This essay is a contribution to the new trend and old tradition of analyzing theological fatalism in light of its relationship to logical fatalism. All results pertain to branching temporal systems that use the A-theory and assume presentism. The project focuses on two kinds of views about branching time. One position is true futurism, which…

This thesis investigates the nature of grammatical patterns through an in-depth study of resultative constructions in Mandarin and Thai. At the heart of the thesis lies the proposal that event structure templates--complex, meaning-based grammatical patterns--must be recognised as primary objects of linguistic analysis. As content-theoretic objects…

Scientists produce research resources that are useful to future research and innovative efforts. In a typical scientific scenario, the results created by a collaborative team often include numerous artifacts, observations and relationships relevant to research findings, such as programs that generate data, parameters that impact outputs, workflows…

This study aimed to describe home literacy (HL) activities of Spanish-/English-speaking children of low-socioeconomic status backgrounds and examine the relationship between HL and performance on standardized assessments. Parents of 65 dual-language learners (DLLs) in kindergarten completed an HL questionnaire. Parents reported an average of 17…

Cognates are words that are the same or nearly the same orthographically and semantically in English and Spanish. The majority of the more than 20,000 cognates are academic vocabulary words comprised of Latin and Greek roots and affixes. Several thousand cognates can be found in the picture books that have earned the Américas Book Award, which was…

This book focuses on appropriate English for Academic Purposes instructional concepts and methods in the Japanese context. It investigates a variety of pedagogical techniques, addressing the fundamental academic English skills -- listening, speaking, reading and writing -- as well as assessment and materials development. All the research included…

This dissertation presents a hybrid filtering method and a case-based reasoning framework for enhancing the effectiveness of Web search. Web search may not reflect user needs, intent, context, and preferences, because today's keyword-based search is lacking semantic information to capture the user's context and intent in posing the search query.…

Software vulnerabilities allow an attacker to reduce a system's Confidentiality, Availability, and Integrity by exposing information, executing malicious code, and undermine system functionalities that contribute to the overall system purpose and need. With new vulnerabilities discovered everyday in a variety of applications and user environments,…

For decades, category-specific semantic impairment--i.e., better comprehension of items from one semantic category than another--has been the driving force behind many claims about the organisation of conceptual knowledge in the brain. Double dissociations between patients with category-specific disorders are widely interpreted as showing that…

Today's organizations face continuous and unprecedented changes in their business environment. Traditional process design tools tend to be inflexible and can only support rigidly defined processes (e.g., order processing in the supply chain). This considerably restricts their real-world applications value, especially in the dynamic and…

Many philosophers believe that if "S" is an unambiguous, context-sensitive, declarative sentence and "p" is a proposition asserted (without conversational implicatures) by a literal utterance of "S" in a context "c," then "p" is fully determined by the linguistic meaning of "S" in…

Semantic Minimalism is a position about the semantic content of declarative sentences, i.e., the content that is determined entirely by syntax. It is defined by the following two points: "Point 1": The semantic content is a complete/truth-conditional proposition. "Point 2": The semantic content is useful to a theory of…

This work investigates production preferences in different languages. Specifically, it examines how animacy, competition processes, and language-specific constraints shape speakers' choices of structure. English, Spanish and Serbian speakers were presented with depicted events in which either an animate or inanimate entity was acted upon by an…

There is a general debate as to whether constituent representations are accessed in compound processing. The present study addresses this issue, exploiting the properties of Italian compounds to test the role of headedness and semantic transparency in constituent access. In a first experiment, a lexical decision task was run on nominal compounds.…

Throughout its long history, the project of a science of grammar has always been an inherently philosophical one, in which the study of grammar was taken to have special epistemological significance. I ask why 20th and 21st century inquiry into Universal Grammar (UG) has largely lost this dimension, a fact that I argue is partially responsible for…