• 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...

Observers see a white triangle on the top of three black disks; the white triangle appears lighter, although it has the same luminance of the white background. Also squared or irregular “anomalous” figures can be created (Kanizsa & Gerbino, 1987). Several competing explanations have been put forward for the effect (Dumais, & Bradley, 1976; Coren, 1991; Ramachandran & Rogers-Ramachandran, 2005),...

Selman and Kautz’s work on “knowledge compilation” established how approximation (strengthening and/or weakening) of a propositional knowledge-base can be used to speed up query processing, at the expense of completeness. In this classical approach, querying uses Horn overand under-approximations of a given knowledge-base, which is represented as a propositional formula in conjunctive normal fo...

Selman and Kautz’s work on knowledge compilation has established how approximation (strengthening and/or weakening) of a propositional knowledgebase can be used to speed up query processing, at the expense of completeness. In the classical approach, the knowledge-base is assumed to be presented as a propositional formula in conjunctive normal form (CNF), and Horn functions are used to overand u...

Research on the syntax of negation has produced a lively debate in the literature. One of the central issues concerns the status of NegP functional projections exist in the phrase structure of natural language (see Pollock 1989, Laka 1994, Haegeman 1995, Zanuttini 1991, 1997), or whether negation elements should be more properly assimilated to adverbial (modificatory) phrases (cf. Holmberg and ...

In a recent review of the cartographic approach to syntactic structures, Cinque & Rizzi (2010) suggested the possibility that functional hierarchies might be the reflex of semantic principles of compositionality which have been grammaticalized. This view carries the implicit assumption that the relation between LF and PF is isomorphic, at last for what concerns clausal operators. However, this ...

Two major approaches to n-words, e.g., no and never in (1) below, have been pursued in the previous literature. The negative indefinite (NI) approach takes n-words to be indefinite expressions within the scope of a sentential negation operator (Penka, 2007, Zeijlstra, 2004, Tubau, 2008:a.o.) and analyzes sentence (1a) below as shown in (2). The negative quantifier (NQ) approach takes n-words to...

To tackle the potentially hard task of defining the reward function in a Markov Decision Process (MDPs), a new approach, called Interactive Value Iteration (IVI) has recently been proposed by Weng and Zanuttini (2013). This solving method, which interweaves elicitation and optimization phases, computes a (near) optimal policy without knowing the precise reward values. The procedure as originall...

To tackle the potentially hard task of defining the reward function in a Markov Decision Process (MDPs), a new approach, called Interactive Value Iteration (IVI) has recently been proposed by Weng and Zanuttini (2013). This solving method, which interweaves elicitation and optimization phases, computes a (near) optimal policy without knowing the precise reward values. The procedure as originall...