In this thesis we propose the use of Dijkstra's concept of a predicate transformer [Dij75] for the determination of database transaction safety [SS89] and the generation of simple conditions to check that a transaction will not violate the integrity constraints in the case that it is not safe. The generation of this simple condition is something that can be done statically, thus providing a mechanism for generating safe transactions. Our approach treats a database as state, a database transaction as a program, and the database's integrity constraints as a postcondition in order to use a predicate transformer [Dij75] to generate a weakest precondition. We begin by introducing a set-oriented update language for relational databases for which a predicate transformer is then defined. Subsequently, we introduce a more powerful update language for deductive databases and define a new predicate transformer to deal with this language and the more powerful integrity constraints that can be expressed using recursive rules. Next we introduce a data model with object-oriented features including methods, inheritance and dynamic overriding. We then extend the predicate transformer to handle these new features. For each of the predicate transformers, we prove that they do indeed generate a weakest precondition for a transaction and the database integrity constraints. However, the weakest precondition generated by a predicate transformer still involves much redundant checking. For several general classes of integrity constraint, including referential integrity and functional dependencies, we prove that the weakest precondition can be substantially further simplified to avoid checking things we already know to be true under the assumption that the database currently satisfies its integrity con-straints. In addition, we propose the use of the predicate transformer in combination with meta-rules that capture the exact incremental change to the database of a particular transaction. This provides a more general approach to generating simple checks for enforcing transaction safety. We show that this approach is superior to known existing previous approaches to the problem of efficient integrity constraint checking and transaction safety for relational, deductive, and deductive object-oriented databases. Finally we demonstrate several further applications of the predicate transformer to the problems of schema constraints, dynamic integrity constraints, and determining the correctness of methods for view updates. We also show how to support transactions embedded in procedural languages such as C.

(Chadic), which exhibits a number of asymmetries: Grammatical focus marking is obligatory only with focused subjects, where focus is marked by the particle án following the subject. Focused subjects remain in situ and the complement of án is a regular VP. With nonsubject foci, án appears in a cleft-structure between the fronted focus constituent and a relative clause. We present a semantically unified analysis of focus marking in Bura that treats the particle as a focusmarking copula in T that takes a property-denoting expression (the background) and an individual-denoting expression (the focus) as arguments. The article also investigates the realization of predicate and polarity focus, which are almost never marked. The upshot of the discussion is that Bura shares many characteristic traits of focus marking with other Chadic languages, but it crucially differs in exhibiting a structural difference in the marking of focus on subjects and non-subject constituents.

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ISA extensions are a very powerful approach to implement new hardware techniques that require or benefit from compiler support: decisions made at compile time can be complemented at runtime, achieving a synergistic effect between the compiler and the processor. This thesis is focused on two ISA extensions: predicate execution and register windows. Predicate execution is exploited by the if-conversion compiler technique. If-conversion removes control dependences by transforming them to data dependences, which helps to exploit ILP beyond a single basic-block. Register windows help to reduce the amount of loads and stores required to save and restore registers across procedure calls by storing multiple contexts into a large architectural register file.In-order processors specially benefit from using both ISA extensions to overcome the limitations that control dependences and memory hierarchy impose on static scheduling. Predicate execution allows to move control dependence instructions past branches. Register windows reduce the amount of memory operations across procedure calls. Although if-conversion and register windows techniques have not been exclusively developed for in-order processors, their use for out-of-order processors has been studied very little. In this thesis we show that the uses of if-conversion and register windows introduce new performance opportunities and new challenges to face in out-of-order processors.The use of if-conversion in out-of-order processors helps to eliminate hard-to-predict branches, alleviating the severe performance penalties caused by branch mispredictions. However, the removal of some conditional branches by if-conversion may adversely affect the predictability of the remaining branches, because it may reduce the amount of correlation information available to the branch predictor. Moreover, predicate execution in out-of-order processors has to deal with two performance issues. First, multiple definitions of the same logical register can be merged into a single control flow, where each definition is guarded with a different predicate. Second, instructions whose guarding predicate evaluates to false consume unnecessary resources. This thesis proposes a branch prediction scheme based on predicate prediction that solves the three problems mentioned above. This scheme, which is built on top of a predicated ISA that implement a compare-and-branch model such as the one considered in this thesis, has two advantages: First, the branch accuracy is improved because the correlation information is not lost after if-conversion and the mechanism we propose permits using the computed value of the branch predicate when available, achieving 100% of accuracy. Second it avoids the predicate out-of-order execution problems.Regarding register windows, we propose a mechanism that reduces physical register requirements of an out-of-order processor to the bare minimum with almost no performance loss. The mechanism is based on identifying which architectural registers are in use by current in-flight instructions. The registers which are not in use, i.e. there is no in-flight instruction that references them, can be early released.In this thesis we propose a very efficient and low-cost hardware implementation of predicate execution and register windows that provide important benefits to out-of-order processors.

This thesis is a descriptive study of four contrastive discourse connectives in Turkish. The main aim of this study is to analyze the connectives with respect to their meaning and predicate-argument structure and lay out the similarities and differences among contrastive discourse connectives with the help of quantitative analysis. Although the study is limited with contrastive connectives, it will have implications on how to resolve discourse structure in general and illustrate how lexico-syntactic elements contribute to discourse semantics.

Today, organizations often need to modify their business processes to cope with changes in the environment, such as mergers/acquisitions, new government regulations, and new customer demand. Most organizations also have a set of business policies defining the way they conduct their business. Although there has been extensive research on process analysis and design, how to systematically extract workflow models from business policies has not been studied, resulting in a missing link between the specification of business policies and the modeling of business processes.Given that process changes are often determined by executives and managers at the policy level, the aforementioned missing link often leads to inefficient and inaccurate implementation of process changes by business analysts and process designers. We refer to this problem as the policy mismatch problem in business process management. For organizations with large-scale business processes and a large number of business policies, solving the policy mismatch problem is very difficult and challenging.In this dissertation, we attempt to provide a formal link between business policies and workflow models by proposing a logic-based methodology for process analysis and design. In particular, we first propose a Policy-driven Process Design (PPD) methodology to formalize the procedure of extracting workflow models from business policies. In PPD, narrative process policies are parsed into precise information on various workflow components, and a set of process design rules and algorithms are applied to generate workflow models from that information.We also develop a logic-based process modeling language named Unified Predicate Language (UPL). UPL is able to represent all workflow components in a single logic format and provides analytical capability via logic inference and query. We demonstrate UPL's expressive power and analytical ability by applying it to process design and process change analysis. In particular, we use UPL to define and classify process change anomalies and develop algorithms to verify and enforce process consistency.The Policy-driven Process Design, Unified Predicate Language, and process change analysis approach found in this dissertation contribute to business process management research by providing a formal methodology for resolving the policy mismatch problem.

Šiame darbe analizuojamas sakinio sandaros ir turinio pamatą sudarantys dviejų skirtingo tipo kalbų sintaksiniai predikatai ir jų struktūrinių tipų morfosintaksinis realizavimas daug tyrinėtas anglų kalbos gramatikos darbuose, tačiau ligi šiol mažai aptartas lietuvių kalbos moksliniuose techniniuose tekstuose. Sintaksinio predikato pamatas negali būti vertinamas tik funkciniu požiūriu. Labai svarbus veiksmažodžio (SP) struktūrinės sandaros vertinimas, lemiantis sintaksinės struktūros specifiką, kai veiksmažodis (SP) skaidomas iš vidaus (pvz., pagrindas [head] ir priklausomi rodikliai, linksniai). Veiksmažodžio sandara taip pat turi ir morfologinių, ir sintaksinių aspektų. / The predicate constitutes the basis of a sentence structure and content. The predicate has been researched at length and in depth in the works of English grammars, but is still little discussed in Lithuanian academic works, especially in those concerning scientific and technical texts. The structure of the predicate cannot be approached only functionally. The characterization of the internal division and morphosyntactic structure of the verb as the predicate is quite challenging (e.g. the verb as the head and affixes as dependent indicators in the VP). Accordingly, the morphosyntactic expression of a verb form and the structure inside the predicate is very complicated.

The predicate constitutes the basis of a sentence structure and content. The predicate has been researched at length and in depth in the works of English grammars, but is still little discussed in Lithuanian academic works, especially in those concerning scientific and technical texts. The structure of the predicate cannot be approached only functionally. The characterization of the internal division and morphosyntactic structure of the verb as the predicate is quite challenging (e.g. the verb as the head and affixes as dependent indicators in the VP). Accordingly, the morphosyntactic expression of a verb form and the structure inside the predicate is very complicated. / Šiame darbe analizuojamas sakinio sandaros ir turinio pamatą sudarantys dviejų skirtingo tipo kalbų sintaksiniai predikatai ir jų struktūrinių tipų morfosintaksinis realizavimas daug tyrinėtas anglų kalbos gramatikos darbuose, tačiau ligi šiol mažai aptartas lietuvių kalbos moksliniuose techniniuose tekstuose. Sintaksinio predikato pamatas negali būti vertinamas tik funkciniu požiūriu. Labai svarbus veiksmažodžio (SP) struktūrinės sandaros vertinimas, lemiantis sintaksinės struktūros specifiką, kai veiksmažodis (SP) skaidomas iš vidaus (pvz., pagrindas [head] ir priklausomi rodikliai, linksniai). Veiksmažodžio sandara taip pat turi ir morfologinių, ir sintaksinių aspektų.

This work investigates the use of formal logic as a practical tool for describing the syntax and semantics of a subset of English, and building a computer program to answer data base queries expressed in that subset. To achieve an intimate connection between logical descriptions and computer programs, all the descriptions given are in the definite clause subset of the predicate calculus, which is the basis of the programming language Prolog. The logical descriptions run directly as efficient Prolog programs. Three aspects of the use of logic in natural language analysis are covered: formal representation of syntactic rules by means of a grammar formalism based on logic, extraposition grammars;. formal semantics for the chosen English subset, appropriate for data base queries; informal semantic and pragmatic rules to translate analysed sentences into their formal semantics. On these three aspects, the work improves and extends earlier work by Colmerauer and others, where the use of computational logic in language analysis was first introduced.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:30:28Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2010-01-18Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:19:19Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 santana_l_dr_sjrp.pdf: 1536697 bytes, checksum: 74eccec20298ad2fbce9e2f4cfd327a3 (MD5) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / O principal objetivo desta tese é o estudo da variação escalar entre construções verbais e nominais que figuram como complemento de orações hierarquicamente superiores, isto é, orações completivas finitas plenamente desenvolvidas e orações completivas não-finitas com um verbo infinitivo ou com uma nominalização como núcleo. Essas possibilidades de variação fornecem um conjunto de construções alternativas, cuja seleção pode depender de fatores funcionais, embora não exclusivamente. A variação entre construções mais nominais e construções mais verbais e as consequências dela decorrentes são razões que justificam plenamente uma investigação criteriosa das motivações semânticas que regem o funcionamento das construções encaixadas completivas, mediante a atuação dos princípios funcionais de iconicidade e economia (HAIMAN, 1983; CRISTOFARO, 2003) na relação entre a semântica do predicado encaixador de complemento e a codificação morfossintática do predicado encaixado. A principal proposição que conduz a investigação é a de que, para a seleção dos diferentes tipos de complemento, existe uma relação de integração semântica (GIVÓN, 1980, 1990) entre construções completivas e a categoria semântica do predicado encaixador, de modo que a semântica do predicado encaixador é altamente relevante para determinar a categoria morfossintática das predicações dependentes. A relação de gradação entre maior ou menor grau de sentencialidade (LEHMANN, 1988), que se correlaciona ao grau de nominalidade da construção dependente, está vinculada ao nível e à camada de organização estrutural definidos pela Gramática Discursivo-Funcional (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008) nos seguintes termos: quanto mais baixa a camada de representação do complemento tanto maior o grau de integração semântica entre o predicado da oração encaixadora... / The aim of this thesis is to investigate the scalar variation between verbal and nominal constructions which function as complements of hierarchically higher clauses, i.e., finite complement clauses which are fully developed, and non-finite complement clauses which are headed by an infinitive verb or a nominalization. This range of variation provides a set of alternative constructions whose selection may, though not exclusively, depend on functional factors. The variation between more nominal and more verbal constructions and its consequences fully justifies a rigorous investigation of the semantic motivations which govern how embedded complement clauses actually function, by means of the functional principles of iconicity and economy (HAIMAN, 1983; CRISTOFARO, 2003) on the relationship between the semantics of the complement taking predicate and the morphosyntactic encoding of the embedded predicate. The main tenet underlying this investigation is that (i) sorting out different types of complement predicates requires a relation of semantic integration (GIVÓN, 1980, 1990) between complement clause and the semantic category of the complement taking predicate and (ii) such relation is, therefore, highly relevant to determine the morphosyntactic encoding of the dependent predications. The gradient relationship between balancing and deranking sentences, which is correlated to the degree of nominality or sentenciality of the dependent construction (LEHMANN, 1988), is associated with the structural organization of levels and layers defined by Functional Discourse Grammar (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008) as follows: the lower the representation level of the complement the higher the degree of semantic integration between the complement taking predicate and the predicate of the embedded clause. Keywords: complement taking predicate; complement clause; semantic integration.