Subordinate Contexts Research Articles

Coreference and parallelism

ABSTRACT Previous studies have demonstrated a reliable effect of parallelism in a variety of domains. These studies have suggested that parallelism is preferred during both production and comprehension, and that parallelism can result in facilitation during sentence processing. There is, however, some debate about whether such effects are truly limited to coordination. In both coordinate and subordinate environments we examined whether parallelism affects pronoun resolution, and furthermore investigated whether distance between a pronoun and an antecedent (locality) affects the retrieval process. Two experiments, each consisting of an offline forced choice task as well as an eye tracking task, indicated that both locality and parallelism influence the pronoun resolution process in both coordinate and subordinate contexts. These findings are discussed in light of popular retrieval models.

The hypothesis of insubordination and three types of wh-exclamatives

This paper provides evidence for Evans’ (2007) insubordination hypothesis w.r.t. wh-exclamatives. It investigates word order in matrix wh-exclamatives and their subordinate correlates and tests matrix-subordinate asymmetry (the felicitousness of wh-words in matrix and subordinate contexts). It establishes distinctions among three groups of wh-exclamatives. Group 1 comprises qualitative and quantitative wh-exclamatives, which together seem to be a basic cross-linguistic wh-exclamative pattern. The qualitative variety demonstrates several strategies of using wh-words, some of which are exclamative-only and/or are sensitive to ellipsis of a gradable adjective/adverb. Group 2 implies the semantic hierarchy w.r.t. the felicitousness of wh-words in matrix exclamatives: ‘what’/‘who’/‘where’>‘when’>‘why’. Group 3 includes ‘which’, ‘what kind’, ‘how’ (manner) exclamatives. Unlike Groups 1 and 3, Group 2 is subject to cross-linguistic variation w.r.t. matrix-subordinate asymmetry. The paper suggests partial overlap between the established classification of wh-exclamatives and the classification developed by Nouwen and Chernilovskaya (2015) and has implications for an exclamative sentence type.

Sequence of tense in (French) child language

We discuss the results of an L1 French comprehension study of the construal of present and imperfective past in (non) subordinate contexts. Our findings reveal that children accept (sometimes enforce) non-indexical simultaneous construals of both present and past under a matrix past — though present is utterance-indexical in adult French. Extending Kratzer’s (1998) zero-tense analysis of English past under past simultaneous construals to Japanese present under past simultaneous construals, we argue that zero-tenses in L1 French surface either as past (adult French) or as present (adult Japanese). That children allow multi-valued parameter settings is expected on the Multiple Grammars hypothesis where language acquisition involves grammar competition. We extend our zero-tense analysis of non-adult tense construals in subordinate contexts to non-subordinate contexts, by arguing that the binder of a zero-tense in child grammar can be a temporal adverb denoting the ‘now’ of the speaker or some salient time implicit in the context.

Autonomy, Gendered Subordination and Transcultural Dialogue

This paper is a theoretical and empirical investigation into whether persons in subordinate social contexts possess agency and if they do, how do we recognise and recover their agency given the oppressive conditions of their lives. It aims to achieve this through forging closer links between the philosophical arguments and the ethnographic evidence of women's agency. Through such an exercise, this paper hopes to bridge the existing gap between feminist theoretical interventions and feminist politics as well as to increase ‘sociological awareness’ within feminist philosophical arguments. In order to think about women's agency in oppressive social contexts, the paper evaluates the suitability of existing theoretical frameworks for examining, describing and capturing the autonomy of persons and concludes that a new and a more complex thinking is required to facilitate thinking about human agency within oppressive transcultural contexts. The social context of subordination, the exhibition of agency within and oppressive context and the application of the new theoretical framework is illustrated in an extensive empirical study of the contact with modernity and its accompanying ideas of autonomy and individual rights of rural women belonging to two districts in Rajasthan, North western India.

A Time Course View of Sentence Priming Effects

Meaning activation was estimated during (standard naming) and after (delayed naming) target presentation to chart the time course of priming effects during reading comprehension. Using sentences biasing homographs toward their dominant and subordinate meanings, two experiments evaluated context effects across three naming-cue delays: immediate, baseline, baseline + 600ms all at a 0-ms interstimulus interval. When participants named a target immediately as it was presented, results converged with previous findings demonstrating initial context-sensitive meaning activation. The delayed naming conditions revealed little post-access influences for dominant contexts. Subordinate contexts, however, provided the strongest evidence of continued (or sustained) processing. It was concluded that context has immediate and automatic effects on initial meaning activation, after which, strategies are invoked for fine-tuning an interpretation of a sentence and integrating it with new information.

Per una teoria dell’interpretazione temporale delle frasi subordinate

In this work I consider the temporal interpretation of some subordinate contexts in Italian. In particular, I analyze the indicative verbal forms appearing in complement clauses. I will argue that in order to determine the temporal interpretation of the subordinate clause, several factors must be taken into account. On one hand, the properties of the predicate appearing in the superordinate clause are crucial in determining the distribution and the interpretation of the embedded form. On the other, the morphosyntactic characteristics of the embedded verb constrain the possible range of contexts in which it can appear and the interpretations it can deliver. Special attention is devoted to the imperfect, given that it can occur in a variety of contexts exhibiting interesting semantic and morphosyntactic properties.

Real-Time Project Enterprise Management in the Energy Business

Summary The energy industry is a capital projects intensive industry, and the success or failure of any firm depends on how well the company manages its capital projects. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on capital projects, yet they display consistent characteristics.Margins are razor thin, with very little room for error.Most projects are late and over budget.The hand-off to the operations and maintenance phase is seldom smooth. Energy companies conceive and finance these projects, which major contractors engineer and construct. A major exploration and production project will involve a joint venture of multiple owners, including national and major oil companies working with 10 to 20 contractors from about as many as 10 countries from five continents. It is surprising that interaction is even possible under these circumstances. No wonder that cycle time and time to first cash are such big challenges. Interaction costs are the costs of people and companies interacting to develop the specifications, design, plans, and installation. Interaction means finding it, keeping it, using it, communicating it, and - most importantly - deciding on it. The "it" is all knowledge associated with an individual's or a firm's responsibility. Interaction costs pervade all industries. They account for 51% of total costs in the U.S. economy.1 The average for one U.S. electric utility business is about 58%. For the petroleum industry, interaction costs may account for over 70% of the total capital expenditure. There are huge opportunities in addressing these interaction costs and reducing the time to completion of these projects. Owners, producers, contractors, and engineering/construction firms have eked out competitive advantages from economies of scale and economies of scope, but "economies of knowledge" 2 still elude them. While current methods of managing projects can deliver marginal improvements, new technologies can deliver magnitude-scale improvements. Fundamental to delivering these huge savings is the use of a Contextual Communications Platform™ (CCP) that enables real-time, cross-enterprise collaboration and consultation for faster and better decision making. The Importance of Context The nature of a project is such that decisions have to be distributed. Unlike the manufacturing industry, project decisions are distributed along the project organization that tends to reflect the architecture of the project. A project has multiple contexts that define it. The contractual context is a structured system of contracts and agreements that define how each company is obliged to perform. The technical context is defined in terms of a hierarchy, or structure, of technical specifications including design and performance details. The construction context is a structured organization of the scope of work that each participating company is obliged to perform according to the contracts to meet the technical objectives. A work breakdown structure may represent the project management context, or perspective. There is a multitude of other smaller contexts embedded within these contexts. If represented on a sheet of paper, contexts will look like a company organization chart, or an inverted tree. They are hierarchical, and they follow the axiom that subordinate contexts inherit the properties of the parent. Contexts are very important in determining the interaction and its costs. The design of the context for every aspect of a project such as contracts, technical, scope of work, and work breakdown directly define the way the project is structured and executed. Every point in this context "tree" is a decision point. Someone somewhere in one of those dozen countries will make decisions at each of these decision points. Every decision point in turn requires consultation with people and reference to previous best practices and knowledge, which are meaningless without context. A CCP is needed for project staff to make real-time decisions across project organizations. The Contextual Communications Platform The project environment needs a multilayered bus that carries data, information, knowledge, and wisdom behind decisions among cross-organizational project participants. Most firms working on projects use people-network systems for consultative decision making. Many use collaborative methods that communicate just data and information. However, both are inadequate to deliver major savings in time and money without compromising on quality. There is little reuse of knowledge and "lessons learned" because a critical element, "the context," has been missing from existing methods of recording them. The wisdom of decisions is based on multiple streams of knowledge, information, and data, all brought together by a context to create taxonomy for a delivered asset. The telecommunications industry uses a bus that has many layers to transmit voice, video, and data over the infrastructure. However, in project environments, communications needs are far greater.