The goal of this paper is to argue that negative concord is the “default value” for the two types of neg-sensitivity by investigating how Japanese children acquire NCIs in their language. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we review several syntactic differences between NPIs and NCIs and a morphosyntactic analysis of those items proposed by Kuno (2007). It is pointed ...

Listeners flexibly recalibrate the perceptual categorization of sounds in response to speakers’ unusual pronunciation variants. Recent studies have shown that generalization of this recalibration can inform us about the nature of prelexical units used for speech perception. The present study tested whether this generalization is sensitive to phonetic or phonological properties of speech. Using ...

In this paper, we study some periodicity concepts on words. First, we extend the notion of full tilings which was recently introduced by Karhumäki, Lifshits, and Rytter to partial tilings. Second, we investigate the notion of quasiperiods and show in particular that the set of quasiperiodic words is a context-sensitive language that is not context-free, answering a conjecture by Dömösi, Horváth...

In this paper, we take Determinative-Measure Compounds as an example to demonstrate how the E-HowNet semantic composition mechanism works in deriving the sense representation for a newly coined determinative-measure (DM) compound. First, we define the sense of a closed set of each individual determiner and measure word in E-HowNet representation exhaustively. Afterwards, we make semantic compos...

Absolute measurements of total scattering cross sections for low energy (5-70 eV) electrons by metastable helium (2(3)S) atoms are presented. The measurements are performed using a magneto-optical trap which is loaded from a laser-cooled, bright beam of slow He(2(3)S) atoms. The data are compared with predictions from convergent close coupling and R matrix with pseudostate calculations, and we ...

Several studies on place perception of prevocalic stop consonants have shown that the apparent perceptual weight of release burst and formant transitions depends on the vowel context: bursts carry higher perceptual weight in high front vowel contexts like /i/ than in low non-front vowel contexts like /a/, while the reverse holds for formant transitions. This finding is generally interpreted as ...

It has been observed that wh-questions cannot be joined disjunctively, the suggested reasons being semantic or pragmatic deviance. We argue that wh-question disjunctions are semantically well-formed but are pragmatically deviant outside contexts that license polarity-sensitive (PS) items. In these contexts the pragmatic inadequacy disappears due to a pragmatically induced recalibration of the i...

The article presents discourse analysis as a method of analyzing qualitative interview data. Using examples from a study of users’ library conceptions, it is argued that participants’ interpretations are much more context-dependent and variable than normally recognized, and that this has important implications for the use of interview data. Instead of producing definitive versions of participan...

The key factor in satisfying human expectation lies in identifying what the user wants to achieve. This could be in the abstract form of a mission or a more tangible and identifying form of a task or an activity. This paper presents two notions. The first notion is acknowledging that the task or activity performed has a significant focus when designing for context-sensitive and mobile systems ....

Just linear problems with positivity constraints in infinite dimensions. . .