The leaky semicolon: compositional semantic dependencies for relaxed-memory concurrency

Program logics and semantics tell a pleasant story about sequential composition: when executing (S1;S2), we first execute S1 then S2. To improve performance, however, processors execute instructions out of order, and compilers reorder programs even more dramatically. By design, single-threaded systems cannot observe these reorderings; however, multiple-threaded systems can, making the story considerably less pleasant. A formal attempt to understand the resulting mess is known as a “relaxed memory model.” Prior models either fail to address sequential composition directly, or overly restrict processors and compilers, or permit nonsense thin-air behaviors which are unobservable in practice. To support sequential composition while targeting modern hardware, we enrich the standard event-based approach with preconditions and families of predicate transformers. When calculating the meaning of (S1; S2), the predicate transformer applied to the precondition of an event e from S2 is chosen based on the set of events in S1 upon which e depends. We apply this approach to two existing memory models.

Peculiarities of the Compositional Structure of the Text of the English-Language Academic Lecture

The academic lecture is considered to be one of the basic genres of modern English-language academic discourse. The study of the compositional structure of the lecture text is extremely important, since a correctly arranged composition contributes to a better presentation of the topic by the lecturer and systemic learning of the material by the students. The purpose of this research was to identify the compositional features of the text of the English-language academic lecture. To achieve this goal, eight English-language lectures on the humanities were selected and carefully analysed. In the course of the analysis, phases of the lecture were singled out, the hierarchy of its elements was revealed, and the composition matrix of the lecture text was built. The main compositional elements of the lecture are as follows: the pre-text part (title complex), the text part (introduction, body, and conclusion) and the aftertext part (references and expression of gratitude for attention). As a result, the author proved that the lecture text has a matrix structure, whose elements are nonuniform, each being designed to perform its own specific function. The compositional-semantic structure of the lecture captures the movement from the “old” knowledge to the “new”. Further, English-language lectures demonstrate both strong and weak positions. This means that some elements in the text are more important than others. At the same time, the strong position does not have to be rigidly connected with the structure of the text. The following are regarded as strong positions: title of the lecture, names of its subsections, beginning and end of subsections, introductory and closing parts of the lecture, conclusions, semantic repetitions of key information, questions-and-answers part, and in-text references.

Text-Forming Function of Addition in the Later Stories of V. G. Lidin

The subject of analysis is addition as a phenomenon of language and speech, as well as the specificity of the text-forming function of addition in artistic and speech creativity. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that until now in the theory of syntax there is no generally accepted view of the essence of addition and how it is produced in speech, and it is also not considered that the text-forming function of addition is unique in different speech spheres, in particular in artistic speech creativity. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that addition is presented as a special syntactic form, characterized by its semantics and formally constructive organization and determining the assumptions and limitations of its speech implementation. The dual manifestation of the text-forming function of attachment in artistic and speech creativity is shown. The research material is based on the late stories of V. G. Lidin, included in the collection “Melting Snows” (1980): this writer, whose metapoetics is characterized by close attention to syntax, used addition with extraordinary skill. When analyzing addition constructions in three stories, it was found that the addition is produced intentionally, counting on a textual perspective. It has been established that the text-forming function of addition is manifested in the organization of compositional-semantic communication on the one hand, and in the creation of an artistic detail on the other hand.

A Compositional Pluralist Semantics for Extensional and Attitude Verbs

We propose a new account of linguistic content that reconciles content-pluralism with compositionality. This is achieved by integrating truth-conditional content and attitude report content into a single notion of content. A parametrized version of this notion (with parameters for agents, times, and information states) serves as input to the compositional semantic machinery. By supplying different parameter-values to the parametrized contents of their complements, different verbs select for different components of the complement’s integrated content. The resulting account explains the different substitution properties of extensional and attitude constructions and captures the role of agents’ epistemicperspective in the determination of attitude content. The account improves upon other accounts of truth-conditional and attitude content (esp. two-dimensional semantics) by interpreting different occurrences of an expression—in extensional and in attitude embeddings—as objects of the same semantic type, and by explaining the substitution-resistance of attitudinal embeddings of extensional constructions.

Clichés and pragmatemes

In order to properly classify the phraseme (that is, a constrained, or non-free, expression) No parking, a universal typology of lexical phrasemes is proposed. It is based on the following two parameters:• The nature of constraints— Lexemic phrasemes: the expression is constrained with respect to freely constructed meaning.— Semantic-lexemic phrasemes: the expression is constrained/non-constrained with respect to the meaning constrained by the conceptual representation.— Pragmatemes: the expression is constrained with respect to pragmatic conditions, that is, to the extralinguistic situation of its use (in a letter, on a street sign, on a package of perishable food).• The compositionalityThe expression can/cannot be represented as regular “sum” of its components.As a result, we have, firstly, the following major classes of lexical phrasemes:1) Non-compositional lexemic phrasemes: idioms (˹cold feet˺, ˹shoot the breeze˺)2) Compositional lexemic phrasemes: collocations (rain heavily, pay a visit)3) Non-compositional semantic-lexemic phrasemes: nominemes (Big Dipper, New South Wales)4) Compositional semantic-lexemic phrasemes: clichés (See you tomorrow! | Absence makes the heart grow fonder.)For clichés, the least-studied class of phrasemes, a more detailed classification is proposed (as a function of the type of their denotation). Secondly, each phraseme (except a nomineme) and each lexemes can be pragmatically constrained, i.e. a pragmateme: ˹Fall out!˺ (idiom; a military command) | Take aim! (collocation; a military command) | Emphasis mine/added (cliché; in a printed text) | Rest! (lexeme; a military command).

Punctual time adverbials in Italian

In past and future perfect sentences, punctual time adverbials like at five o’clock can specify either the Event Time or the Reference Time. In Italian, their interpretation is affected by syntactic position: a clause-peripheral adverbial allows for both interpretations, while a clause-internal adverbial only has the E-interpretation. Moreover, for clause-peripheral adverbials the presence of the adverb già (already) blocks the E-interpretation. It is shown that this pattern can be accounted for under a smuggling analysis, in which (i) the adverbial is merged as a DP in a functional projection intervening between T and the subject in the edge of v/VP, thus blocking Agree between them; (ii) smuggling of v/VP past the adverbial solves the intervention effect; and (iii) an E-adverbial originates in a projection below già (already), while an R-adverbial originates in a projection above it. A compositional semantic analysis is provided for the proposed syntactic structure.

Indeterminate pronouns in Old English: a compositional semantic analysis

Indeterminate pronouns in Old English (expressions like hwa ‘who/what’ and hwelc ‘which’) permit several interpretations in addition to their use as interrogative pronouns, for example readings as universal or existential quantifiers. They combine with morphological prefixes (ge- ‘and, also’ and a- ‘always, ever’), which change the range of possible interpretations. Old English indeterminate pronouns are shown to contribute a crosslinguistically hitherto unattested pattern of available interpretations. In particular, bare indeterminate pronouns have a universal interpretation and ge-indeterminate pronouns can be both universal and existential. This paper offers an alternative semantic analysis in the spirit of Hamblin (Found Lang 10:41–53, 1973) and Shimoyama (Nat Lang Semant 14:139–173, 2006). A compositional semantics is given for the pronouns and the prefixes, which derives the available readings. The paper ends with a proposal for compositional semantic change relating Old English indeterminate pronouns to their modern descendants.

Revisiting obligatory relatives in German

In the literature on relative clauses (e. g. Alexiadou et al.2000: 4), it is occasionally observed that the German complex definite determiner d-jenige (roughly ‘the one’) must share company with a restrictive relative clause, in contrast to bare determiners der/die/das (Roehrs2006: 213–215; Gunkel2006; Gunkel2007). Previous works such as Sternefeld (2008: 378–379) and Blümel (2011) treat the relative clause as a complement of D to account for its mandatory occurrence. While such syntactic analyses have intuitive appeal, they pose problems for a compositional semantic analysis.The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we report on two rating studies providing empirical evidence for the obligatoriness of relative clauses in German DPs introduced by the complex determiner d-jenige. Secondly, following Simonenko (2014, 2015), we provide an analysis of the phenomenon at the syntax-semantics interface that captures familiar (Blümel2011) as well as novel related observations. Particularly, the analysis accounts for the facts that postnominal modifiers can figure in d-jenige-DPs and that the element can have anaphoric demonstrative pronominal uses.