Plural logic adds to singular logic plural variables and a two-place connective ‘is/are among’, written ‘ ́’. Superplural logic adds to plural logic higher-level variables and higher-level twoplace connectives ‘are among’, written ‘ ́n’. This thesis examines the linguistic, logical, and philosophical status of superplural logic. I begin by asking whether the idea of a superplural logic is intelli...

Formalisms involving some degree of nondeterminism are frequent in computer science. In particular, various programming or specification languages are based on term rewriting systems where confluence is not required. In this paper we examine three concrete possible semantics for nondeterminism that can be assigned to those programs. Two of them –call-time choice and run-time choice– are quite w...

The paper investigates the memory-based learning (MBL) paradigm as a model of productive linguistic behavior in the domain of Dutch noun plural inflection. We first sketch the origin and background of the MBL approach, to then provide a short overview of Dutch noun plural inflection along with a detailed description of the use of MBL models for inflectional morphology. Results of a large number...

(3) Carrying guns is illegal in Illinois. a. # “It’s OK to carry a gun as long as you don’t have more than one” b. “Carrying more than zero guns is illegal” • No morphologically plural DPs in sentence 1, but continuation indicates semantic plurality for both DPs: (4) Each boy drew a picture. They hung them on the wall. • Common assumption: plurals are semantically unmarked, in the sense that th...

Norm, one of the NLM Lexical tools, is a commonly used retrieval tool for natural language processing applications with the Unified Medical Language System® (UMLS). One of the core normalization techniques is to find the uninflected form of terms. Terms in UMLS Metathesaurus® have (s), (es), or (ies) attached to them as a shorthand way of representing either singular or plural nouns. An ideal n...

This phenomenon has attracted some attention from formal semanticists, who have mainly investigated the way semantics influences agreement choice by attempting to relate the preference for singular or plural to various lexical properties of the predicate (e.g. Bennett, 1974; Barker, 1992; Pollard and Sag, 1994; Schwarzschild, 1996). However, the reverse whether agreement choice influences seman...

This paper incorporates morphological markedness constraints into a framework in which morphology and phonology directly interact, modeled with interleaving of morphological and phonological constraints in serial OT (Wolf 2008, 2009). Morphological markedness constraints are constraints against realization (or spell-out) of morphologically marked feature sets. The empirical data motivating this...

Human languages may be shaped not only by the (individual psychological) processes of language acquisition, but also by population-level processes arising from repeated language learning and use. One prevalent feature of natural languages is that they avoid unpredictable variation. The current work explores whether linguistic predictability might result from a process of iterated learning in si...

The present paper proposes a new integration method of plural spoken term detection (STD) results obtained from plural subword models that we previously proposed. We confirmed that these new subword models, which are the 1/2 phone model, the 1/3 phone model, and the sub-phonetic segment (SPS) model, are effective for STD systems, which must be vocabulary-free in order to process arbitrary query...