The English definite and indefinite articles (also known as determiners) are a useful index of early morphosyntactic productivity in children’s speech, and give evidence about children’s representation of syntactic abstractions. Previous work (i.e. Pine & Lieven, 1997) used a measure of productivity that shows a strong sensitivity to sample size and does not account for the relationship between...

We say that a symmetric matrix K is quasi-definite if it has the form K = [ −E AT A F ] where E and F are symmetric positive definite matrices. Although such matrices are indefinite, we show that any symmetric permutation of a quasi-definite matrix yields a factorization LDLT . We apply this result to obtain a new approach for solving the symmetric indefinite systems arising in interior-point m...

Davis, Gillon and Matthewson (hereafter Davis et al) argue that “hypothesisdriven fieldwork has led to a more complete and accurate picture of linguistic diversity than has been produced by methods which rely largely on extracting information from existing descriptive grammars”. They discuss five cases to support their conclusion. In this response, I will discuss only one of these cases, since ...

As several linguists have pointed out, the occurrence of indefinite subject NPs (in initial or preverbal position) is more restricted than the occurrence of definite ones. There seems to be a widespread typological preference for definite preverbal subjects, and some languages (Arabic, for instance) even forbid the presence of preverbal indefinite subjects. Other languages (such as English or S...

This paper focuses on teaching the use of indefinite articles ‘a’ and ‘an’ appropriately to students who have had their schooling from Hindi medium schools are presently pursuing bachelor diploma courses. It was seen that these fail correct before English words because lack knowledge consonant vowel sounds in language, further solve this issue a technique introduced where they could prior assoc...

In this paper we present a novel explanation of the source of indefinite information in common sense reasoning: Indefinite information arises from reports about the world expressed in terms of concepts that have been defined using only definite rules. Adopting this point of view, we show that first-order logic is insufficiently expressive to handle important examples of common sense reasoning. ...

The present article argues that the idea of morphology-driven syntax carries over to first-language acquisition. Morphology encodes properties of functional categories, i.e. particular features and feature values that must be set according to the target (adult) language during the acquisition process. In agreement with previous findings concerning the acquisition of functional categories in the...

In 2005, DeLong, Urbach, and Kutas took advantage of the a/an English indefinite article phonological alternation and the sensitivities of the N400 ERP component to show that readers can neurally preactivate individual words of a sentence (including nouns and their prenominal indefinite articles) in a graded fashion with a likelihood estimated from the words' offline probabilities as sentence c...