Verbal reduplication in Mandarin Chinese: An HPSG account

The current study presents an HPSG analysis for verbal reduplication in Mandarin Chinese. After discussing its interaction with Aktionsarten and aspect markers, we argue that it is a morphological rather than syntactic process. We put forward a lexical rule for verbal reduplication in Mandarin Chinese and the different forms of reduplication are captured in an inheritance hierarchy. The interaction between verbal reduplication and aspect marking is handled by multiple inheritance. This analysis covers all forms of verbal reduplication in Mandarin Chinese and has none of the shortcomings of the previous analyses.

Why we avoid the ‘Multiple Inheritance’ issue in usage-based cognitive construction grammar

This squib revisits the phenomenon of ‘Multiple Inheritance’ (MI) and discusses reasons why many usage-based, cognitive Construction Grammarians seem to be avoiding it when modeling the constructicon and linguistic knowledge. After a brief discussion of the concept and some examples from the literature, the paper examines potential reasons for the apparent disinterest. Finally, the author points to some open questions regarding MI by discussing a specific example, namely modified NPN constructions like day after hellish day or hour after hour of dominoes. It can be argued that these strings inherit their characteristic features from several different abstract templates.

FHJ: A formal model for hierarchical dispatching and overriding

© Yanlin Wang, Haoyuan Zhang, Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira, and Marco Servetto. Multiple inheritance is a valuable feature for Object-Oriented Programming. However, it is also tricky to get right, as illustrated by the extensive literature on the topic. A key issue is the ambiguity arising from inheriting multiple parents, which can have conflicting methods. Numerous existing work provides solutions for conflicts which arise from diamond inheritance: i.e. conflicts that arise from implementations sharing a common ancestor. However, most mechanisms are inadequate to deal with unintentional method conflicts: conflicts which arise from two unrelated methods that happen to share the same name and signature. This paper presents a new model called Featherweight Hierarchical Java (FHJ) that deals with unintentional method conflicts. In our new model, which is partly inspired by C++, conflicting methods arising from unrelated methods can coexist in the same class, and hierarchical dispatching supports unambiguous lookups in the presence of such conflicting methods. To avoid ambiguity, hierarchical information is employed in method dispatching, which uses a combination of static and dynamic type information to choose the implementation of a method at run-time. Furthermore, unlike all existing inheritance models, our model supports hierarchical method overriding: that is, methods can be independently overridden along the multiple inheritance hierarchy. We give illustrative examples of our language and features and formalize FHJ as a minimal Featherweight-Java style calculus.

FHJ: A formal model for hierarchical dispatching and overriding

© Yanlin Wang, Haoyuan Zhang, Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira, and Marco Servetto. Multiple inheritance is a valuable feature for Object-Oriented Programming. However, it is also tricky to get right, as illustrated by the extensive literature on the topic. A key issue is the ambiguity arising from inheriting multiple parents, which can have conflicting methods. Numerous existing work provides solutions for conflicts which arise from diamond inheritance: i.e. conflicts that arise from implementations sharing a common ancestor. However, most mechanisms are inadequate to deal with unintentional method conflicts: conflicts which arise from two unrelated methods that happen to share the same name and signature. This paper presents a new model called Featherweight Hierarchical Java (FHJ) that deals with unintentional method conflicts. In our new model, which is partly inspired by C++, conflicting methods arising from unrelated methods can coexist in the same class, and hierarchical dispatching supports unambiguous lookups in the presence of such conflicting methods. To avoid ambiguity, hierarchical information is employed in method dispatching, which uses a combination of static and dynamic type information to choose the implementation of a method at run-time. Furthermore, unlike all existing inheritance models, our model supports hierarchical method overriding: that is, methods can be independently overridden along the multiple inheritance hierarchy. We give illustrative examples of our language and features and formalize FHJ as a minimal Featherweight-Java style calculus.

Challenges in Kazakh Auxiliary Selection

This paper proposes an account for the four auxiliaries in Kazakh that express the imperfective aspect. The main factors – the auxiliary, the main verb, their inflections and the aspectual specifications reveal a complicated system, which can be captured with an appropriate monotonic, multiple inheritance type hierarchy using online-type construction with the implementation of Pāṇinian competition. This analysis sheds light to a very different auxiliary system that we find in Indo-European languages.

A multi-strategy approach for the merging of multiple taxonomies

Taxonomy merging is an important work to provide a uniform schema for several heterogeneous taxonomies. Previous studies primarily focus on merging two taxonomies in a specific domain, while the merging of multiple taxonomies has been neglected. This article proposes a taxonomy merging approach to automatically merge multiple source taxonomies into a target taxonomy in an asymmetric manner. The approach adopts a strategy of breaking up the whole into parts to decrease the complexity of merging multiple taxonomies and employs a block-based method to reduce the scale of measuring semantic relations between concept pairs. In addition, for the problem of multiple inheritance, a method of topical coverage is proposed. Experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world scenarios indicate that the proposed merging approach is feasible and effective to merge multiple taxonomies. In particular, the proposed approach works well in the aspects of limiting the semantic redundancy and establishing high-quality hierarchical relations between concepts.

Network Morphology

The morphological machinery of a language is at the service of syntax, but the service can be poor. A request may result in the wrong item (deponency), or in an item the syntax already has (syncretism), or in an abundance of choices (inflectional classes or morphological allomorphy). Network Morphology regulates the service by recreating the morphosyntactic space as a network of information sharing nodes, where sharing is through inheritance, and inheritance can be overridden to allow for the regular, irregular, and, crucially, the semiregular. The network expresses the system; the way the network can be accessed expresses possible deviations from the systematic. And so Network Morphology captures the semi-systematic nature of morphology. The key data used to illustrate Network Morphology are noun inflections in the West Slavonic language Lower Sorbian, which has three genders, a rich case system and three numbers. These data allow us to observe how Network Morphology handles inflectional allomorphy, syncretism, feature neutralization, and irregularity. Latin deponent verbs are used to illustrate a Network Morphology account of morphological mismatch, where morphosyntactic features used in the syntax are expressed by morphology regularly used for different features. The analysis points to a separation of syntax and morphology in the architecture of the grammar. An account is given of Russian nominal derivation which assumes such a separation, and is based on viewing derivational morphology as lexical relatedness. Areas of the framework receiving special focus include default inheritance, global and local inheritance, default inference, and orthogonal multiple inheritance. The various accounts presented are expressed in the lexical knowledge representation language DATR, due to Roger Evans and Gerald Gazdar.

INHERITANCE MECHANISM REALIZATION DURING ELECTRONIC DEVELOPMENT OF EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS

The article describes the implementation of the mechanism of inheritance of educational programs in the process of electronic development of educational documentation of the university. The purpose of the inheritance mechanism is to improve the processes of automated development of educational programmes and to ensure internal consistency of educational documentation. In the course of the study, the concept of inheritance of educational programs was introduced as a mechanism to take into account the information of parental educational programs when describing the elements of subsidiary programs corresponding to this information. The possibilities of applying the inheritance mechanism in situations: 1) preparation of documentation of similar programs implemented on different forms of training are disclosed; 2) creation of different versions of documentation of educational programs, depending on the year of reception; 3) creating one child program based on several parents; 4) multiple inheritance of a series of related educational programs. Functional requirements for the educational program development tool system are described for each of the above situations. Actual data on the impact of the inheritance mechanism in the development of educational programmes are presented. Thus, the inheritance of educational programs is an effective mechanism for developing educational documentation in an electronic environment. This mechanism significantly reduces the cost of developing similar programs, as well as improving the quality of the university 's educational documentation by improving the consistency of its parts.