A Bi-Polar Theory of Nominal and Clause Structure and Function

It is taken as axiomatic that grammar encodes meaning. Two key dimensions of meaning that get grammatically encoded are referential meaning and relational meaning. The key claim is that, in English, these two dimensions of meaning are typically encoded in distinct grammatical poles—a referential pole and a relational pole—with a specifier functioning as the locus of the referential pole and a head functioning as the locus of the relational pole. Specifiers and heads combine to form referring expressions corresponding to the syntactic notion of a maximal projection. Lexical items and expressions functioning as modifiers are preferentially attracted to one pole or the other. If the head of an expression describes a relation, one or more complements may be associated with the head. The four grammatical functions specifier, head, modifier and complement are generally adequate to represent much of the basic structure and function of nominals and clauses. These terms are borrowed from X-Bar Theory, but they are motivated on semantic grounds having to do with their grammatical function to encode referential and relational meaning

Everett's "Many-Worlds" Proposal

Hugh Everett III proposed that a quantum measurement can be treated as an interaction that correlates microscopic and macroscopic systems—particularly when the experimenter herself is included among those macroscopic systems. It has been difficult, however, to determine precisely what this proposal amounts to. Almost without exception, commentators have held that there are ambiguities in Everett’s theory of measurement that result from significant—even embarrassing—omissions. In the present paper, we resist the conclusion that Everett’s proposal is incomplete, and we develop a close reading that accounts for apparent oversights. We begin by taking a look at how Everett set up his project—his method and his criterion of success. Illuminating parallels are found between Everett’s method and then-contemporary thought regarding inter-theoretic reduction. Also, from unpublished papers and correspondence, we are able to piece together how Everett judged the success of his theory of measurement, which completes our account of his intended contribution to the resolution of the quantum measurement problem

Statistical mechanics of ontology based annotations

We present a statistical mechanical theory of the process of annotating an object with terms selected from an ontology. The term selection process is formulated as an ideal lattice gas model, but in a highly structured inhomogeneous field. The model enables us to explain patterns recently observed in real-world annotation data sets, in terms of the underlying graph structure of the ontology. By relating the external field strengths to the information content of each node in the ontology graph, the statistical mechanical model also allows us to propose a number of practical metrics for assessing the quality of both the ontology, and the annotations that arise from its use. Using the statistical mechanical formalism we also study an ensemble of ontologies of differing size and complexity; an analysis not readily performed using real data alone. Focusing on regular tree ontology graphs we uncover a rich set of scaling laws describing the growth in the optimal ontology size as the number of objects being annotated increases. In doing so we provide a further possible measure for assessment of ontologies.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figure

The interaction of question particles and negation in embedded contexts: the case of alles

The German question particle alles (Reis 1992; Zimmermann 2007) is characterised in the semantic literature as imposing plurality and exhaustivity requirements on the answer space. We report on novel experimental probing the interaction of alles and negation in embedded questions. We investigated alles with three embedding predicates: vergessen 'forget', wissen 'know', and überraschen 'surprise'. The data show that alles may be focussed and contributes to at-issue propositional content, on the basis of its interaction with negation

Does Mandarin dou ever have rightward associates?

The Mandarin quantificational adverb dou 都 is well-known for its versatility: it occurs in a wide variety of constructions, and has a wide range of s emantic and pragmatic contributions to the meaning of the clause it occurs in, ranging from un iversal quantification, through even- type focusing, to clearly pragmatic-attitudinal functions. This pa per targets a relatively narrow segment of this wid e spectrum: those use of dou where (i) it is used with universal quantification al force, and/but (ii) the linguistic expression often associated with its qua ntification domain in the literature appears to its right in the clause, as opposed to the much more usual s cenario of its associate taking a position to its left . It is shown that the alleged associates to its ri ght are in fact not its true associates syntactically, at least not in the manner that its leftward associates are: (i) the ’personal pronoun’ construction in fact complies with the LC, making u se of covert elements; (ii) in the ’kind-denoting N P’ construction the associate of dou , providing it with a variable to bind, is the VP, rather than the kind- denoting NP; (iii) in the ’wh-pronoun’ construction dou is an adverb functioning as a discourse particle, it takes no associate, binds no variable, but modifies the meaning of the question by adding two congruency requirements (plurality, exhaustivit y). Some remaining questions are addressed in a very tentative manner in an Appendix

Thermodynamic efficiency of information and heat flow

A basic task of information processing is information transfer (flow). Here we study a pair of Brownian particles each coupled to a thermal bath at temperature $T_1$ and $T_2$, respectively. The information flow in such a system is defined via the time-shifted mutual information. The information flow nullifies at equilibrium, and its efficiency is defined as the ratio of flow over the total entropy production in the system. For a stationary state the information flows from higher to lower temperatures, and its the efficiency is bound from above by $\frac{{\rm max}[T_1,T_2]}{|T_1-T_2|}$. This upper bound is imposed by the second law and it quantifies the thermodynamic cost for information flow in the present class of systems. It can be reached in the adiabatic situation, where the particles have widely different characteristic times. The efficiency of heat flow|defined as the heat flow over the total amount of dissipated heat|is limited from above by the same factor. There is a complementarity between heat- and information-flow: the setup which is most efficient for the former is the least efficient for the latter and {\it vice versa}. The above bound for the efficiency can be [transiently] overcome in certain non-stationary situations, but the efficiency is still limited from above. We study yet another measure of information-processing [transfer entropy] proposed in literature. Though this measure does not require any thermodynamic cost, the information flow and transfer entropy are shown to be intimately related for stationary states.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figur