Claude Levi-Strauss reminds us that “the notion of humanity, encompassing, without distinction race or civilization, all forms the human species, is a recent phenomenon and limited expansion … But for major part dozens millennia, this appears totally absent. Humanity stops at frontiers tribe, language group, often even village …” (Finkielkraut 1996, 1).

The recently recognized aetosaur Tecovasuchus chatterjeei Martz and Small occurs at several localities in lower Chinle Group strata across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Based on lithostratigraphic correlation and other vertebrate occurrences, all Tecovasuchus occurrences are of Adamanian age. Indeed, all occurrences are consistent with assignment to the St. Johnsian sub-land vertebrate faunac...

A key challenge faced by children in vocabulary acquisition is learning which of the many possible meanings is appropriate for a word. The word generalization problem refers to how children associate a word such as dog with a meaning at the appropriate category level in the taxonomy of objects, such as Dalmatians, dogs, or animals. We present extensions to a cross-situational learner that enabl...

We present an analysis of parser performance on speech data, comparing word type and token frequency distributions with written data, and evaluating parse accuracy by length of input string. We find that parser performance tends to deteriorate with increasing length of string, more so for spoken than for written texts. We train an alternative parsing model with added speech data and demonstrate...

A particularly important form of token-reflexive symbol is found in the tenses of verbs. The tenses determine time with reference to the time point of the act of speech, i.e., of the token uttered. A closer analysis reveals that the time indication given by the tenses is of a rather complex structure. Let us call the time point of the token the point of speech. Then the three indications, ‘befo...