In confronting the challenge of providing formal models of dialogue, with its plethora of fragments and rich variation in modes of context-dependent construal, it might seem that linguists face two types of methodological choice: either (a) conversation employs dialogue-specific mechanisms, for which a grammar specific to such activity must be constructed; or (b) variation arises due to indepen...

The need to distinguish two syntactic sources for adnominal adjectives (a direct modification and a relative clause one), with the associated interpretive properties, turns out to have certain implications for the semantic classification of adjectives. We will see that it provides evidence for the existence of a class of truly privative adjectives, and for the conclusion that subsective adjecti...

This paper presents the first acoustic phonetic investigation of Mebengokre, a Jê language spoken in the brazilian Amazon. Our focus lies in one conspicuous property of this language’s phonetic structure: the frequent occurrence of unreleased stops in post-vocalic position. Based on auditory impressions from the field and on theoretical considerations we expected to observe variation in vowel d...

Recent research suggests that it is more appropriate to model pronunciation variation with syllable-length acoustic models than with context-dependent phones. Due to the large number of factors contributing to pronunciation variation at the syllable level, the creation of multi-path model topologies appears necessary. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for constructing multi-path models...

If you think that semantic minimalism is the only alternative to contextualism but you’d rather do without Cappelen and Lepore’s mysteriously minimal “propositions,” you can. You just have to recognize that being semantically incomplete does not make a sentence context-sensitive. You don’t have to go through the ritual of repeatedly incanting things like this: “John is ready” expresses the prop...

Database privacy is an ambiguous concept, whose meaning is usually context-dependent. We give a conceptual framework for technologies in that field in terms of three dimensions, depending on whose privacy is considered: i) respondent privacy (to avoid re-identification of patients or other individuals to whom the database records refer); ii) owner privacy (to ensure that the owner must not give...

This paper shows that the traces of rational graphs coincide with the context-sensitive languages.

This paper defines multiset-valued linear index grammar and unordered vector grammar with dominance links. The former models certain uses of multiset-valued feature structures in unification-based formalisms , while the latter is motivated by word order variation and by "quasi-trees", a generalization of trees. The two formalisms are weakly equivalent, and an important subset is at most context...

The aim of this study was to analyzing and modeling domestic activities (i.e. what people do in the home). The ultimate goal is to help to design ubiquitous technologies which are context sensitive and which really fit with our needs.

Acceptability of case ellipsis on focused subjects and objects exhibits clear asymmetry which so far has not received a plausible explanation. Case ellipsis on focused direct objects occurs naturally, whereas case ellipsis on focused transitive subjects is unnatural whether the subject is contrastively focused or not. The main purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence that the d...