Present-day English gerunds: A multilayered referential model

Recent studies into the semantics of English gerunds have successfully uncovered meaning differences between nominal and verbal gerunds by adopting a referential perspective on their semantics. Referential research of gerundive nominalizations, however, still struggles with a number of issues, mainly centering around the position of verbal gerunds within the traditionally nominal domain of referentiality. This paper wishes to address these issues by establishing a multilayered model of referentiality which can be applied to both ordinary as well as less prototypical noun phrases. First of all, it disentangles the typically nominal feature of definiteness from the more flexible concept of specificity. Secondly, the model looks at the type of mental space in which the referent is accessed. Specific expressions are often associated with “actual” or realis spaces, whereas non-specific entities are typically linked to “virtual” or irrealis spaces. It is argued here, however, that deverbal nominalizations like gerunds realize specificity independently of the mental space the entity is located in. The multilayered model that is proposed is applied and integrated in a corpus-based analysis of Present-day English nominal and verbal gerunds. Mapping out the interactions between (in)definiteness, (non-)specificity and actuality/virtuality, it will be concluded, allows us to situate the various subtypes of nominal and verbal gerunds more accurately on the cline of functional nouniness.

Ellipsis of terms of address and reference in casual communication events in Vietnamese

There is a general view that pro-drop only occurs in languages with either a ‘rich’ inflectional system (Taraldsen 1978; Chomsky 1981; Jaeggli 1982; Suñer 1982), or in languages whose pronouns are agglutinating for case, number, or other nominal feature (Huang 1989; Neeleman & Szendrői 2005). The Vietnamese language fits neither of these categories. The explanation of the phenomenon of ellipsis of terms of address and reference (toa) in this paper is, therefore, not based on these morphological grounds. Rather, it is presented from a pragmatic perspective, which employs discourse analysis as its major methodology. The paper attempts to demonstrate the fact that although Vietnamese is not a pro-drop language in its traditional definition, ellipsis of toa in casual communication events among Vietnamese speakers is very common, and highly situational. In other words, these elliptic items in this case are referred to as references “in a form of situational (exophoric) presupposition” (Halliday & Hasan 1976: 145).

Validity of the Salience Asymmetry Interpretation of the IAT: Comment on Rothermund and Wentura (2004)

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) requires responding to category contrasts such as young vs. old, male vs. female, and pleasant vs. unpleasant. In introducing the IAT, A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, and J. L. K. Schwartz (1998) proposed that IAT measures reflect mental structures involving the nominal features of the IAT’s categories (e.g., age features for young vs. old; gender features for male vs. female; valence features for pleasant vs. unpleasant). In contrast, K. Rothermund and D. Wentura (2004) proposed that IAT performance is dominated by salience asymmetries of the IAT’s pairs of contrasted categories. To assess relative contributions of nominal feature contrasts vs. salience asymmetries we (a) briefly summarize the extensive evidence now available to support construct validity of the IAT as a measure based on nominal category features and (b) present two new experiments that yielded results problematic for the salience asymmetry interpretation.

L2 multiple nominal feature agreement in German: the acquisition of grammatical gender in a formal environment

This work reports on accuracy in grammatical gender marking by Italian adults learning German in a formal environment. It aims at investigating whether adult speakers of a [+gender] language who are acquiring a [+gender] L2 language can master a complex gender agreement system given the crucial role played either by other morphosyntactic features in the L2 nominal inflection. Moreover, it explores the role that L2 input (formal instruction; access to the L2 outside classroom activities) may (not) have in this particular domain of language acquisition. Findings indicate that L1 transfer – the fact that [gender] is morphologically realized in both languages although the Italian system is not congruent to the German one – and formal instruction do not play a crucial role in the population investigated for this study. Overall, results show that acquiring lexical gender seems to be possible from early on, whereas mastering more complex agreement configurations where multiple morphosyntactic factors interact on gender marking on nominal elements is problematic even if the category gender is present in the L1.

Propositional Gerunds in English and Spanish

This paper offers a characterization of Propositional Gerunds in English and Spanish that hinges on the different feature specification of the gerund morpheme in each language. I first propose an analysis of the construction in English as a defective clausal structure (AspP or TP), which can optionally project a [+N] feature in a GerP. Then I justify the same syntactic analysis for Spanish, but in this case the adverbial source of the V-ndo head prevents the projection of this nominal feature. My proposal is that most of the peculiarities of Propositional Gerunds in both languages actually follow from their defective structure and from the feature specification forced by the gerund suffix in each case. Along these lines I contrastively account for the syntactic positions in which a Propositional Gerund may appear, and also for its main structural characteristics, as the morphological Case of its subject or the (im)possibility of temporal/aspectual modification in the construction.

Performance Characteristics of a Variable Density Pin Array Micro-Heat Exchanger

The design, fabrication and preliminary performance of a variable density pin array micro heat exchanger for micro-cooling applications is reported. Various pin diameters and density configurations were analyzed for their ability to provide maximum uniform heat transfer over the active area of the micro-heat exchanger using air as the working fluid for maximum mass flow rates through the micro-heat exchanger in the range of 40 mg/sec to 60 mg/sec. Fabrication of the micro-heat exchanger was performed using deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) technique on a 0.5 mm thick silicon wafer with nominal feature sizes in the range of 5 microns to 20 microns. Performance data is presented based on analysis and comparison to a baseline configuration with no pins.

Radical Pro Drop and the Morphology of Pronouns

We propose a new generalization governing the crosslinguistic distribution of radical pro drop (the type of pro drop found in Chinese). It occurs only in languages whose pronouns are agglutinating for case, number, or some other nominal feature. Other types of languages cannot omit pronouns freely, although they may have agreement-based pro drop. This generalization can for the most part be derived from three assumptions. (a) Spell-out rules for pronouns may target nonterminal categories. (b) Pro drop is zero spell-out (i.e., deletion) of regular pronouns. (c) Competition between spell-out rules is governed by the Elsewhere Principle. A full derivation relies on an acquisitional strategy motivated by the absence of negative evidence. We test our proposal using data from a sample of twenty languages and The World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005).

(De)-Focussing and Object Raising in Romanian

This article argues that VOS structures in Romanian are derived from a basic VSO word order and, consequently, involve object raising out of VP, across the subject left in situ. Binding interactions and the availability of raising quantified NPs clause-medially provide syntactic support for an A-movement analysis of the raised objects. In contrast to other languages that allow (or require) movement of objects to argumental positions, it is argued that in Romanian VOS structures the object does not move for the purposes of Case checking nor does object raising entail a strong, definite interpretation of the moved NP. Rather, object raising is an instance of de-focussing, made possible by a strong nominal feature on the abstract verb v.

Position Tolerance Verification Using Simulated Gaging

One of the routine manual tasks in dimensional inspection is the assembly verification of circular features by mechanical gaging. With the aid of coordinate measuring machines or vision systems, this task can be performed more efficiently through simulation or soft-gaging. A formulation is presented for interpretation of 2D position tolerance specifications. Simulated gages are constructed from datum features as a set of constraint relationships. The measure of perfect-form position-imperfection is determined as the distance between the measured and the nominal feature positions subject to datum constraint requirements. The derived formulation is applied to an example part with a hole-slot datum-priority-frame. This formulation results in a three-variable optimization problem which is solved by an Augmented Lagrange Multipliers technique. The extension of the formulation to 3D is also discussed, but without reference to a specific representation.