For just over twenty years now, I have been an admirer of Fred Sommer’s work in the logic of natural language, especially as summarized extensively in his 1982 book of this title. Before I knew many details about Fred’s work, I wrote in the 1970s Suppes and Macken (1978), and Suppes (1979a, 1979b, 1981). All four of these earlier articles of mine, the first one with Elizabeth Macken, concentrat...

We examine the prosodic incorporation of utterance-final vocatives in American English. Our report is based on two separate experiments to test the claim by Beckman and Pierrehumbert (1986) ([1]) and Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg ([9]) that the phonetic manifestation of an L* tone on the final vocative is indicative of its contrastive behavior. Our first experiment, involving the dramatic readin...

This paper provides an account of the syntactic and semantic representations used in Te Kaitito, a bilingual English/Māori natural language processing system. With the exception of some very simple systems (e.g. Leslie, 1998), the grammar given in Te Kaitito is the first implemented computational grammar for Māori, indeed (we believe) for any Polynesian language. It is therefore of interest to ...

• geis quite slippery and has eluded really satisfactory description – let alone analysis – despite getting considerable attention since the 19th century. • I’m in the middle of a large-scale corpus study of the prefix, trying to get a proper handle on its syntax and semantics in order to develop a better theory. • Today I will present some intermediate results from the ongoing study and lay ou...

We present an improved method for automated word alignment of parallel texts which takes advantage of knowledge of syntactic divergences, while avoiding the need for syntactic analysis of the less resource rich language, and retaining the robustness of syntactically agnostic approaches such as the IBM word alignment models. We achieve this by using simple, easily-elicited knowledge to produce s...

Verbal Pseudo-Coordination (as in English ‘go and get’) has been described for a number of individual languages, but this is the first edited volume to emphasize topic from comparative perspective, connection Multiple Agreement Constructions more generally. The chapters include detailed analyses Romance, Germanic, Slavic other languages. These contributions show important cross-linguistic simil...

The paper describes a system that extracts knowledge from technical English texts. Our basic assumption is that in technical texts syntax is a reliable indication of meaning. Consequently, semantic interpretation of the text starts from surface syntax. The linguistic component of the system uses a broad-coverage, domainindependent parser of English, as well as a user-assisted semantic interpret...

We present an evaluation of Link Grammar and Connexor Machinese Syntax, two major broad-coverage dependency parsers, on a custom hand-annotated corpus consisting of sentences regarding protein-protein interactions. In the evaluation, we apply the notion of an interaction subgraph, which is the subgraph of a dependency graph expressing a protein-protein interaction. We measure the performance of...

The present study examines transfer errors at the levels of phonetics and syntax in the interlanguage of 10 fourteen-year-old Basque/Spanish bilinguals who have been learning English for 7 years in a formal school context in the Basque Country. Analyses showed that learners display L1 effects in the acquisition of both English phonetics and syntax, even though phonetic transfer errors (replacem...

This paper presents a Vietnamese syntax parsing method by applying PCFG model and improved CYK algorithm. The PCFG model (Probabilistic Context – Free Grammar) has been widely applied for language parsing problems and given a high effect especially for English. In this paper, we propose a model that is applied the PCFG for Vietnamese syntax parsing and an approach for building a set of linguist...