Legal draftsmen achieve the dual characteristics of thel egislative genre, viz. precision and all-inclusiveness, by the use of various linguistic devices, among which are (i) common words with uncommon meanings; (ii) binomial and multinominal expressions; (iii) nominalization; and (iv) qualifications. Whilst these four devices are very effective for their intended purpose, they often cause lexical, semantic or syntactic problem in the comprehension and translation of texts. This thesis explores, by analysis of the corpus, the different nature and extent of such problems caused by the above four devices in the translation of legislative texts from English to Chinese. Analyses in the thesis reveal that translation problems caused by the first two of the four devices mentioned above are mainly lexical in nature, though binomials contained in qualifications may sometimes also lead to semantic ambiguity. Translation problems arising from the use of nominalization or the use of qualifications are primarily semantic in nature, and are basically a problem of handling the various semantic units in the clauses. They can occur in both the comprehension stage and the actual rendering stage of the translation process. In the former, the problem lies in the difficulty in unpacking the various semantic units in the clauses, especially in the syntactically interrupted clauses where syntactic discontinuities are caused by the use of qualifications. in the latter, the difficulty lies in the syntactic re-arrangement of those units in the target language text in a manner syntactically acceptable to the target language while strictly in accordance with each semantic relationship intended by the source language text. Both the use of nominalization and the use of qualifications also give rise to some lexical problems. The analyses in the thesis also highlights some of the linguistic and extra-linguistic pre-requisites for a translator of legislative texts, for whom a good common sense and sufficient basic legal knowledge are as important as an extremely high level of proficiency in both the source language and the target language. / Master of Arts (Translation and Linguistics)

<p>Denna uppsats behandlar förekomsten av den optionella subjunktionen <em>som</em> i svenska objektsrelativsatser. Sökningar gjordes i en svenskspråkig korpus för att hitta objektsrelativsatser med och utan <em>som</em>. Resultaten undersöktes mot bakgrund av två hypoteser gällande processningseffektivitet och tillgänglighet hos referenter. I båda fallen styrktes dessa hypoteser. S<em>om </em>tycks vara mer frekvent i relativsatser där många ord skiljer matrissatsens korrelat från relativsatsens finita verb vilket stödjer principen Maximize On-line Processing som formulerats av Hawkins och som grundar sig i teorier kring processningseffektivitet. <em>Som </em>tycktes också vara mer frekvent i relativsatser där det inbäddade subjektet var i hög grad tillgängligt, i fråga om pronominell och animat status hos referenten.</p>

<p>Space syntax has been considered to be an important theory and analytical tool to study the correlation between spatial configuration and human social activities. But its traditional Axial Model has limitations in representing street. The conclusion got form Axial Model，that spatial configuration of street network can well predict the traffic flow, has been widely doubled.</p><p>In order to testify the conclusion, the thesis sets out to use Axial, Stroke and Named Street Models to model and analyze Hong Kong street network. Our research methodology is first to create and study different models of street network in pilot study area- Kowloon peninsula of Hong Kong, from the perspectives of space syntax theory and properties of complicated network. Through the pilot study, tentative correlations and conclusions could be derived, which are verified through the case study of whole street network of Hong Kong by taking samples from three different sampling criteria.</p><p>Through analysis, we find out that local integration best correlates with vehicle flow, and this correlation is called predictability of street network. Through comparisons of different models in terms of predictability, we conclude that stroke model has the best ability to predict vehicle flow. By analyzing the axial model of Hong Kong street network and comparing its result to early study, we prove that axial model does have limitations to represent street network. Also we find out all models of street network have properties of small world network and scale free, from the topological studies of these models.</p><p>In the research of this thesis, we develop an extension of ArcGIS, named Axwoman 4 in order to calculate and extract space syntax parameters from different models. And important implementation algorithms are introduced in this thesis.</p><p>The thesis is summed up at the end, and future research directions are given.</p>

This report elucidates the linguistic representation of temporal relations among events. This involves examining sentences that contain two clauses connected by words like once, by the time, when, and before. Specifically, the effect of the tenses of the connected clauses on the acceptability of sentences are examined. For example, Rachel disappeared once Jon had fallen asleep is fine, but *Rachel had disappeared once Jon fell asleep is unacceptable. A theory of acceptability is developed and its implications for interpretation discussed. Factoring of the linguisitic knowledge into a general, syntactic component and a lexical component clarifies the interpretation problem. Finally, a computer model of the theory is demonstrated.

In this paper we describe {\\it syntactic closures}. Syntactic closures address the scoping problems that arise when writing macros. We discuss some issues raised by introducing syntactic closures into the macro expansion interface, and we compare syntactic closures with other approaches. Included is a complete implementation.

This paper considers the problem of language change. Linguists must explain not only how languages are learned but also how and why they have evolved along certain trajectories and not others. While the language learning problem has focused on the behavior of individuals and how they acquire a particular grammar from a class of grammars ${cal G}$, here we consider a population of such learners and investigate the emergent, global population characteristics of linguistic communities over several generations. We argue that language change follows logically from specific assumptions about grammatical theories and learning paradigms. In particular, we are able to transform parameterized theories and memoryless acquisition algorithms into grammatical dynamical systems, whose evolution depicts a population's evolving linguistic composition. We investigate the linguistic and computational consequences of this model, showing that the formalization allows one to ask questions about diachronic that one otherwise could not ask, such as the effect of varying initial conditions on the resulting diachronic trajectories. From a more programmatic perspective, we give an example of how the dynamical system model for language change can serve as a way to distinguish among alternative grammatical theories, introducing a formal diachronic adequacy criterion for linguistic theories.

The goal of this article is to reveal the computational structure of modern principle-and-parameter (Chomskian) linguistic theories: what computational problems do these informal theories pose, and what is the underlying structure of those computations? To do this, I analyze the computational complexity of human language comprehension: what linguistic representation is assigned to a given sound? This problem is factored into smaller, interrelated (but independently statable) problems. For example, in order to understand a given sound, the listener must assign a phonetic form to the sound; determine the morphemes that compose the words in the sound; and calculate the linguistic antecedent of every pronoun in the utterance. I prove that these and other subproblems are all NP-hard, and that language comprehension is itself PSPACE-hard.

This is the first issue of a series in which affiliates of the Institute of Linguistics report the results of their experimental work. Generative linguistics usually rely on the method of native speaker judgements in order to test their hypotheses. If a hypothesis rules out a set of sentences, linguistics can ask native speakers whether they feel these sentences are indeed ungrammatical in their language. There are, however, circumstances where this method is unreliable. In such cases a more elaborate method to test a hypothesis is called. All papes in this series, and hence, all papers in this volume deal with issues that cannot be reliably tested with native speaker judgements. <br><br> This volume contains 7 papers, all using different methods and finding answers to very different questions. This heterogenity, by the way, reflects the various interests and research programs of the institute. The paper, by Trutkowski, Zugck, Blaszczak, Fanselow, Fischer and Vogel deals with superiority in 10 Indo-European languages. The paper by Schlesewsky, Fanselow and Frisch and by Schlesewsky and Frisch, deal with the role of case in processing German sentences. The paper by Vogel and Frisch deals with resolving case conflicts, as does the paper by Vogel and Zugck. The nature of partitive case is the topic of the paper by Fischer. The paper by K?gler deals with the realization of question intonation in two German dialects. <br><br> We hope that you enjoy reading the papers!

This volume contains the proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Prosody, Syntax, and Information Structure (WPSI2), held at University of Potsdam on March 18, 2005. WPSI 2 was aimed to discuss issues on the interaction of prosody, syntax, and information structure, from interdisciplinary points of view. The contributors (Haruo Kubozono, Shinichiro Ishihara, Yoshihisa Kitagawa, and Satoshi Tomioka) have been recently working on relevant issues, especially looking at the phenomena related to the intonation of focus and (wh-)questions in Japanese.

This thesis explores the development of parallel treebanks, collections of language data consisting of texts and their translations, with syntactic annotation and alignment, linking words, phrases, and sentences to show translation equivalence. We describe the semi-manual annotation of the SMULTRON parallel treebank, consisting of 1,000 sentences in English, German and Swedish. This description is the starting point for answering the first of two questions in this thesis. What issues need to be considered to achieve a high-quality, consistent,parallel treebank? The units of annotation and the choice of annotation schemes are crucial for quality, and some automated processing is necessary to increase the size. Automatic quality checks and evaluation are essential, but manual quality control is still needed to achieve high quality. Additionally, we explore improving the automatically created annotation for one language, using information available from the annotation of the other languages. This leads us to the second of the two questions in this thesis. Can we improve automatic annotation by projecting information available in the other languages? Experiments with automatic alignment, which is projected from two language pairs, L1–L2 and L1–L3, onto the third pair, L2–L3, show an improvement in precision, in particular if the projected alignment is intersected with the system alignment. We also construct a test collection for experiments on annotation projection to resolve prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities. While majority vote projection improves the annotation, compared to the basic automatic annotation, using linguistic clues to correct the annotation before majority vote projection is even better, although more laborious. However, some structural errors cannot be corrected by projection at all, as different languages have different wording, and thus different structures. / I denna doktorsavhandling utforskas skapandet av parallella trädbanker. Dessa är språkliga data som består av texter och deras översättningar, som har märkts upp med syntaktisk information samt länkar mellan ord, fraser och meningar som motsvarar varandra i översättningarna. Vi beskriver den delvis manuella uppmärkningen av den parallella trädbanken SMULTRON, med 1.000 engelska, tyska och svenska meningar. Denna beskrivning är utgångspunkt för att besvara den första av två frågor i avhandlingen. Vilka frågor måste beaktas för att skapa en högkvalitativ parallell trädbank? De enheter som märks upp samt valet av uppmärkningssystemet är viktiga för kvaliteten, och en viss andel automatisk bearbetning är nödvändig för att utöka storleken. Automatiska kvalitetskontroller och automatisk utvärdering är av vikt, men viss manuell granskning är nödvändig för att uppnå hög kvalitet. Vidare utforskar vi att använda information som finns i uppmärkningen, för att förbättra den automatiskt skapade uppmärkningen för ett annat språk. Detta leder oss till den andra av de två frågorna i avhandlingen. Kan vi förbättra automatisk uppmärkning genom att överföra information som finns i de andra språken? Experimenten visar att automatisk länkning som överförs från två språkpar, L1–L2 och L1–L3, till det tredje språkparet, L2–L3, får förbättrad precision, framför allt för skärningspunkten mellan den överförda länkningen och den automatiska länkningen. Vi skapar även en testsamling för experiment med överföring av uppmärkning för att lösa upp strukturella flertydigheter hos prepositionsfraser. Överföring enligt majoritetsprincipen förbättrar uppmärkningen, jämfört med den grundläggande automatiska uppmärkningen, men att använda språkliga ledtrådar för att korrigera uppmärkningen innan majoritetsöverföring är ännu bättre, om än mer arbetskrävande. Vissa felaktiga strukturer kan dock inte korrigeras med hjälp av överföring, eftersom de olika språken använder olika formuleringar, och därmed har olika strukturer.