The celebrated Zeilberger algorithm which finds holonomic recurrence equations for definite sums of hypergeometric terms F (n, k) is extended to certain nonhypergeometric terms. An expression F (n, k) is called hypergeometric term if both F (n + 1, k)/F (n, k) and F (n, k+1)/F (n, k) are rational functions. Typical examples are ratios of products of exponentials, factorials, Γ function terms, b...

Previous studies have shown that children have difficulty inferring intended referents of definite/indefinite determiners: e.g., that ”Give me the ball” implies a specific ball, while ”Give me a ball” requests any ball from a larger set. Here, we show that these findings need not indicate a fragile capacity for pragmatic reasoning because adults only make such inferences within specific context...

This article argues that the Italian plural indefinite article dei and its French counterpart is a partitive structure without an overt numeral. Unlike a similar proposal in (Chierchia 1998a), the present account crucially holds that the definite DP embedded in these ‘defective partitives’ is a kind-denoting DP. This assumption derives the lack of existence presupposition, the absence of cardin...

Positive definite kernels, such as Gaussian Radial Basis Functions (GRBF), have been widely used in computer vision for designing feature extraction and classification algorithms. In many cases nonpositive definite (npd) kernels and non metric similarity/dissimilarity measures naturally arise (e.g., Hausdorff distance, Kullback Leibler Divergences and Compact Support (CS) Kernels). Hence, there...

I conducted three experiments in which I investigated how people use the definite article with entities that have never been explicitly introduced. I claim that using the definite article to determine a particular entity presupposes that that entity has a preestablished discourse referent. If an explicit discourse referent has not been supplied by previous context, additional presuppositions mu...

Free relatives as in the English (1) and similar structures in other languages have been described as having definite or universal interpretation (Jacobson 1995, a.o.). They act as DPs and are islands for extraction. We will refer to this type of free relative as definite FRs. In addition to this cross-linguistically common definite FR construction, some languages also have a second free-relati...