Indefinite noun phrases introduce new discourse referents equipped with different referential and discourse properties. Indefinites can show wide or narrow scope behavior and they can be interpreted as specific or non-specific. Indefinites also show different discourse effects such as different degrees of discourse prominence. In this paper we present the results of two psycholinguistic pilot s...

Given a set P of n points on the real line and a (potentially in nite) family of functions, we investigate the problem of nding a small (weighted) subset S ⊆ P , such that for any f ∈ F, we have that f(P ) is a (1 ± ε)-approximation to f(S). Here, f(Q) = ∑ q∈Q w(q)f(q) denotes the weighted discrete integral of f over the point set Q, where w(q) is the weight assigned to the point q. We study th...

The referential properties of noun phrases in the Japanese language, which has no articles, are useful for article generation in JapaneseEnglish machine translation and for anaphora resolution in Japanese noun phrases. They are generally classified as generic noun phrases, definite noun phrases, and indefinite noun phrases. In the previous work, referential properties were estimated by developi...

The semantics of determiner phrases, be they definite descriptions, indefinite descriptions or quantified noun phrases, is often assumed to be a fully solved question: common nouns are properties, and determiners are generalised quantifiers that apply to two predicates: the property corresponding to the common noun and the one corresponding to the verb phrase. We first present a criticism of th...

BACKGROUND: Definite references signal a speaker's belief that a listener can uniquely identify the referent (e.g., the dog, as the only dog among a group of animals). Clark's (1992) collaborative referencing model provides a way to examine the speaker's display of confidence that his/her reference will be understood by the listener without further clarification. We previously found that amnesi...

abstractsince heubner's (1985) pioneering study, there have been many studies on (mis) use/ non-use of articles by l2 learners from article-less and article languages the present study investigated how persian l2 learners of english produce and interpret english definite descriptions and demonstrative descriptions it was assumed that definite and demonstrative descriptions share the same centra...