Syntactic Conditions Research Articles

Abstract Operational Methods for Call-by-Push-Value

Levy's call-by-push-value is a comprehensive programming paradigm that combines elements from functional and imperative programming, supports computational effects and subsumes both call-by-value and call-by-name evaluation strategies. In the present work, we develop modular methods to reason about program equivalence in call-by-push-value, and in fine-grain call-by-value, which is a popular lightweight call-by-value sublanguage of the former. Our approach is based on the fundamental observation that presheaf categories of sorted sets are suitable universes to model call-by-(push)-value languages, and that natural, coalgebraic notions of program equivalence such as applicative similarity and logical relations can be developed within. Starting from this observation, we formalize fine-grain call-by-value and call-by-push-value in the higher-order abstract GSOS framework, reduce their key congruence properties to simple syntactic conditions by leveraging existing theory and argue that introducing changes to either language incurs minimal proof overhead.

No prosody-syntax trade-offs: Prosody marks focus in Mandarin cleft constructions

In line with the idea that language has evolved to be efficient and to avoid redundancy, syntactic means of marking information structure have been derived from prosodic ones, and vice versa, for many languages. On the basis of crosslinguistic comparisons, prosody-syntax trade-offs have frequently been described for clefts. The present study investigated whether such trade-offs can also be observed language-internally, testing whether clefting reduced prosodic focus marking in production or its effects on perception in Mandarin. A production study found that clefts showed prosodic focus marking equal to or exceeding that found in syntactically unmarked equivalents. In both syntactic conditions, focused constituents had larger f0 ranges, higher f0 maxima and longer durations compared to a broad focus baseline, while post-focal constituents showed lower f0 maxima and minima, lower intensity and, for clefts, shorter durations (28 participants, 937 utterances containing 4466 syllables analyzed in total). A rating study likewise found that the effect of prosody on the perception of information structure was not modulated by clefting, which neither affected ratings nor reaction times (102 participants, 2448 responses analyzed in total). These findings suggest that prosody is integral for marking focus in cleft constructions instead of constituting a redundant cue.

The genitive alternation in German

Abstract The genitive case in German is predominantly used to form noun modifiers (die Sehenswürdigkeiten [Hamburgs] ‘the sights of Hamburg’). Such genitive modifiers occur in a variety of different registers in German, and they have been claimed to be especially characteristic of non-proximal, written language. In many instances, they are interchangeable with diachronically younger prepositional phrases headed by von, with no noticeable impact on interpretation, thus giving rise to a genuine syntactic alternation phenomenon. There is an ongoing debate in the literature as to the distribution and function of these constructions. Based on corpus data from newspapers and internet discussion forums (approximately 15,000 noun phrases), we discuss semantic and syntactic conditions that limit the scope of this alternation. We then use a mixed-effects logistic regression model to examine a number of intra- and extralinguistic factors that bear on the choice of one construction over the other. We find that von-modifiers are used much less frequently than genitive modifiers overall, but there are grammatical niches in which they seem to thrive and, perhaps, even spread.

The Effectiveness of A Program Based on Differentiated Instruction Strategy in Developing the Syntactic Skills of Second-Grade Intermediate Level Students

The study aims to identify the effectiveness of a program based on a Differentiated Instruction Strategy in developing the syntactic skills of second-grade intermediate level students. In order to achieve the objective of this study; A list of syntactic skills corresponding to second-grade of intermediate level students was prepared, a test was designed to measure these skills, and a program based on differentiated instruction strategy was developed. The study sample consisted of (32) students of the second-grade of intermediate level who were divided into two groups: an experimental group of (16) students who were taught using the program based on the differentiated instruction strategy, and a control group of (16) students who were taught using the traditional way. After applying the pre-post study tools, the study reached several results that revealed the effectiveness of the program in developing syntactic skills related to syntactic understanding, syntactic inference, syntactic application, and syntactic condition among the experimental group of second-grade students of the intermediate level; in view of the results of the study, a set of suggestions and recommendations were presented.

Chase Termination Beyond Polynomial Time

The chase is a widely implemented approach to reason with tuple-generating dependencies (tgds), used in data exchange, data integration, and ontology-based query answering. However, it is merely a semi-decision procedure, which may fail to terminate. Many decidable conditions have been proposed for tgds to ensure chase termination, typically by forbidding some kind of "cycle'' in the chase process. We propose a new criterion that explicitly allows some such cycles, and yet ensures termination of the standard chase under reasonable conditions. This leads to new decidable fragments of tgds that are not only syntactically more general but also strictly more expressive than the fragments defined by prior acyclicity conditions. Indeed, while known terminating fragments are restricted to PTime data complexity, our conditions yield decidable languages for any k- ExpTime. We further refine our syntactic conditions to obtain fragments of tgds for which an optimised chase procedure decides query entailment in PSpace or k- ExpSpace, respectively.

First-Order Temporal Logic on Finite Traces: Semantic Properties, Decidable Fragments, and Applications

Formalisms based on temporal logics interpreted over finite strict linear orders, known in the literature as finite traces , have been used for temporal specification in automated planning, process modelling, (runtime) verification and synthesis of programs, as well as in knowledge representation and reasoning. In this article, we focus on first-order temporal logic on finite traces . We first investigate preservation of equivalences and satisfiability of formulas between finite and infinite traces, by providing a set of semantic and syntactic conditions to guarantee when the distinction between reasoning in the two cases can be blurred. Moreover, we show that the satisfiability problem on finite traces for several decidable fragments of first-order temporal logic is ExpSpace -complete, as in the infinite trace case, while it decreases to NExpTime when finite traces bounded in the number of instants are considered. This leads also to new complexity results for temporal description logics over finite traces. Finally, we investigate applications to planning and verification, in particular by establishing connections with the notions of insensitivity to infiniteness and safety from the literature.

Language Contact Phenomena in Maya under Spanish Influence – A Case Study on the Use of Pronominals in Yucatec Maya

This contribution aims to analyse the language contact phenomena between Yucatec Maya and Spanish, focusing specifically on the case of pronominals. This empirical study takes place in the village of Xocén in Yucatán, Mexico where most locals speak Maya while Spanish is the official language also spoken by many (bilingual) locals. The use of pronominals in Maya differs from Spanish in terms of morphology, functions, case assignment, syntactic conditions, and discourse conditions. I apply the interface hypothesis developed by Sorace (2011) which expects bilinguals to show optionality in the use of pronominals that require specific syntactic and discourse conditions (interface), and the contact-induced language change hypothesis developed by Heine and Kuteva (2003) which expects the formation of the pronominals in Maya to be influenced by Spanish. In a case study with three monolingual Mayan speakers and six bilingual Mayan-Spanish speakers, I collected freely produced speech data in Maya focusing on the use of pronominals and analysed the different functions these pronominals fulfil. The results show that bilinguals do display optionality regarding certain pronominals that exist at interfaces and that no influence of Spanish can be found in the Mayan pronominal system. Therefore, Maya-Spanish bilingualism can be better characterised by Sorace’s interface hypothesis (2011) than by contact-induced grammaticalisation (Heine and Kuteva 2003).

The potential of verbs of thinking in the implementation of the modal meaning of desirability, possibility in media discourse

The author, based on media texts, examines the verbs of thinking, think, decide and their derivatives. The subject of the study is the meaning of situational modality - the meaning of desirability, possibilities realized by verbs of thinking. The purpose of the work is to reveal the specifics of the modal functioning of the verbs thinking, think, decide and their derivatives. Achieving this goal is facilitated by solving the following tasks: 1) identify modal meanings realized by the verbs think and decide and their derivatives; 2) determine the conditions for the modal functioning of the above verbs. The goals and objectives of this work determined the choice of a comprehensive research methodology, including the following methods: functional-semantic, contextual, descriptive. As a result of the study, it was found that the verbs of thinking and decide and their derivatives are capable of realizing the modal meaning of desirability (variant meaning of intention), possibility, and in some cases the complex meaning of “desirability + possibility”. The scientific novelty of the article is determined by the material and subject of the study. The analysis of media texts made it possible to: 1) establish the lexical and grammatical basis of the modal functioning of verbs of thinking, the semantics of which implicitly contains a modal component; 2) determine the syntactic conditions for the implementation of the meanings of situational modality, which consist in the presence of a dependent (subjective) infinitive with the verb; 3) to conclude that the most frequent modal modifier in media discourse is the verb to decide and its derivatives. Observations and conclusions obtained as a result of the study stimulate further study of the specifics and conditions of the modal functioning of verbs of thinking in different spheres of social life.

On Dynamics in Structured Argumentation Formalisms

This paper is a contribution to the research on dynamics in assumption-based argumentation (ABA). We investigate situations where a given knowledge base undergoes certain changes. We show that two frequently investigated problems, namely enforcement of a given target atom and deciding strong equivalence of two given ABA frameworks, are intractable in general. Notably, these problems are both tractable for abstract argumentation frameworks (AFs) which admit a close correspondence to ABA by constructing semanticspreserving instances. Inspired by this observation, we search for tractable fragments for ABA frameworks by means of the instantiated AFs. We argue that the usual instantiation procedure is not suitable for the investigation of dynamic scenarios since too much information is lost when constructing the abstract framework. We thus consider an extension of AFs, called cvAFs, equipping arguments with conclusions and vulnerabilities in order to better anticipate their role after the underlying knowledge base is extended. We investigate enforcement and strong equivalence for cvAFs and present syntactic conditions to decide them. We show that the correspondence between cvAFs and ABA frameworks is close enough to capture dynamics in ABA. This yields the desired tractable fragment. We furthermore discuss consequences for the corresponding problems for logic programs.

AbU: A calculus for distributed event-driven programming with attribute-based interaction

AbU: A calculus for distributed event-driven programming with attribute-based interaction

Semantics of Predicative PrepositionalCase Forms of Noun: State and Evaluation

The article is devoted to the study of predicative prepositional-case forms of the noun, capable of expressing thoughts about the state, in varying degrees approaching the category of the state. The relevance of the research topic is due to the development of personal bisubstantial construction in modern Russian, in the syntactic conditions of which the idea of the state and/or evaluation is further developed. Prepositional-case forms like v forme, v trende, v zamote (in form, in trend, in fact) occupy an intermediate position between the noun and the category of state, and therefore the purpose of the study is to specify their status depending on the ratio of this state and evaluation in their semantic structure. The methodological basis of the research is the theory of transitivity developed by V. V. Babaytseva, as well as the transitivity scale as the main methodological tool, the hypothesis of syntactic constructions of bisubstantial sentences put forward by N. A. Gerasimenko, as well as the theses of K. Ya. Segal and M. S. Milovanova on the axiological semantics of forms the value-evaluative potential of which is realized in certain syntactic constructions. The research material is the prepositional case forms of the noun extracted from the National Corpus of the Russian language and social networks, functioning in a predicative position and denoting the state and/or assessment. The article proposes a variant of the analysis of specific word forms from the point of view of the degree of their distance from the class of nouns and their convergence with the category of state (degree of predication), which is the reason for the novelty of this work. The article concludes that the increase in the number of such lexemes is associated with the actualization of bisubstantial sentences, provoked by the tendency to emancipation of prepositional-case forms of the noun, on the one hand, and the course outlined in the consciousness of modern man on his personality, on himself as an object of cognition, on the other.

Причастия как средства выражения одновременности в английском языке

The study aims to identify the features of the functioning of English participles as means of simultaneity expression. Scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that it determines the syntactic conditions for the representation of simultaneity meanings by participles as means of dependent predicativity and as means of independent predicativity within participial constructions. As a result, it has been proved that in the English language, the potential of expressing simultaneity by participles in polypredicative complexes is contingent both on their inclusion in a participial construction and on their position in relation to the subject being defined. Participles are involved in simultaneity representation with the same subject and different subjects. The reference to the subject of the main clause determines the dependence of the participial construction and the participle, as well as the representation of same-subject simultaneity. The Present Participle and the Past Participle express simultaneity in preposition and at the beginning of a sentence as a part of the dependent participial construction. The Past Participle cannot express simultaneity in postposition, unlike the Present Participle. Different-subject simultaneity can be expressed by the absolute participial construction, in which participles are used to denote actions performed by the subject that does not coincide with the subject of the main predicate.

More on the Issue of the Articles in the Bulgarian Language

The definite articles in the Bulgarian language are distinguished by some specific features, some of which are: first, for m.r. ed.h. there are two forms; second - in writing the same is noted in four ways; third - the use of the full and short article depends on syntactic conditions, etc. The author expresses her opinion for accepting only the full form of the defining article for the masculine gender, using scientific and pragmatic arguments and proving the unnecessariness of the short form.

Formal and Semantic Hierarchy of Turkish Transitive Verbs

In Turkish, transitivity is defined according to both syntactic and semantic criteria. However, the types of transitional verbs and sentences, determined by the semantic and syntactic criteria, often contradict each other. Sometimes, a verb or sentence which meets the semantic condition may not satisfy the syntactic or vice versa. There are two reasons cause this contradiction. The first is due to the reason for adherence of transitivity to strict syntactic qualification and not taking the specific encoding situation of prototype transitivity [NOM-ACC] into account or ignoring the frames out of valency-related verb-meaning codification. The second is the restraint of transitivity in prototype transitivity as a rigid semantic concept. However, transitivity is a gradual and multifactorial concept. Therefore, it is not possible to talk about a single transitivity, hence a single verb type and a single case frame in which transitivity is encoded. There are different degrees of transitivity, and they can be labeled in the range of high degree to low degree transitivity. The degrees of transitivity in Turkish are formally coded up to a point with different case frames. It has been investigated which phases of transitivity in Turkish and how far different degrees of transitivity can be coded with variable case frames in this work. Turkish transitive verb hierarchy and related classes are proposed based on semantic and syntactic parameters. The transitivity scale of Turkish and the semantic map of verb classes will be formed as the final stage of this study.

Exploiting the Power of Equality-Generating Dependencies in Ontological Reasoning

Equality-generating dependencies (EGDs) allow to fully exploit the power of existential quantification in ontological reasoning settings modeled via Tuple-Generating Dependencies (TGDs), by enabling value-assignment or forcing the equivalence of fresh symbols. These capabilities are at the core of many common reasoning tasks, including graph traversals, clustering, data matching and data fusion, and many more related real-world scenarios. However, the interplay of TGDs and EGDs is known to lead to undecidability or intractability of query answering in tractable Datalog+/- fragments, like Warded Datalog+/-, for which, in the sole presence of TGDs, query answering is PTIME in data complexity. Restrictions of equality constraints, like separable EGDs, have been studied, but all achieve decidability at the cost of limited expressive power, which makes them unsuitable for the mentioned tasks. This paper introduces the class of "harmless" EGDs, that subsume separable EGDs and allow to model a very broad class of tasks. We contribute a sufficient syntactic condition for testing harmlessness, an undecidable task in general. We argue that in Warded Datalog+/- with harmless EGDs, ontological reasoning is decidable and PTIME. From such theoretical underpinnings, we develop novel chase-based techniques for reasoning with harmless EGDs and present an implementation within the Vadalog system, a state-of-the-art Datalog-based reasoner. We provide full-scale experimental evaluation and comparative analysis.

Towards Syntactic Epistemic Logic

Traditionally, Epistemic Logic represents epistemic scenarios using a single model. This, however, covers only complete descriptions that specify truth values of all assertions. Indeed, many—and perhaps most—epistemic descriptions are not complete. Syntactic Epistemic Logic, SEL, suggests viewing an epistemic situation as a set of syntactic conditions rather than as a model. This allows us to naturally capture incomplete descriptions; we discuss a case study in which our proposal is successful. In Epistemic Game Theory, this closes the conceptual and technical gap, identified by R. Aumann, between the syntactic character of game-descriptions and semantic representations of games.

Syntactic conditions on cumulative readings of German jeder ‘every’ DPs

English every-DPs can have cumulative readings relative to plural DPs, but only under severe syntactic constraints. This paper discusses different potential formulations of these constraints for the German correlate of every-DPs, jed-DPs. We argue that existing ‘surface-oriented’ hypotheses face empirical problems and propose a new hypothesis, namely that the availability of a cumulative reading relative to another plural X is sensitive to all positions in the derivational chain of X. We then spell out one possible semantic analysis of this pattern and sketch the consequences of this hypothesis for future empirical work.

The role of the Babanki noun phrase-final enclitic class marker

Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language of the North-West Region of Cameroon exhibits a noun phrase (NP) level enclitic class marker related to that found in other Ring languages such as Aghem and Lamnso’. As is common in Ring noun class systems generally, all modifiers within the Babanki NP agree with their nominal heads by prefixed or procliticised concords. Surprisingly, under certain conditions, there is an additional NP-final enclitic, which also indexes the noun class of the head noun. The question that arises is why such an additional enclitic indexing of noun class is necessary. The aim of this paper is to provide a description of the Babanki noun class enclitic with respect to both syntactic and semantico-pragmatic parameters — something which has not been tackled before in any of the available descriptions of Babanki grammatical structures. As for syntactic conditions, two crucial parameters determine the presence vs. absence of the NP enclitic class marker: (1) the internal composition of the NP with respect to (a) the type of modifier involved and (b) the presence of the head, and (2) the NP-external conditions, in particular with respect to the syntactic position of the NP. As for pragmatic factors, a minimal trace of the influence of the NP’s focus status on the occurrence of the enclitic can be detected in the systematic absence of the enclitic on modifiers that are inherently focalized.

The role of the Babanki noun phrase-final enclitic class marker

Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language of the North-West Region of Cameroon exhibits a noun phrase (NP) level enclitic class marker related to that found in other Ring languages such as Aghem and Lamnso’. As is common in Ring noun class systems generally, all modifiers within the Babanki NP agree with their nominal heads by prefixed or procliticised concords. Surprisingly, under certain conditions, there is an additional NP-final enclitic, which also indexes the noun class of the head noun. The question that arises is why such an additional enclitic indexing of noun class is necessary. The aim of this paper is to provide a description of the Babanki noun class enclitic with respect to both syntactic and semantico-pragmatic parameters — something which has not been tackled before in any of the available descriptions of Babanki grammatical structures. As for syntactic conditions, two crucial parameters determine the presence vs. absence of the NP enclitic class marker: (1) the internal composition of the NP with respect to (a) the type of modifier involved and (b) the presence of the head, and (2) the NP-external conditions, in particular with respect to the syntactic position of the NP. As for pragmatic factors, a minimal trace of the influence of the NP’s focus status on the occurrence of the enclitic can be detected in the systematic absence of the enclitic on modifiers that are inherently focalized.

Answering Queries with Negation over Existential Rules

Ontology-based query answering with existential rules is well understood and implemented for positive queries, in particular conjunctive queries. For queries with negation, however, there is no agreed-upon semantics or standard implementation. This problem is unknown for simpler rule languages, such as Datalog, where it is intuitive and practical to evaluate negative queries over the least model. This fails for existential rules, which instead of a single least model have multiple universal models that may not lead to the same results for negative queries. We therefore propose universal core models as a basis for a meaningful (non-monotonic) semantics for queries with negation. Since cores are hard to compute, we identify syntactic conditions (on rules and queries) under which our core-based semantics can equivalently be obtained for other universal models, such as those produced by practical chase algorithms. Finally, we use our findings to propose a semantics for a broad class of existential rules with negation.