Understanding Focus: Pitch, Placement and Coherence

This paper presents a novel account of focal stress and pitch contour in English dialogue. We argue that one should analyse and treat focus and pitch contour jointly, since (i) some pragmatic interpretations vary with contour (e.g., whether an utterance accepts or rejects; or whether it implicates a positive or negative answer); and (ii) there are utterances with identical prosodic focus that in the same context are infelicitous with one contour, but felicitous with another. We offer an account of two distinct pitch contours that predicts the correct felicity judgements and implicatures, outclassing other models in empirical coverage or formality. Prosodic focus triggers a presupposition, where what is presupposed and how the presupposition is resolved depends on prosodic contour. If resolving the presupposition entails the proffered content, then the proffered content is uninteresting and hence the utterance is in-felicitous. Otherwise, resolving the presupposition may lead to an implicature. We regiment this account in SDRT

Natural intensions

There is an attractive way to explain representation in terms of adaptivity: roughly, an item R represents a state of affairs S if it has the proper function of co-occurring with S (that is, if the ancestors of R co-occurred with S and this co-occurrence explains why R was selected for, and thus why R exists now). Although this may be an adequate account of the extension or reference of R, what such explanations often neglect is an account of the intension or sense of R: how S is represented by R. No doubt such an account, if correct, would be complex, involving such things as the proper functions of the mechanisms that use R, the mechanisms by which R fulfills its function, and more. But it seems likely that an important step toward such an account would be the identification of the norms that govern this process. The norms of validity and Bayes' Theorem can guide investigations into the actual inferences and probabilistic reasoning that organisms perform. Is there a norm that can do the same for intension-fixing? I argue that before this can be resolved, some problems with the biosemantic account of extension must be resolved. I attempt to do so by offering a complexity-based account of the natural extension of a representation R: for a given set of ancestral co-occurrences Z, the natural extension is the extension of the least complex intension that best covers Z. Minimal description length is considered as a means for measuring complexity. Some advantages of and problems with the account are identified

Supersymmetry, Naturalness and the Landscape

We argue that the study of the statistics of the landscape of string vacua provides the first potentially predictive -- and also falsifiable -- framework for string theory. The question of whether the theory does or does not predict low energy supersymmetry breaking may well be the most accessible to analysis. We argue that low energy -- possibly very low energy -- supersymmetry breaking is likely to emerge, and enumerate questions which must be answered in order to make a definitive prediction.Comment: Talk at the Pran Nath Fest at Pascos 2004. 16 page

Focus marking in Kikuyu

Im Kikuyu, einer in Kenia gesprochenen Bantusprache, wird Fokus systematisch durch Wortstellung markiert. In dieser Arbeit werden die verschiedenen Varianten der Markierung von Fokus in Frage-Antwortsequenzen dargestellt. Nach einem Überblick über in der Literatur vorhandene Diskussionen des Phänomens wird auf der Grundlage von mit einem Muttersprachler erhobenen Daten eine syntaktische Analyse von Fokuskonstruktionen mit der Partikel ne vorgeschlagen. Ferner werden neue Daten zur Fokussierung verschiedener Satzteile, z.B. der VP, des ganzen Satzes und des Wahrheitswerts, präsentiert. Ziel der Arbeit ist somit, die deskriptive Datenbasis zu Fokuskonstruktionen im Kikuyu zu erweitern und einen theoretischen Beitrag zu ihrer Analyse im Rahmen der generativen Grammatik zu liefern. Die Arbeit wurde im Sommer 2003 als Magisterarbeit an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, angenommen.In Kikuyu, a Bantu language spoken in Kenya, focus is marked systematically by means of word order. In this study, the different possibilities for marking focus in question answer sequences are presented. After an overview of the discussions of the phenomenon in the literature, a syntactic account for focus constructions with the particle ne is proposed. This account is based on original data that was gathered with a native speaker. In addition, new data on focusing different parts of the sentence, e.g. the VP, the entire sentence, or the truth-value, are presented. The aim of this study thus is to broaden the descriptive basis for focus constructions in Kikuyu and to provide a theoretical contribution to their analysis in the framework of generative grammar

Physical limits of inference

I show that physical devices that perform observation, prediction, or recollection share an underlying mathematical structure. I call devices with that structure "inference devices". I present a set of existence and impossibility results concerning inference devices. These results hold independent of the precise physical laws governing our universe. In a limited sense, the impossibility results establish that Laplace was wrong to claim that even in a classical, non-chaotic universe the future can be unerringly predicted, given sufficient knowledge of the present. Alternatively, these impossibility results can be viewed as a non-quantum mechanical "uncertainty principle". Next I explore the close connections between the mathematics of inference devices and of Turing Machines. In particular, the impossibility results for inference devices are similar to the Halting theorem for TM's. Furthermore, one can define an analog of Universal TM's (UTM's) for inference devices. I call those analogs "strong inference devices". I use strong inference devices to define the "inference complexity" of an inference task, which is the analog of the Kolmogorov complexity of computing a string. However no universe can contain more than one strong inference device. So whereas the Kolmogorov complexity of a string is arbitrary up to specification of the UTM, there is no such arbitrariness in the inference complexity of an inference task. I end by discussing the philosophical implications of these results, e.g., for whether the universe "is" a computer.Comment: 43 pages, updated version of Physica D version, which originally appeared in 2007 CNLS conference on unconventional computatio