Crossover from BKT-Rough to KPZ-Rough Surfaces for Crystal Growth/Recession

We found a crossover from a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT, logarithmic-rough surface to a Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ, algebraic)-rough surface for growing/recessing vicinal crystal surfaces in the non-equilibrium steady state using the Monte-Carlo method. We also found that the crossover point from a BKT-rough surface to a KPZ-rough surface is different from the kinetic roughening point for the (001) surface. Multilevel islands and negative islands (island-shaped holes) on the terrace formed by the two-dimensional nucleation process are found to block surface fluctuations, which contributes to making a BKT-rough surface.

Intervention Effects with Negation

Negation inhibits certain wh-dependencies. This chapter investigates two kinds of intervention effects: negative islands such as *How didn’t John behave? and Beck-effects such as *Which student did no one give which book to? It is shown that both types of intervention effects call for a semantic or pragmatic rather than a syntactic explanation. At the same time, it is argued that the two types should not be reduced to one. Different semantic and pragmatic approaches to the data are surveyed and issues for future research are highlighted.

Calculating the Scope of Negation

This chapter investigates scopal interactions between sentential negation and quantifiers, with special attention to the relative scope of negation and quantificational subjects. It examines a variety of proposals that explore the influences of phrase structure, focus, topic, and other pragmatic factors on the scope of negation. It also examines the related phenomena of incorporated negation in quantifiers and negative islands.

Partition by exhaustification: comments on Dayal 1996

In this paper I argue for a new constraint on questions, namely that a questiondenotation (a set of propositions) must map to a partition of a Stalnakerian Context-Set bypoint-wise exhaustification (point-wise application of the function Exh). The presuppositionthat Dayal attributes to an Answer operator follows from this constraint, if we assume a fairlystandard definition of Exh (Krifka, 1995). But the constraint is more restrictive therebyderiving the sensitivity of higher order quantification to negative islands (Spector, 2008).Moreover, when combined with recent proposals about the nature of Exh – designedprimarily to account for the conjunctive interpretation of disjunction (e.g. Bar-Lev and Fox,2017) – Dayal’s presupposition follows only in certain environments. This observationallows for an account of the “mention-some” interpretation of questions that makes specificdistributional predictions.Keywords: exhaustivity, Free Choice, maximality, higher-order quantification, mentionsome,negative-islands, partition, scalar implicatures, uniqueness.

Structural and semantic ambiguity of why-questions: An overlooked case of weak islands in English

We argue that English why-questions are systematically ambiguous between a purpose and a reason interpretation, similarly to Mandarin, Russian, and Polish (contra Stepanov & Tsai 2008). We argue that the distinct semantic interpretations correspond to two distinct base-generated positions of why. While reason why is base-generated within CP (Rizzi 2001, Ko 2005), purpose why is adjoined to vP (Stepanov & Tsai 2008). Furthermore, we show that English purpose why, similarly to previously reported data from Mandarin, is only compatible with dynamic predicates with agentive subjects. We argue that this selectional restriction follows from two properties: (i) why semantically requires a proposition as its argument, and (ii) only dynamic predicates with agentive subjects have a syntactic structure that accommodates two adjunction sites of the relevant semantic type, i.e., they contain two distinct propositional levels (Bale 2007) and therefore two attachment sites for why. In contrast, propositionally simple predicates only have one propositional level and hence only one possible attachment site, which corresponds to the reason interpretation of why. Evidence for this proposal comes from the observation that only the lower why - associated with the purpose reading - is sensitive to negative islands, which suggests that its attachment site is below negation (vP), whereas the higher why is insensitive to island effects of this sort, which suggests that its base generated position is above negation (CP).

Formation Two Dimensional Negative Islands At High Rate Cooling Of Ultra-Flat Surface Si(111)

In situ ultrahigh vacuum reflection electron and ex situ atomic force microscopy have been applied to investigate morphology transformations of the ultra-flat stepped Si(111) surface with wide (20–50 µm in diameter) singular terraces during sublimation and quenching from elevated temperatures. The formation of two dimensional negative (vacancy) islands has been observed on the wide terraces after the quenching from temperatures above 1 200°C. The increasing of the critical terrace size for the two-dimensional negative island nucleation has been explained by the changing of the atomic mechanism of mass transport on silicon surface.

Islands of Contradiction: Presuppostion and Negative Islands

No abstract.

Negative Islands and obviation by 'wa' in Japanese degree questions

This paper aims to explain the observation (not previously reported) that -wa obviates Negative Island effects in Japanese degree questions. The explanation offered ties this obviation to epistemic implications associated with -wa, deriving the latter in a (Neo-)Gricean framework. The explanation relies on Fox & Hackl’s (2006) view that Negative Islands in degree questions are due to the necessary failure of a Maximality Presupposition, but it abandons their proposal that such presuppositions must be calculated under the assumption that scales of degrees are invariably dense.