0. Introduction Previous analyses of the use of English definite descriptions have generally taken one of two approaches, loosely characterizable as familiarity and uniqueness. That is, felicitous use of the definite article has been argued to require that the referent of the NP be either known to the hearer within the current context of utterance (e.g. Heim 1983, Prince 1992) or uniquely ident...

Recent theories of metrical structure in Optimality Theory differ starkly in whether feet can be aligned gradiently (McCarthy and Prince 1993, Gordon 2002, Hyde 2002) or only categorically (Kager 2001, 2005, McCarthy 2003, Buckley 2009). Particularly challenging for certain categorical theories are apparent cases of the initial-dactyl effect, where all feet align rightward except for the leftmo...

Kohonen's Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is one of the most popular arti cial neural network algorithms. Word category maps are SOMs that have been organized according to word similarities, measured by the similarity of the short contexts of the words. Conceptually interrelated words tend to fall into the same or neighboring map nodes. Nodes may thus be viewed as word categories. Although no a prior...

The importance of pitch range variation for intonational meaning and theory is well known; however, whether pitch range is a phonetic dimension which is treated categorically in English remains unclear. To test this possibility, three intonation continua varying in pitch range were constructed which had endpoints with contrastive representations under autosegmental-metrical (AM) theory: H* vs. ...

An essential component of soil mapping is classification, a process of assigning spatial soil entities to predefined categories (classes). However, by their nature soils exist as a continuum both in the spatial and attribute domains and often cannot be fitted into discrete categories without introducing errors or at least over-simplification. One approach to mitigate this problem in digital soi...

The ability to distinguish between different types of arguments is central to syntactic analysis, whether studied from a theoretical or computational point of view. This thesis investigates the influence and interaction of linguistic properties of syntactic arguments in argument differentiation. Cross-linguistic generalizations regarding these properties often express probabilistic, or soft, co...

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary and probabilistic theories of grammaticality. Thes...

The validity of a grammatical framework can be verified in at least the three ways: (a) by showing its applicability to wide range of linguistic phenomena, (b) by demonstrating the soundness of its formal foundations, and (c) by verifying its compatibility with experimental evidence. As for Optimality Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993), option (a) has been pursued extensively in the recent ...

ness, possibly as a continuum from optional to obligatory and from gradient to categorical (see Scobbie 2007 for a related proposal). A simplified schematic representation of these continua, representing speaker K3’s (presumed) knowledge of coronal and labial assimilation, is shown in Fig. 6. On the optional/obligatory dimension, both processes are optional (variable), yet differ in the relativ...