• Clause Typing This work is part of a broader project on clause typing undertaken collaboratively with Raffaella Zanuttini. Our work on clause types begins from the following fundamental points: ∗This is part of a project funded by NSF grant BCS-0234278, ‘Clause Types: Form and Force in Grammatical Theory’, to Paul Portner and Raffaella Zanuttini. Miok Pak, and Simon Mauck, our collaborators o...

We present a method for dependency and case structure analysis that captures the consistency between intra-clause relations (i.e., case structures or predicate-argument structures) and inter-clause relations. We assess intra-clause relations on the basis of case frames and inter-clause relations on the basis of transition knowledge between case frames. Both knowledge bases are automatically acq...

In this paper I argue that children generally need relatively little input evidence to set word order parameters. Within a type of Split-CP model of clause structure, where different clause types are assumed to have different heads in the CP domain, I suggest that children make no global search of the primary linguistic data, but scan the input for designated word order cues, focusing exclusive...

In this paper we prove that there exists a Horn clause H such that the problem: given a Horn clause G. Is G a consequence of H ? is not recursive. Equivalently, there exists a one-clause PROLOG program such that there is no PROLOG implementation answering TRUE if the program implies a given goal and FALSE otherwise. We give a short survey of earlier results concerning clause implication and pro...

In the generative literature, clause type effects have typically been modeled in one of two ways—“truncation” whereby embedded clauses are structurally reduced relative to root clauses, and intervention, by which non-root clauses have additional material that blocks movement available in root contexts. This paper analyzes two clause type effects in Basque— the possibility of verb-initial word o...

Many aspects of the relation of different decision tree and DNF complexity measures of Boolean functions have been more or less substantially explored. This paper adds a new detail to the picture: we prove that DNF tautologies with terms conflicting in one or two variables pairwise possess a tree-like structure. An equivalent reformulation of this result (adopting the terminology of [7, 8, 9]) ...

Based on the definition of the relative clause from Song (2001), this paper examines the relative clause in the Hui’an dialect from four parameters: (a) the relativization marker used; (b) the position of the head noun relative to the restricting clause; (c) the role and encoding of the head noun in the restricting clause; and (d) the role and encoding of the head noun in the main clause. The H...

This is the report-version of a mini-series of two articles [60, 61] on the foundations of conjunctive normal forms with non-boolean variables. These two parts are here bundled in one report, each part yielding a chapter. Part I We consider the problem of generalising boolean formulas in conjunctive normal form by allowing non-boolean variables, with the goal of maintaining combinatorial proper...

Chinese event descriptive clause splitting is the task of splitting a complex Chinese sentence into several clauses. In this paper, we present a discriminative approach for Chinese event descriptive clause splitting task. By formulating the Chinese clause splitting task as a sequence labeling problem, we apply the structured SVMs model to Chinese clause splitting. Compared with other two baseli...