Conflict in Russian Genitive Plural Assignment: a Solution Represented in DATR

Inflectional endings are assigned in languages by general principles, but these can come into conflict. We address the question of how such conflict is resolved. A particularly complex example is the Russian genitive plural, where we find that with soft-stem nouns there is a conflict between exponent assignment according to declension class and a default exponent assignment for soft-stem nouns. What is specially interesting is that the conflict here can be resolved by reference to subsystems over and above the paradigm, such as stress. We present an explicit account of the conflict and its mediation by basing our study on default inheritance. For this purpose we make use of the lexical knowledge representation language DATR. This allows us to demonstrate in the output provided that the correct forms are indeed predicted by our theory

The Value of Public Sector Annual Reports and Annual Reporting Awards as a Signal of Management Performance

Australian public sector reforms have emphasised the accountability of agencies for the performance of management. Despite considerable diversity in public sector organisations, annual reports have been promoted as an appropriate tool to discharge the accountability of all government agencies. However, there remains an absence of consistent empirical evidence as to the value of the annual report for reporting on management performance. Further, debates about the role of public sector annual reports often become intertwined with notions of the quality of reports. Prior research has investigated the incentives of agencies to enter annual reporting awards as a means of signalling the quality of management. However, the research ignores the possibility that the value of annual reports to discharge performance accountability and the value of entry into an annual reporting award may vary depending on the type of public sector agency and on the relationships between stakeholders. This study focuses on the Queensland public sector and the Queensland Annual Reporting Award (QARA) and uses a series of case studies to examine the value of the annual report as a means of discharging accountabilities. The results reveal a cross sectional variation in the perceived value of the annual report in discharging accountabilities. In some cases it was thought that alternative forms of communication provided a more suitable means to discharge the accountability demands of stakeholders. Further, while annual reporting awards provide a mechanism to supply a credible signal of quality, it will only be used in those situations where the participants identify direct benefits of entry

Archi as a basis for comparing different frameworks

Abstract The set of agreement problems presented by Archi test the adequacy of available infrastructure in theoretical models of agreement and reveal the basic similarities that underpin different approaches. This three-way comparison of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), and Minimalism exposes the strengths and weaknesses of each theory by comparing their accounts of specific empirical problems. To this end, the behaviour of numeral phrases provides good insight into NP/DP agreement and canonical clausal agreement, while the accounts of biabsolutive constructions tackle a more unusual syntactic problem. Examining the generality of the theoretical apparatus (in terms of how much new infrastructure has to be introduced to deal with the problem sets) and predictive ability (namely, the extent to which the relative restrictiveness of the approaches is beneficial or inadequate in dealing with ‘highly complex’ systems of agreement) helps us understand fundamental differences between each of the frameworks.</jats:p

Deleterious Associations of Sitting Time and Television Viewing Time With Cardiometabolic Risk Biomarkers: Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle (AusDiab) study 2004–2005

OBJECTIVE - We examined the associations Of Sitting time and television (TV) Viewing time with continuously measured biomarkers of cardio-metabolic risk in Australian adults