Abstract Referentially vague (or ‘ignorance’) indefinites are known to exhibit apparently conflicting behavior: in the singular, they referentially (Giannakidou and Quer 2013, Alonso-Ovalle Menéndez-Benito 2010, 2011, 2013), but plural appear depend on a discourse given set. The phenomenon is typically discussed context of Spanish algún/algunos (Gutiérrez-Rexach 2001, Martí 2008, 2009); this pa...

A new brain imaging study demonstrates that patients with autism have a strikingly different pattern of brain activity compared with control subjects. During cognitive tasks, cortical areas known as the "default state" network--areas that have been implicated in both self-referential processing and processing of socially relevant information--typically reduce their brain activity. In patients w...

Self-referential processing is a key cognitive process, associated with the serotonergic system and the default mode network (DMN). Decreased levels of serotonin and reduced activations of the DMN observed in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) suggest that self-referential processing might be altered in patients with ALS. Here, we investigate the effects of ALS on the electroencephalography co...

In 2 studies, we investigated how peers establish a referential pact to call something, for example, a cushion versus a pillow (both equally felicitous). In Study 1, pairs of 4- and 6-year-old German-speaking peers established a referential pact for an artifact, for example, a woman's shoe, in a referential communication task. Six-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, continued to use these same expr...

What is the role of textual features above the sentence level in advancing the machine translation of literature? This paper examines how referential cohesion is expressed in literary and non-literary texts and how this cohesion affects translation. We first show in a corpus study on English that literary texts use more dense reference chains to express greater referential cohesion than news. W...

We demonstrate a program that can inspect a distributed relational database on the Internet to discover and quantify referential integrity issues for integration purposes. The program computes data quality metrics for referential integrity at four granularity levels: database, table, column and value, going from a global to a detailed view, exhibiting specific evidence about referential errors....

One of most serious problems plaguing the World Wide Web today is that of broken hypertext links, which are a major annoyance to browsing users and also a cause of tarnished reputation and possible loss of opportunity for information providers. The root of the problem lies in the current Web architecture’s lack of support for referential integrity. This paper presents a model for the provision ...