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Case attraction has stood as a puzzling, and elusive, oddity of older Indo-European languages. This paper focuses on attraction in Ancient Greek, establishing both the regularity of the operation and its underlying motivation. A novel method is proposed for grounding case in terms of a feature-based representation of agentivity properties, loosely based on Dowty’s proto-role theory, but reformulated in terms of privative opposition and hierarchically organized via a lattice. This structure is then used to model the case system of Ancient Greek and derive a hierarchical ordering on the case system in terms of agentivity. Modelling the interaction between this hierarchy and the other factors involved in case attraction in the Optimality Theory framework yields a full solution, predicting both its distribution and frequencies therein.

Applying multi-agent systems in real world scenarios requires several essential research questions to be answered. Agents have to perceive their environment in order to take useful actions. In a multi-agent system this results in a distributed perception of partial information, which has to be fused. Based on the perceived environment the agents have to plan and coordinate their actions. The relation between action and perception, which forms the basis for planning, can be learned by perceiving the result of an action. In this paper we focus these three major research questions.

First, we investigate distributed world models that describe the aspects of the world that are relevant for the problem at hand. Distributed Perception Networks are introduced to fuse observations to obtain robust and efficient situation assessments. Second, we show how coordination graphs can be applied to multi-robot teams to allow for efficient coordination.Third, we present techniques for agent planning in uncertain environments, in which the agent only receives partial information (through its sensors) regarding the true state of environment.

In our work on the Russian Genitive of Negation (Borschev and Partee 1998a, 1998b, 2002a, 2002b, 2002c, Partee and Borschev 2002, 2004b, In press), we address the semantics of the Genitive of Negation construction and the interplay of lexical, compositional, and contextual factors. In this paper we focus on one interesting semantic proposal that has arisen recently (Kagan 2005, Partee and Borschev 2004b) and arguments both in favor of it and against it. We consider the matter unresolved and worth continued investigation. In this introductory section we review the basic facts of the Genitive of Negation, and some of the key points of existing proposals including our own. In Section 2 we discuss our notion of “Perspective Structure” and the question of where it belongs in the grammar, concluding that it is probably best viewed as a semantic correlate of diathesis shift. In Section 3 we address the principal issue of this paper, the possibility that the relevant diathesis shift in this case involves the demotion of the Genitive-marked NP from a normal referential type e to a property type, <e,t>, raising arguments both for and against such a proposal and pointing to further research which will need to be done.

It is a well-known fact that only factive propositional attitude predicates are felicitous with (indirect question) complements. It has also been noted that so-called emotive factive predicates are only felicitous with some, not all, indirect question complements. But the reasons for these two constraints have remained unclear. I propose a competition-based explanation in terms of optimality theoretic pragmatics: Due to the competition with factive predicates, predicates like are infelicitous with complements automatically verifying the factive presupposition; and emotive factive predicates are infelicitous with complements to the extent that these complements compete with more informative complements. To arrive at these results, it is necessary to assume an analysis of questions on which they denote propositions and to be more careful than has been customary about the formulation of the presuppositions of factive and what I call super-factive predicates.

This work aims to demonstrate that event structure and thematic relations are closely intertwined. Specifically, we show that in Modern Hebrew the choice of a morphological template has profound effects on the event structure of derived verbs. These effects are correlated with the thematic features marked by the templates, and are mediated by the aspectual classification of the lexical material provided by roots.

For a cognitive account of reasoning it is useful to factor out the syntactic aspect — the aspect that has to do with pattern matching and simple substitution — from the rest. The calculus of monotonicity, alias the calculus of natural logic, does precisely this, for it is a calculus of appropriate substitutions at marked positions in syntactic structures. We first introduce the semantic and the syntactic sides of monotonicity reasoning or ‘natural logic’, and propose an improvement to the syntactic monotonicity calculus, in the form of an improved algorithm for monotonicity marking. Next, we focus on the role of monotonicity in syllogistic reasoning. In particular, we show how the syllogistic inference rules (for traditional syllogistics, but also for a broader class of quantifiers) can be decomposed in a monotonicity component, an argument swap component, and an existential import component. Finally, we connect the decomposition of syllogistics to the doctrine of distribution.

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the possibility for Western tense theories to be applied successfully to the description of the Georgian tense system. Georgian tense is extremely complex because the Georgian language is agglutinative which means that semantic information which is scattered over the sentence in Germanic and Romance languages is expressed by a morphologically very complex verbal form that has many other duties to fulfill apart from expressing temporal information. It will be argued that the binary tense system as developed in [8] and modernized in [9] is indeed applicable and, after an extension, may even explain in a sufficient degree of depth why Georgian tense is expressed as it is, especially as far as the aorist is concerned. The description of the Georgian tenses—both the analytic ones and the synthetic ones—in terms of binary oppositions seems more adequate than a description in terms of the standard ternary make up of the Reichenbachian framework.

Two criteria of decidability for axiomatic systems based on J.Lukasiewicz’s three-valued logic are established.

In this paper I argue that the set of formal features that can head a functional projection is not predetermined by UG but derived through L1 acquisition. I formulate a hypothesis that says that every functional category F is realised as a semantic feature [F] unless there are overt doubling effects in the L1 input with respect to F; this feature is then analysed as a formal feature [i/uF]. In the first part of the paper I provide a theoretical motivation for this hypothesis, in the second part I test this proposal with a case study, namely the cross-linguistic distribution of Negative Concord (NC). I demonstrate that in NC languages negation must be analysed as a formal feature [i/uNEG], whereas in Double Negation languages this feature remains a semantic feature [NEG] (always interpreted as a negative operator), thus paving the way for an explanation of NC in terms of syntactic agreement. In the third part I argue that the application of the hypothesis to the phenomenon of negation yields two predictions that can be tested empirically. First I demonstrate how this hypothesis predicts negative markers Neg° can be available only in NC languages; second, independent change of the syntactic status of negative markers, can invoke a change with respect to the exhibition of NC in a particular language. Both predictions are proven to be correct. I finally argue what the consequences of the proposal presented in this paper are for both the syntactic structure of the clause and second for the way parameters are associated to lexical items.