Restructured Niger-Congo gender systems as another type of concurrent nominal classification

Recent research looks increasingly at languages with more than one system of nominal classification and first systematic typological assessments of so-called “concurrent noun classification” exist with a focus on cases involving classifiers and gender. We elaborate on this work by dealing with Niger-Congo languages that have restructured their inherited noun classification in a particular way. The inherited system entailing a strong parallelism between agreement-based gender and affix-based noun inflections shifted toward one where the gender system is reduced to an animacy-based opposition while nominal inflection maintains a considerable amount of original complexity with semantic criteria beyond those of the innovative gender distinction. While the phenomenon as such is not a new discovery, its typological relevance has gone unrecognized so far. We argue that such cases of restructured gender systems in Niger-Congo prima facie suggest themselves as candidates for a new type of concurrent noun classification, both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. We present a detailed description of the phenomenon in the Guang language Gonja and determine whether or how it can be integrated in the available typology. We also survey its wider distribution and discuss some recurrent historical aspects of its emergence in the family.Deutsche ForschungsgemeinschaftPeer Reviewe

Approaches to High-Level Programming and Prototyping of Concurrent Applications

Concurrent programming is conceptually harder to undertake and to understand than sequential programming, because a programmer has to manage the coexistence and coordination of multiple concurrent activities. To alleviate this task several high-level approaches to concurrent programming have been developed. For some high-level programming approaches, prototyping for facilitating early evaluation of new ideas is a central goal. Prototyping is used to explore the essential features of a proposed system through practical experimentation before its actual implementation to make the correct design choices early in the process of software development. Approaches to prototyping concurrent applications with very high-level programming systems intend to alleviate the development of parallel algorithms in quite different ways. Early experimentation with alternate design choices or problem decompositions for concurrent applications is suggested to make concurrent programming easier. This paper presents a survey of approaches to high-level programming and prototyping of concurrent applications to review the state of the art in this area. The surveyed approaches are classified with respect to the prototyping process

Workshop on Modelling of Objects, Components, and Agents, Aarhus, Denmark, August 27-28, 2001

This booklet contains the proceedings of the workshop Modelling of Objects, Components, and Agents (MOCA'01), August 27-28, 2001. The workshop is organised by the CPN group at the Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark and the "Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science" Group at the University of Hamburg, Germany. The papers are also available in electronic form via the web pages: http://www.daimi.au.dk/CPnets/workshop01

Synthesis of asynchronous controllers using integer linear programming

A novel strategy for the logic synthesis of asynchronous control circuits is presented. It is based on the structural theory of Petri nets and integer linear programming. Techniques that are capable of checking implementability conditions, such as complete state coding, and deriving a gate netlist to implement the specified behavior are presented. These techniques can handle Petri net specifications consisting of several thousands of transitions and provide a significant speed-up compared with techniques that have previously been proposed.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Coloured Petri Nets - a Pragmatic Formal Method for Designing and Analysing Distributed Systems

The thesis consists of six individual papers, where the present paper contains the mandatory overview, while the remaining five papers are found separately from the overview. The five papers can roughly be divided into three areas of research, namely case studies, education, and extensions to the CPN method.The primary purpose of the PhD thesis is to study the pragmatics, practical aspects, and intuition of CP-nets viewed as a formal method for describing and reasoning about concurrent systems. The perspective of pragmatics is our leitmotif, but at the same time in the context of CP-nets it is a kind of hypothesis of this thesis. This overview paper summarises the research conducted as an investigation of the hypothesis in the three areas of case studies, education, and extensions.The provoking claim of pragmatics should not be underestimated. In the present overview of the thesis, the CPN method is compared with a representative selection of formal methods. The graphics and simplicity of semantics, yet generality and expressiveness of the language constructs, essentially makes CP-nets a viable and attractive alternative to other formal methods. Similar graphical formal methods, such as SDL and Statecharts, typically have significantly more complicated semantics, or are domain-specific languages.research conducted in this thesis, opens a new complex of problems. Firstly, to get wider acceptance of CP-nets in industry, it is important to identify fruitful areas for the effective introduction of the CPN method. Secondly, it would be useful to identify a few extensions to the CPN method inspired by specific domains for easier adaption in industry. Thirdly, which analysis methods do future systems make use of