How hard a problem would this be to solve?

This paper analyzes the interrelation of two understudied phenomena of English: discontinuous modifier phenomenon (so willing to help out that they called early; more ready for what was coming than I was) and the complex pre-determination phenomenon (this delicious a lasagna; How hard a problem (was it)?). Despite their independence, they frequently occur intertwined, as in too heavy {a trunk} (for me) to lift and so lovely a melody that some people cried. This paper presents a declarative analysis of these and related facts that avoids syntactic movement in favor of monotonic constraint satisfaction. It demonstrates how an explicit, sign-based, constructional approach to grammatical structure captures linguistic generalizations, while at the same time accounting for idiosyncratic facts in this seemingly complex grammatical domain.

CHARACTERIZING THE ABILITY OF PARALLEL ARRAY GENERATORS ON REVERSIBLE PARTITIONED CELLULAR AUTOMATA

A PCAAG introduced by Morita and Ueno is a parallel array generator on a partitioned cellular automaton (PCA) that generates an array language (i.e. a set of symbol arrays). A "reversible" PCAAG (RPCAAG) is a backward deterministic PCAAG, and thus parsing of two-dimensional patterns can be performed without backtracking by an "inverse" system of the RPCAAG. Hence, a parallel pattern recognition mechanism on a deterministic cellular automaton can be directly obtained from a RPCAAG that generates the pattern set. In this paper, we investigate the generating ability of RPCAAGs and their subclass. It is shown that the ability of RPCAAGs is characterized by two-dimensional deterministic Turing machines, i.e. they are universal in their generating ability. We then investigate a monotonic RPCAAG (MRPCAAG), which is a special type of an RPCAAG that satisfies monotonic constraint. We show that the generating ability of MRPCAAGs is exactly characterized by two-dimensional deterministic linear-bounded automata.

Labeled Interval Operations Involving Non-Monotonic Equations

The Labeled Interval Calculus (LIC) as presented in (Ward, 1989) defined three interval propagation operations for use with strictly monotonic constraint equations. This paper generalizes those propagation operations to non-monotonic constraint equations and illustrates their use by examples.