the p...

This paper deals with modelling the argument structure of constructions with two internal arguments expressing a beneficiary/recipient and a patient/theme. It offers an analysis of the dative shift which captures both the alternative grammatical function mappings and the altered semantics of the participants of the related predicates. The LMT variant used assumes that semantic participants are ...