Quantifying the complexity of relative clause and cleft sentences

Explanations of the difficulty of relative-clause sentences implicate complexity but the measurement of complexity remains controversial. Four experiments investigated how far relational complexity (RC) theory, that has been found valid for cognitive development and human reasoning, accounts for the difficulty of 16 types of English, object- and subject-extracted relative-clause constructions. RC corresponds to the number of nouns assigned to thematic roles in the same decision. Complexity estimates based on RC and those based on maximal integration cost (MIC) were strongly correlated and accounted for similar variance in sentence difficulty (subjective ratings, comprehension accuracy, reading times). Consistent with RC theory, sentences that required more than 4 role assignments in the same decision were extremely difficult for many participants. Performance on nonlinguistic relational tasks predicted comprehension of object-extracted sentences, before and after controlling for subject-extractions. Working memory tasks predicted comprehension of object-extractions before controlling for subjectextractions. The studies extend the RC approach to a linguistic domain.

A Framework of Fuzzy Diagnosis

Fault diagnosis has become an important component in intelligent systems, such as intelligent control systems and intelligent eLearning systems. Reiter's diagnosis theory, described by first-order sentences, has been attracting much attention in this field. However, descriptions and observations of most real-world situations are related to fuzziness because of the incompleteness and the uncertainty of knowledge, e. g., the fault diagnosis of student behaviors in the eLearning processes. In this paper, an extension of Reiter's consistency-based diagnosis methodology, Fuzzy Diagnosis, has been proposed, which is able to deal with incomplete or fuzzy knowledge. A number of important properties of the Fuzzy diagnoses schemes have also been established. The computing of fuzzy diagnoses is mapped to solving a system of inequalities. Some special cases, abstracted from real-world situations, have been discussed. In particular, the fuzzy diagnosis problem, in which fuzzy observations are represented by clause-style fuzzy theories, has been presented and its solving method has also been given. A student fault diagnostic problem abstracted from a simplified real-world eLearning case is described to demonstrate the application of our diagnostic framework.

Judicial (in)activism in Australia's secular commonwealth

his article addresses two aspects of Australia's soft secular government. The first aspect explains how, and asks why, judges have been inactive in helping to draw the contours of secular government in Australia. The principal reason is that much of the social regulation that provokes the interest of faith-based groups is the constitutional concern of the States, and no State Constitution claims to coordinate relations between church and state. Moreover, the electorate has twice refused to pass referenda, in 1944 and 1988, for extending a constitutional demand of secular governance to the States. However, this is not so for the Commonwealth. It falls under the restrictions of section 116 of the federal Constitution, which states: The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion ('the establishment clause') or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion ('the free exercise clause'), and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth. As will be explained, while methods of legal interpretation suggest that section 116's establishment clause could place mild demands of non-discrimination on the federal Parliament, judicial inactivity in policing such demands on the Commonwealth, paradoxically, has arguably been secured by judicial activism in the High Court. A second aspect of secular government addressed is the High Court's disposal of 'the separation of church and state' as a constitutional principle in Australia. The contrast, of course, is to the United States, where for sixty years 'separation' has been given uneven recognition as a rule of constitutional law, and has undoubtedly driven the development of hard forms of secular governance in that country. The centrepiece of American secular government is the 1971 decision in Lemon v Kurtzman, where the US Supreme Court held that valid legislation had to pass three tests, ie: First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion .. . finally, the statute must not foster 'an excessive government entanglement with religion. The third 'entanglement' prong of Lemon is the modern, less ambitious, form of the 'wall of separation', prohibiting too close an engagement between church and state. As this paper will demonstrate, 'entanglement's' destiny shows how unlikely it is that 'separation' can survive as a meaningful constitutional principle in the USA. And, it will also be argued that 'separation' has even poorer prospects for import to Australia.

Motivations for second position: Evidence from North-Central Australia

It has long been observed that many languages from all over the world require that certain grammatical categories (e.g., person, number, tense, modality) occur in the "second position" of a clause. Much of the research into second position has developed formal explanations for this recurring pattern, based on interactions between morphosyntax and phonology. In this article I explore how pragmatics of information packaging interacts with these other features in the development of such morphosyntactic architecture in three North-Central Australian languages: Warlpiri, Wambaya, and Garrwa.

The role of animacy and definiteness in the clitic-DP nexus

We extend Cuervo's (2003) analysis of the Lower Applicative Dative DP in Spanish to account for the animate definite DP preceded by a and the fact that it is not possible to have both an animate dative definite direct object and a dative indirect object in the same clause. We argue that the presence of such a dative DP 'blocks' the upward movement of the direct object DP to the specifier of the Lower Applicative phrase. We analyse the case ‘mismatch’ between the third person accusative clitic and the co-referring dative DP with animate definite reference in River Plate Spanish as resulting from the raising of the accusative clitic to the head of the Applicative phrase and the movement of the DP to its specifier, where dative case is always assigned in Spanish. We propose that similar phenomena observed in some Australian languages are amenable to a similar analysis.

Reasoning about timeouts

In real-time programming a timeout mechanism allows exceptional behaviour, such as a lack of response, to be handled effectively, while not overly affecting the programming for the normal case. For. example, in a pump controller if the water level has gone below the minimum level and the pump is on and hence pumping in more water, then the water level should rise above the minimum level within a specified time. If not, there is a fault in the system and it should be shut down and an alarm raised. Such a situation can be handled by normal case code that determines when the level has risen above the minimum, plus a timeout case handling the situation when the specified time to reach the minimum has passed. In this paper we introduce a timeout mechanism, give it a formal definition in terms of more basic real-time commands, develop a refinement law for introducing a timeout clause to implement a specification, and give an example of using the law to introduce a timeout. The framework used is a machine-independent real-time programming language, which makes use of a deadline command to represent timing constraints in a machine-independent fashion. This allows a more abstract approach to handling timeouts.