Given a variety of finite monoids V, a subset of a monoid is a V-subset if its syntactic monoid belongs to V. A function between two monoids is V-preserving if it preservesV-subsets under preimages and it is hereditary V-preserving if it is W-preserving for every subvariety W of V. The aim of this paper is to study hereditary V-preserving functions when V is one of the following varieties of fi...

We solve two open problems concerning syntactic complexity: We prove that the cardinality of the syntactic semigroup of a left ideal or a suffix-closed language with n left quotients (that is, with state complexity n) is at most n n−1 + n − 1, and that of a two-sided ideal or a factor-closed language is at most n n−2 + (n − 2)2 n−2 + 1. Since these bounds are known to be reachable, this settles...

— Some synchronizing properties of"very pure" subsemigroups ofafree semigroup are shown by means of an analysis of the properties of their syntactic semigroups. Résumé. — On démontre certaines propriétés de synchronisation pour les sous-semigroupes « très purs » d'un semigroupe libre, en analysant les propriétés de leurs semigroupes syntactiques.

A right ideal is a language L over an alphabet Σ that satisfies L = LΣ∗. We show that there exists a stream (sequence) (Rn | n > 3) of regular right ideal languages, where Rn has n left quotients and is most complex under the following measures of complexity: the state complexities of the left quotients, the number of atoms (intersections of complemented and uncomplemented left quotients), the ...

We give a new proof of Salvati’s theorem that the group language O2 is 2 multiple context free. Unlike Salvati’s proof, our arguments do not use any idea specific to two-dimensions. This raises the possibility that the argument might generalize to On.

The aim of this paper is to examine the kind of evidence that might be adduced in support of relativist semantics of a kind that have recently been proposed for predicates of personal taste, for epistemic modals, for knowledge attributions and for other cases. I shall concentrate on the case of taste predicates, but what I have to say is easily transposed to the other cases just mentioned. I sh...

Sentence comprehension requires the integration of both syntactic and semantic information, the acquisition of which seems to have different trajectories in the developing brain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined the neural correlates underlying syntactic and semantic processing during auditory sentence comprehension as well as its development in preschool children by man...

This study examines second language (L2) syntactic development in conjunction with the effects such development has on human judgments of writing quality (i.e., judgments of both overall writing proficiency and more fine-grained judgments of syntactic proficiency). Essays collected from 57 L2 learners in a longitudinal study were analyzed for growth and scoring patterns using syntactic complexi...

the meaning of an idiomatic expression cannot be transparently worked out from the meanings of its constituent words due to its figurative and unpredictable nature. consequently, the syntactic composition and the structural paradigm of an idiomatic expression are supposed to be the same in every context. however, this is not the case in the institutionalized second language varieties of english...