We distinguish diagrammatic from sentential paper-and-pencil representationsof information by developing alternative models of information-processing systems that are informationally equivalent and that can be characterized as sentential or diagrammatic. Sentential representations are sequential

This dissertation is a defense of the hypothesis that the noun phrase is headed by afunctional element (i.e., \non-lexical " category) D, identi ed with the determiner. In this way, the structure of the noun phrase parallels that of the sentence, which is headed by In (ection), under assumptions now standard within the Government-Binding (GB) framework. The central empirical problem addressed is the question of the proper analysis of the so-called \Poss-ing " gerund in English. This construction possesses simultaneously many properties of sentences, and many properties of noun phrases. The problem of capturing this dual aspect of the Possing construction is heightened by current restrictive views of X-bar theory, which, in particular, rule out the obvious structure for Poss-ing, [NP NP VPing], by virtue of its exocentricity. Consideration of languages in which nouns, even the most basic concrete nouns, show agreement (AGR) with their possessors, points to an analysis

of apparently conflicting results concerning the roles of lexical and contextual information in sentence processing, explains differences among ambiguities in terms of ease of resolution, and provides a more unified account of language comprehension than was previously available. One of the principal goals

serious than in EI Salvador, ” declares one Latin American diplomat. “The oligarchy is that much more reactionary. and the choices are far fewer. “ ‘Zero’: The Guatemalan oligarchs hated Jimmy Carter for cutting off U.S. military aid in 1977 to protest human-rights abuses-and the right-wingers hired

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Suppose one is given a description of a system, together with an observation of the system's behaviour which conflicts with the way the system is meant to behave. The diagnostic problem is to determine those components of the system which, when assumed to be functioning abnormally, will explain the discrepancy between the observed and correct system behaviour. We propose a general theory for this problem. The theory requires only that the system be described in a suitable logic. Moreover, there are many such suitable logics, e.g. first-order, temporal, dynamic, etc. As a result, the theory accommodates diagnostic reasoning in a wide variety of practical settings, including digital and analogue circuits, medicine, and database updates. The theory leads to an algorithm for computing all diagnoses, and to various results concerning principles of measurement for discriminating among competing diagnoses. Finally, the theory reveals close connections between diagnostic reasoning and nonmonotonic reasoning.

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This paper proposes a new theory of the relationship between the sentence processing mechanism and the available computational resources. This theory -- the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT) -- has two components: an integration cost component and a component for the memory cost