Title of dissertation: MEASURING PREDICATES Alexis Wellwood, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Dissertation directed by: Professor Valentine Hacquard Department of Linguistics Determining the semantic content of sentences, and uncovering regularities between linguistic form and meaning, requires attending to both morphological and syntactic properties of a language with an eye to the notional categori...

We present an approach for automatically generating relevant , focused questions to be asked during code inspection sessions. The method is based on Hoare-logic. The novel key idea is the introduction of informal predicates, which, though not having a formal definition , may have a perfectly legal and unique informal interpretation. Such predicates make it easier to express requirements in term...

Given the importance of IT investments in today’s organization, firms tend to spend increasing amounts of time and resources to better manage IT projects. However these projects continue to have high failure rates thus highlighting the need for improved risk management. A stream of IS research has focused on identifying several causes of managerial risks. The theory base that has been used in t...

An extension to finite state transducers is presented, in which atomic symbols are replaced by arbitrary predicates over symbols. The extension is motivated by applications in natural language processing (but may be more widely applicable) as well as by the observation that transducers with predicates generally have fewer states and fewer transitions. Although the extension is fairly trivial fo...

Recently, there have been some attempts to block the Knowability Paradox and other modal paradoxes by adopting a type-theoretic framework in which knowledge and necessity are regarded as typed predicates. The main problem with this approach is that when these notions are simultaneously treated as predicates, a new kind of paradox appears. I claim that avoiding this paradox either by weakening t...

Is ‘vague’ vague? Aldrich (1937: 94) didn’t think so. Austin (1962: 126) did, and Sorensen (1985) offered a proof. Deas (1989) rejected the proof, but in (2003) I sided with Sorensen. Now Hull (2005) replies on behalf of Deas. Why so much fuss about a single word? One reason, I think, is that a lot depends on how we settle the question. For example, Frege (1903: §56) famously remarked that logi...