Relational Predicates Research Articles

Categorizing concept predications and participations in Platonic dialogues

The Platonic work, extended to a lot of dialogues, could be used among others as an analytical instruction of the nature of participation given through various types of predication relations. This article focuses on the identification of the implicit and explicit predications (seen as participations) dispersed in the Platonic work. Nine distinct categories have been found and each of then is comprised of certain structures, carrying distinguishable meanings. Ordinary predication, Pauline predication, identity, difference, otherness and definition are included, while the various senses of self-predication and self-participation are presented. Lastly, concept maps of mutual relations between selected ideas are exhibited in a software ontology environment.

A ‘big DP’ analysis of Russian copular constructions with <em>èto</em>

This paper develops a novel analysis of èto copular constructions in Russian. First, we address ‘NOMpre èto NOMpost’ constructions, where NOM is a nominative noun phrase. We propose that there are two predication relations established in such clauses: one on the clausal level, with NOMpost being the subject of predication, and another one within the constituent headed by èto. The latter, we argue, constitutes a ‘big DP’: it contains NOMpre in the specifier position and pro in the complement position of D0; a predication relation is established between the two with the help of the predicativizer èto. The analysis is extended to account for ‘èto NOMpost’ constructions. The proposal goes against treating èto in ‘(NOMpre) èto NOMpost’ constructions as the subject of predication or as a dedicated functional head on the clausal spine; it also explicitly rejects treating NOMpre in all ‘(NOMpre) èto NOMpost’ constructions as a hanging topic. The proposed analysis captures all the relevant properties of èto constructions and makes important predictions about their distribution, the agreement pattern, and the properties of NOMpost. The ‘big DP’ approach also allows us to establish a link between èto copular constructions and specificational pseudo-clefts.

Embodied semantic parameters for the lexical representation of spatial relational categories

Abstract This paper proposes an explanatory model for the lexical representation of the native speakers’ lexical knowledge of English prepositions. Lexical knowledge of prepositions as relational predicates includes argument structure (trajector-landmark) as in Cognitive Grammar, situation types (position vs state) as in Functional Grammar, lexical hierarchies (spatial subdomains) based on semantic primitives, as in Natural Semantic Metalanguage, and embodied perceptual parameters configured in four dimensions, namely, geometry, topology, force-dynamics and function (from Cognitive Linguistics). This model is illustrated here by expounding three lexical templates compatible with constructional templates in the Lexical Constructional Model, representing the semantic decomposition of English prepositions at, on and in.

Are modal verbs adverbs?

Morphologically, a modal verb is nothing more than a verb since it carries time, mood and person. However, from a functionalist perspective, we observe that the content of a modal verb, like that of an adverb, affects the relation of predication. This behavior is clearly not that of a verb, but rather that of an adverb. This somewhat iconoclastic view is made possible by the functionalist model, as well as by Tesnière’s concept of transfer (translation), which posits that words cannot be reduced to morphological entities. Moreover, this conception echoes an intuition of G. Guillaume, who defines the adverb as an incidence to an incidence.

Особливості формування дієслівної лексики у дошкільників з загальним недорозвитком мовлення шляхом розвитку умінь дієслівної предикації

The article highlights the methodological aspects of speech therapy work on the formation of verb vocabulary in preschoolers with generalized underdevelopment of speech. A structured methodology aimed at developing verb compatibility skills is substantiated, methodological techniques are defined, their content and methodological support are developed. Attention is focused on the importance of predicative relations for the development of syntactic structures and the role of verbal predication is taken into account. According to the authors, when forming verbal vocabulary in preschoolers with speech underdevelopment, it is necessary to activate the ability to use predicative units variably, to be guided by their lexical-semantic and contextual-semantic features. The use of associative relations between lexemes is proposed and their types are taken into account. It is taken into account that the acquisition of lexical semantics occurs through a number of mental operations: determination of semantic features of a speech and language situation, establishment of structural relations; coordination of a semantic element with linguistic means; comparison of features of objects of reality; generalization of different meanings of a word and establishment of a system of relations between words. The author's methodology of forming verb vocabulary is based on modern research in the fields of speech therapy, psycholinguistics, linguodidactics and includes actualization and accumulation of verbal vocabulary at the denotative, categorical, and contextual levels; formation of verbal variability of different types (with visual and auditory reinforcement, based on mnemonic processes; contextual and semantic variability; intuitive and practical variability); formation of verbal compatibility and verbal valence; stimulation of associative relations mediated by verbal vocabulary.

Transitivity and polysemy of the Verb in Romanian Language

The present article studies the semantic-syntactic structure of polysemantic verbs, following the stratification of their meanings. Analyzing the syntactic neighborhoods of a certain polysemantic verb, with the matrix of obligatory thematic roles, characteristic for actantial, circumstantial or predicative relations, we notice that in the process of functioning, various transformational processes of a different nature take place. Following the research, it was found that these transformations modify the argumentative structure of the verb at the referential level, changing its semantic-syntactic structure, which allows it to pass from one semantic class to another to fully reveal its communicative role. Responsible for these would be the phenomenon of actantial derivation. Only two forms of actantial derivation were discussed – transitivization and intransitivization – given that transitivity, an unmarked semantic feature, influences the ability of the verb to accumulate meanings with different syntactic patterns. It was found that there is an obvious oscillation between the positive or negative marking of transitivity and the realization of a verb as intransitive or transitive. The phenomenon of free syntactic variation also participates in the diversification of the syntactic structure of a polysemantic verb, which allows the operation of semantically equivalent but syntactically different variants.

On the Syntax of Existential Sentences in Standard Arabic

Existential sentences are noncanonical sentences that express the (non)existence of an entity. They have not received considerable attention in Standard Arabic (SA). This paper, thus, aims to propose a syntactic analysis of SA existential sentences. We first discuss the key grammatical properties of the four syntactic items, namely the copular verb, the expletive hunaaka, the pivot, and the coda phrase, that comprise the SA existential sentence. The expletive and the pivot are obligatory items in the structure, whereas the copular verb and the coda are optional. In our proposed analysis, we assume that the expletive is inserted in the Spec-TP to satisfy the EPP feature on T. We argue for the presence of a predicate phrase headed by Pred which hosts the pivot in its specifier and takes a null existential predicate as its complement. The fact that the expletive must precede the pivot and the locality requirement of the predication relation support locating the pivot in the Spec-PredP. We also assume that the coda is an adjunct, which is supported by its optionality and its inability to function as an NP. The conclusions reached may contribute to the ongoing discussion of existential constructions by presenting the perspective of SA.

TeCre: A Novel Temporal Conflict Resolution Method Based on Temporal Knowledge Graph Embedding

Since the facts in the knowledge graph (KG) cannot be updated automatically over time, some facts have temporal conflicts. To discover and eliminate the temporal conflicts in the KG, this paper proposes a novel temporal conflict resolution method based on temporal KG embedding (named TeCre). Firstly, the predicate relation and timestamp information of time series are incorporated into the entity–relation embedding representation by leveraging the temporal KG embedding (KGE) method. Then, taking into account the chronological sequence of the evolution of the entity–relation representation over time, TeCre constrains the temporal relation in the KG according to the principles of time disjoint, time precedence, and time mutually exclusive constraints. Besides that, TeCre further considers the sequence vectorization of predicate relation to discover the temporal conflict facts in the KG. Finally, to eliminate the temporal conflict facts, TeCre deletes the tail entities of the temporal conflict facts, and employs the link prediction method to complete the missing tail entities according to the output of the score function based on the entity–relation embedding. Experimental results on four public datasets show that TeCre is significantly better than the state-of-the-art temporal KG conflict resolution model. The mean reciprocal ranking (MRR) and Hits@10 of TeCre are at least 5.46% and 3.2% higher than the baseline methods, respectively.

« La Russie n’est pas un adversaire ». Négation et construction du sens social dans la presse d’information

The aim of the article is to show the role of syntactic negation ne pas in the construction of Russia’s social meaning in the French press discourse. The analysis allowed to distinguish three most common uses of negation: negation related to relational predicates, the effect of which is the remodeling of social meaning; negation in attributive sentences with a proper name as predicate, leading to indirect characterization of the referent; and negation of scalar predicates, which at first glance has an attenuation value, and simultaneously masks the features of the referent.

TBRm: A Time Representation Method for Industrial Knowledge Graph

With the development of the artificial intelligence industry, Knowledge Graph (KG), as a concise and intuitive data presentation form, has received extensive attention and research from both academia and industry in recent years. At the same time, developments in the Internet of Things (IoT) have empowered modern industries to implement large-scale IoT ecosystems, such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Using knowledge graphs (KG) to process data from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a research field worthy of attention, but most of the researched knowledge graph technologies are mainly concentrated in the field of static knowledge graphs, which are composed of triples. In fact, many graphs also contain some dynamic information, such as time changes at points and time changes at edges; such knowledge graphs are called Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs). We consider the temporal knowledge graph based on the projection and change of space. In order to combine the temporal information, we propose a new representation of the temporal knowledge graph, namely TBRm, which increases the temporal dimension of the translational distance model and utilizes relational predicates in time add representation in time dimension. We evaluate the proposed method on knowledge graph completion tasks using four benchmark datasets. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of TBRm representation in the temporal dimension. At the same time, it is also practiced on a network security data set of the Industrial Internet of Things. The practical results prove that the TBRm method can achieve good performance in terms of the degree of harm to IIoT network security.

Exploiting lexical patterns for knowledge graph construction from unstructured text in Spanish

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are useful data structures for the integration, retrieval, dissemination, and inference of information in various information domains. One of the main challenges in building KGs is the extraction of named entities (nodes) and their relations (edges), particularly when processing unstructured text as it has no semantic descriptions. Generating KGs from texts written in Spanish represents a research challenge as the existing structures, models, and strategies designed for other languages are not compatible in this scenario. This paper proposes a method to design and construct KGs from unstructured text in Spanish. We defined lexical patterns to extract named entities and (non) taxonomic, equivalence, and composition relations. Next, named entities are linked and enriched with DBpedia resources through a strategy based on SPARQL queries. Finally, OWL properties are defined from the predicate relations for creating resource description framework (RDF) triples. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method to determine the degree of elements extracted from the input text and to assess their quality through standard information retrieval measures. The evaluation revealed the feasibility of the proposed method to extract RDF triples from datasets in general and computer science domains. Competitive results were observed by comparing our method regarding an existing approach from the literature.

Demonstrating quest

Machine learning models are everywhere now; but only few of them are transparent in how they work. To remedy this, local explanations aim to show users how and why learned models produce a certain output for a given input (data sample). However, most existing approaches are oriented around images or text data and, thus, cannot leverage the structure and properties of tabular data. Therefore, we demonstrate Quest, a new framework for generating explanations that are a better fit for tabular data. The main idea is to create explanations in the form of relational predicates (called queries hereafter) that approximate the behavior of a classifier around the given sample. For this demo, we use Quest on different synthetic and real-world tabular data sets and pair it with a user interface intended to be used during model development by a data scientist working on classification models.

ENGLISH PREDICATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS: STRUCTURE AND TYPES

This paper deals with the typology of predicative constructions in the English language based on their structure. It provides a theoretical overview of the existing standpoints as for the above mentioned language phenomenon, specifying the structure of the English predicative constructions, and determining their types. Any predicative construction consists of two parts – nominal + verbal. Between the two parts of the predicative construction there is a secondary predicative relation, i.e. the relation similar to that as the subject and the predicate have. The predicative construction may be used only when there are two different doers of the actions in the sentence. As soon as there are three types of verbals in English (the Infinitive, the Gerund, and the Participle), it is only logical to identify infinitival, gerundial, and participial predicative constructions: there is no predicative construction without a verbal, and then the name of the construction indicates the type of the verbal used in it. As a result of the study eleven types of predicative constructions were defined, namely: two gerundial types (Gerundial and Half-Gerundial), three infinitival types (Objective Infinitive, Subjective Infinitive, and For-to-Infinitive), six participial types (Objective Participial, Subjective Participial, Nominative Absolute Participial, Prepositional Absolute Participial, and two purely absolute constructions where there is no explicit verbal constituent but it is implied and can be easily restored – Nominative Absolute (Participial) and Prepositional Absolute (Participial)). The paper is believed to be of practical use for future translators / interpreters and English-language teachers, for it gives both an overall idea of a predicative construction as of an English language economy means and syntactic functions of all predicative constructions in the sentence.

Who does what to whom? graph representations of action-predication in speech relate to psychopathological dimensions of psychosis

Graphical representations of speech generate powerful computational measures related to psychosis. Previous studies have mostly relied on structural relations between words as the basis of graph formation, i.e., connecting each word to the next in a sequence of words. Here, we introduced a method of graph formation grounded in semantic relationships by identifying elements that act upon each other (action relation) and the contents of those actions (predication relation). Speech from picture descriptions and open-ended narrative tasks were collected from a cross-diagnostic group of healthy volunteers and people with psychotic or non-psychotic disorders. Recordings were transcribed and underwent automated language processing, including semantic role labeling to identify action and predication relations. Structural and semantic graph features were computed using static and dynamic (moving-window) techniques. Compared to structural graphs, semantic graphs were more strongly correlated with dimensional psychosis symptoms. Dynamic features also outperformed static features, and samples from picture descriptions yielded larger effect sizes than narrative responses for psychosis diagnoses and symptom dimensions. Overall, semantic graphs captured unique and clinically meaningful information about psychosis and related symptom dimensions. These features, particularly when derived from semi-structured tasks using dynamic measurement, are meaningful additions to the repertoire of computational linguistic methods in psychiatry.

RSSGG_CS: Remote Sensing Image Scene Graph Generation by Fusing Contextual Information and Statistical Knowledge

To semantically understand remote sensing images, it is not only necessary to detect the objects in them but also to recognize the semantic relationships between the instances. Scene graph generation aims to represent the image as a semantic structural graph, where objects and relationships between them are described as nodes and edges, respectively. Some existing methods rely only on visual features to sequentially predict the relationships between objects, ignoring contextual information and making it difficult to generate high-quality scene graphs, especially for remote sensing images. Therefore, we propose a novel model for remote sensing image scene graph generation by fusing contextual information and statistical knowledge, namely RSSGG_CS. To integrate contextual information and calculate attention among all objects, the RSSGG_CS model adopts a filter module (FiM) that is based on adjusted transformer architecture. Moreover, to reduce the blindness of the model when searching semantic space, statistical knowledge of relational predicates between objects from the training dataset and the cleaned Wikipedia text is used as supervision when training the model. Experiments show that fusing contextual information and statistical knowledge allows the model to generate more complete scene graphs of remote sensing images and facilitates the semantic understanding of remote sensing images.

An evaluation of collocations used by children between 4.0 and 6.0 years old

The purpose of this work is to determine how widely and in which semantic and morphologic categories, word associations are used by children. There is no study about word associations children use in the acquisition of Turkish as their mother tongue. Participants of the current research consisted of a total of 90 kids between 4.0 and 6.0 years of age in 3 different cities in Turkey based on easy accessibility. The data obtained by transferring oral language texts produced by children in their natural habitat to the computer environment was analyzed by evaluating according to their age brackets. Semantic categories are free-combinations, collocations (sub-categories; semi-restricted collocations, restricted collocations, figurative idioms and pure idioms) and co-creations. Morphologic categories are determined as rigid noun phrases, predicative relations, and phrasal templates. As a result, it was seen that the production of children in the participation group increases as age increases. Generally, it is seen that children in the 6.0 age group produce more complete word associations compared to lower age groups. Word association productions of 6.0-year-old children are more than the total word association productions of children in 4.0 and 5.0. It was determined that children perform productions in the free-combination category the most between semantic categories, and they make up predicative relations the most between morphologic categories. This result matches theories of development and acquisition and the characteristics of Turkish.

Aristotelská logika jako nástroj řešení problémů

This paper argues that the traditional description of Aristotelian logic as a “tool” (organon) of philosophy corresponds to the instrumental role of Aristotle’s logical investigations in the context of dialectical debates and scientific inquiry. Aristotle investigates propositions and their mutual relations within arguments to provide a tool for the discovery of premisses which could serve to refute or establish a conclusion regarding a particular problem. This is obviously so in the Topics, where problems are limited to the question of whether an attribute belongs to a subject or not; but it is also true in the Analytics, where problems include the questions of why an attribute belongs to a subject or what a particular state of affairs, which can be analysed into a predicative relation, is. Basing itself mainly on Prior Analytics I,27–8 and Alexander’s commentary on these chapters, the paper shows how the classification of syllogistic modes in the Prior Analytics, in addition to and inclusive of the classification of predicates and propositions in the Topics, is supposed to be helpful in solving both dialectical and scientific problems.

Abandoning the EPP-feature in Polish dual copula clauses by redefining the predication relation

This paper questions the logic behind the presence and the working of the EPP-feature in Polish dual copula clauses (henceforth, DCCs) with the pronominal copula to, the verbal copula być ‘to be’, and two nominative 3rd person DPs, as represented in Bondaruk (2019). The criticism follows from: (i) – Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) downward Agree operation; (ii) – the view that the predicator encodes the predication relation between the pre-copular subject and the post-copular predicate; (iii) – selective multiple Agree, whereby the satisfaction of the EPP- and uφ-features is divorced. Adopting (i)–(iii), Bondaruk’s scrutiny allows either the pre- or the post-copular DP to occupy SpecTP, thereby accounting for DCCs’ agreement and configurational patterns, but, simultaneously, suffering from theoretical shortcomings it creates. We argue for a simpler satisfaction of the subject requirement which does not rely on the troublesome EPP-feature, but is motivated formally by the relation between T and the higher DP. We derive this requirement by following Zeiljstra’s (2012) upward Agree which only takes place once interpretable features c-command uninterpretable features, and Rothstein’s (2004) approach which is based on a neo-Davidsonian event semantics and which argues that be and its complement form a complex predicate, separated from the pre-copular DP both semantically and syntactically.

Semantics-oriented resultatives: Evidence from valency alternation verbs

Resultative phrases are generally believed to conform to the Direct Object Restriction: that is, they describe the direct object if verbs are transitive. However, some exceptions have occasionally been reported, and this paper investigates the problem by focusing on resultative phrases that occur with the valency alternation verbs in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Verbs that license the locative alternation and locatum-subject alternation describe events that involve two arguments, the location and the locatum, which are perceived to concurrently undergo a change of state. It will be shown that resultative phrases with a valency alternation verb can be predicated of either argument regardless of whether it is expressed as direct object. Furthermore, resultative verbal suffixes in Mandarin, interpreted as description of either the location or the locatum, give rise to the locative alternation while their interpretation remains the same. Thus, it is claimed that in Japanese and Mandarin, the predication relation of resultative phrases is not determined by the grammatical function of arguments as generally believed, but rather by the lexical semantics of the verbs.

Embedded root phenomena and indirect speech reports

Abstract This article analyzes the occurrence of performative root phenomena in complement clauses. I show that the clauses that host this kind of phenomena have the same distribution as direct speech complements. I argue that the correspondence is based on the fact that, due to their rich syntactic left periphery, these embedded clauses convey speech acts. This assumption receives further support by the grammatical behavior of what I argue are the two major classes of verbs subordinating direct speech and ERP-hosting embedded clauses: locutionary and illocutionary embedding verbs. I analyze illocutionary verbs as bearing an abstract illocutionary predicate selecting either a propositional or a speech-act type, and locutionary verbs as ordinary relational predicates selecting a speech-act type. Taken together, these elements allow for a straightforward syntax-semantics interface and explain the differentiated behavior of root phenomena in complements to locutionary and illocutionary verbs.