Using Verb Extension to Gauge Children’s Verb Meaning Construals: The Case of Chinese

Verb extension is a crucial gauge of the acquisition of verb meaning. In English, studies suggest that young children show conservative extension. An important test of whether an early conservative extension is a general phenomenon or a function of the input language is made possible by Chinese, a language in which verbs are more frequent and acquired earlier. This study tested whether 3-year-old Chinese children extended a group of familiar verbs that specify various ways to carry objects. Shown videos that portrayed typical, mid-typical, or atypical carrying actions (as verified by Chinese adults), children were asked to judge whether they were examples of specific Chinese carry verbs. Children’s verb extensions were mostly limited to typical exemplars, suggesting that an early conservative extension may be universal. Furthermore, extension breadth was related to the onset of verb production: verbs acquired earlier elicited more extension judgments than those acquired later.

Forgetting Auxiliary Atoms in Forks (Extended Abstract)

This work tackles the problem of checking strong equivalence of logic programs that may contain local auxiliary atoms, to be removed from their stable models and to be forbidden in any external context. We call this property projective strong equivalence (PSE). It has been recently proved that not any logic program containing auxiliary atoms can be reformulated, under PSE, as another logic program or formula without them -- this is known as strongly persistent forgetting. In this paper, we introduce a conservative extension of Equilibrium Logic and its monotonic basis, the logic of Here-and-There, in which we deal with a new connective we call fork. We provide a semantic characterisation of PSE for forks and use it to show that, in this extension, it is always possible to forget auxiliary atoms under strong persistence. We further define when the obtained fork is representable as a regular formula.

Fair Allocation with Diminishing Differences

Ranking alternatives is a natural way for humans to explain their preferences. It is used in many settings, such as school choice, course allocations and residency matches. Without having any information on the underlying cardinal utilities, arguing about the fairness of allocations requires extending the ordinal item ranking to ordinal bundle ranking. The most commonly used such extension is stochastic dominance (SD), where a bundle X is preferred over a bundle Y if its score is better according to all additive score functions. SD is a very conservative extension, by which few allocations are necessarily fair while many allocations are possibly fair. We propose to make a natural assumption on the underlying cardinal utilities of the players, namely that the difference between two items at the top is larger than the difference between two items at the bottom. This assumption implies a preference extension which we call diminishing differences (DD), where X is preferred over Y if its score is better according to all additive score functions satisfying the DD assumption. We give a full characterization of allocations that are necessarily-proportional or possibly-proportional according to this assumption. Based on this characterization, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for finding a necessarily-DD-proportional allocation whenever it exists. Using simulations, we compare the various fairness criteria in terms of their probability of existence, and their probability of being fair by the underlying cardinal valuations. We find that necessary-DD-proportionality fares well in both measures. We also consider envy-freeness and Pareto optimality under diminishing-differences, as well as chore allocation under the analogous condition --- increasing-differences.

The fixed point property and a technique to harness double fixed point combinators

The ${\lambda }$-calculus enjoys the property that each ${\lambda }$-term has at least one fixed point, which is due to the existence of a fixed point combinator. It is unknown whether it enjoys the ‘fixed point property’ stating that each ${\lambda }$-term has either one or infinitely many pairwise distinct fixed points. We show that the fixed point property holds when considering possibly open fixed points. The problem of counting fixed points in the closed setting remains open, but we provide sufficient conditions for a ${\lambda }$-term to have either one or infinitely many fixed points. In the main result of this paper we prove that in every sensible ${\lambda }$-theory there exists a ${\lambda }$-term that violates the fixed point property. We then study the open problem concerning the existence of a double fixed point combinator and propose a proof technique that could lead towards a negative solution. We consider interpretations of the ${\lambda } {\mathtt{Y}}$-calculus into the ${\lambda }$-calculus together with two reduction extension properties, whose validity would entail the non-existence of any double fixed point combinators. We conjecture that both properties hold when typed ${\lambda } {\mathtt{Y}}$-terms are interpreted by arbitrary fixed point combinators. We prove reduction extension property I for a large class of fixed point combinators. Finally, we prove that the ${\lambda }{\mathtt{Y}}$-theory generated by the equation characterizing double fixed point combinators is a conservative extension of the ${\lambda }$-calculus.

Computability logic: Giving Caesar what belongs to Caesar

The present article is a brief informal survey o$\textit {computability logic}$ (CoL). This relatively young and still evolving nonclassical logic can be characterized as a formal theory of computability in the same sense as classical logic is a formal theory of truth. In a broader sense, being conceived semantically rather than proof-theoretically, CoL is not just a particular theory but an ambitious and challenging long-term project for redeveloping logic. In CoL, logical operators stand for operations on computational problems, formulas represent such problems, and their "truth" is seen as algorithmic solvability. In turn, computational problems – understood in their most general, interactive sense – are defined as games played by a machine against its environment, with "algorithmic solvability" meaning existence of a machine which wins the game against any possible behavior of the environment. With this semantics, CoL provides a systematic answer to the question "What can be computed?", just like classical logic is a systematic tool for telling what is true. Furthermore, as it happens, in positive cases "What can be computed" always allows itself to be replaced by "How can be computed", which makes CoL a problem-solving tool. CoL is a conservative extension of classical first order logic but is otherwise much more expressive than the latter, opening a wide range of new application areas. It relates to intuitionistic and linear logics in a similar fashion, which allows us to say that CoL reconciles and unifies the three traditions of logical thought (and beyond) on the basis of its natural and "universal" game semantics.

ON A QUESTION OF KRAJEWSKI’S

In this paper, we study finitely axiomatizable conservative extensions of a theory U in the case where U is recursively enumerable and not finitely axiomatizable. Stanisław Krajewski posed the question whether there are minimal conservative extensions of this sort. We answer this question negatively.Consider a finite expansion of the signature of U that contains at least one predicate symbol of arity ≥ 2. We show that, for any finite extension α of U in the expanded language that is conservative over U, there is a conservative extension β of U in the expanded language, such that $\alpha \vdash \beta$ and $\beta \not \vdash \alpha$. The result is preserved when we consider either extensions or model-conservative extensions of U instead of conservative extensions. Moreover, the result is preserved when we replace $\dashv$ as ordering on the finitely axiomatized extensions in the expanded language by a relevant kind of interpretability, to wit interpretability that identically translates the symbols of the U-language.We show that the result fails when we consider an expansion with only unary predicate symbols for conservative extensions of U ordered by interpretability that preserves the symbols of U.

In Praise of Impredicativity: A Contribution to the Formalization of Meta-Programming

Processing programs as data is one of the successes of functional and logic programming. Higher-order functions, as program-processing programs are called in functional programming, and meta-programs, as they are called in logic programming, are widespread declarative programming techniques. In logic programming, there is a gap between the meta-programming practice and its theory: The formalizations of meta-programming do not explicitly address its impredicativity and are not fully adequate. This article aims at overcoming this unsatisfactory situation by discussing the relevance of impredicativity to meta-programming, by revisiting former formalizations of meta-programming, and by defining Reflective Predicate Logic, a conservative extension of first-order logic, which provides a simple formalization of meta-programming.

ENAYAT MODELS OF PEANO ARITHMETIC

Simpson [6] showed that every countable model ${\cal M} \models PA$ has an expansion $\left( {{\cal M},X} \right) \models P{A^{\rm{*}}}$ that is pointwise definable. A natural question is whether, in general, one can obtain expansions of a nonprime model in which the definable elements coincide with those of the underlying model. Enayat [1] showed that this is impossible by proving that there is ${\cal M} \models PA$ such that for each undefinable class X of ${\cal M}$, the expansion $\left( {{\cal M},X} \right)$ is pointwise definable. We call models with this property Enayat models. In this article, we study Enayat models and show that a model of $PA$ is Enayat if it is countable, has no proper cofinal submodels and is a conservative extension of all of its elementary cuts. We then show that, for any countable linear order γ, if there is a model ${\cal M}$ such that $Lt\left( {\cal M} \right) \cong \gamma$, then there is an Enayat model ${\cal M}$ such that $Lt\left( {\cal M} \right) \cong \gamma$.