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This review lists Agama smithii Boulenger 1896 as a synonym of Agama agama (Linnaeus 1758), Agama trachypleura Peters 1982 as a synonym of Acanthocercus phillipsii (Boulenger 1895) and describes for the first time Acanthocercus guentherpetersi n. sp. Without more convincing evidence, Chamaeleon ruspolii Boettger 1893 cannot be accepted as specifically distinct from Chamaeleo dilepis Leach 1819, nor Chamaeleo calcaricarens Böhme 1985 from C. africanus Laurenti 1768. Consequently, 101 species of lizard are currently recognised in Ethiopia, of which some 40% appear to be denizens of the Somali-arid zone. This significant proportion is attributable in part to the importance of the Horn of Africa as a centre for reptilian diversification and endemicity, in part to the fact that this lowland fauna was rather extensively sampled during the 1930s, but also to the conspicuous neglect of lizards in other regions of the country. Mountain and forested habitats are widespread in Ethiopia, so it seems extraordinary to record only five saurian species which are believed to be endemic in such environments. The inference that there are many more still to be discovered has important implications for conservation, because montane forest is known to be among the most threatened of Ethiopian biomes and there is clearly an urgent need for its herpetofauna to be more thoroughly researched and documented.
In this article we examine and "exapt" Wurzel's concept of superstable markers in an innovative manner. We develop an extended view of superstability through a critical discussion of Wurzel's original definition and the status of marker-superstability versus allomorphy in Natural Morphology: As we understand it, superstability is - above and beyond a step towards uniformity - mainly a symptom for the weakening of the category affected (cf. 1.,2. and 4.). This view is exemplified in four short case studies on superstability in different grammatical categories of four Germanic languages: genitive case in Mainland Scandinavian and English (3.1), plural formation in Dutch (3.2), second person singular ending -st in German (3.3), and ablaut generalisation in Luxembourgish (3.4).
In order to understand the specific structures and features of the German surnames the most important facts about their emergence and history should be outlined and, at the same time, be compared with the Swedish surnames because there are considerable differences (for further details cf. Nubling 1997 a, b). First of all, surnames in Germany emerged rather early, with the first instances occurring in the 11th century in southern Germany; by the 16th century surnames were common all over Germany. Differences are related to geography (from south to north), social class (from the upper to the lower classes) und urban versus rural areas.
The medium of (oral) language is mostly disregarded (or overlooked) in contemporary media theories. This "ignoring of language" in media studies is often accompanied by an inadequate transport model of communication, and it converges with an "ignoring of mediality" in mentalistic theories of language. In the present article it will be argued that this misleading opposition of language and media can only be overcome if one already regards oral language, not just written language, as a medium of the human mind. In my argumentation I fall back on Wittgenstein’s conception of language games to try to show how Wittgenstein’s ideas can help us to clear up the problem of the mediality of language and also to show to what extent the mentalistic conception of Chomskyan provenance cannot be adequate to the phenomenon of language.
As editor of the next iteration of the Köchel Catalogue, I have to deal with the current (sixth) edition’s Appendix C, devoted to "Doubtful and Misattributed Works." My goal is to reduce the potentially vast dimensions of that appendix to only those works for which some connection to Mozart cannot be ruled out. In the decades since 1964, when the current edition of Köchel was published, many of the works listed in Appendix C have been convincingly attributed to other composers. Other works therein can confidently be dismissed as never having had any meaningful connection to Mozart. Yet even after removing the reattributed and trivially misattributed works from the appendix, we are left with a handful of works that may possibly have had something to do with Mozart, even if clear evidence one way or the other remains elusive. One must, of course, be cautious in removing questionable and doubtful works from the catalogue, as the present case-study will illustrate. The work under consideration, catalogued as K6 Anh. C 9.07, is an unaccompanied piece for three or four voices with the text "Venerabilis barba capucinorum." ...
In the past, a divide could be seen between ’deep’ parsers on the one hand, which construct a semantic representation out of their input, but usually have significant coverage problems, and more robust parsers on the other hand, which are usually based on a (statistical) model derived from a treebank and have larger coverage, but leave the problem of semantic interpretation to the user. More recently, approaches have emerged that combine the robustness of datadriven (statistical) models with more detailed linguistic interpretation such that the output could be used for deeper semantic analysis. Cahill et al. (2002) use a PCFG-based parsing model in combination with a set of principles and heuristics to derive functional (f-)structures of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). They show that the derived functional structures have a better quality than those generated by a parser based on a state-of-the-art hand-crafted LFG grammar. Advocates of Dependency Grammar usually point out that dependencies already are a semantically meaningful representation (cf. Menzel, 2003). However, parsers based on dependency grammar normally create underspecified representations with respect to certain phenomena such as coordination, apposition and control structures. In these areas they are too "shallow" to be directly used for semantic interpretation. In this paper, we adopt a similar approach to Cahill et al. (2002) using a dependency-based analysis to derive functional structure, and demonstrate the feasibility of this approach using German data. A major focus of our discussion is on the treatment of coordination and other potentially underspecified structures of the dependency data input. F-structure is one of the two core levels of syntactic representation in LFG (Bresnan, 2001). Independently of surface order, it encodes abstract syntactic functions that constitute predicate argument structure and other dependency relations such as subject, predicate, adjunct, but also further semantic information such as the semantic type of an adjunct (e.g. directional). Normally f-structure is captured as a recursive attribute value matrix, which is isomorphic to a directed graph representation. Figure 5 depicts an example target f-structure. As mentioned earlier, these deeper-level dependency relations can be used to construct logical forms as in the approaches of van Genabith and Crouch (1996), who construct underspecified discourse representations (UDRSs), and Spreyer and Frank (2005), who have robust minimal recursion semantics (RMRS) as their target representation. We therefore think that f-structures are a suitable target representation for automatic syntactic analysis in a larger pipeline of mapping text to interpretation. In this paper, we report on the conversion from dependency structures to fstructure. Firstly, we evaluate the f-structure conversion in isolation, starting from hand-corrected dependencies based on the TüBa-D/Z treebank and Versley (2005)´s conversion. Secondly, we start from tokenized text to evaluate the combined process of automatic parsing (using Foth and Menzel (2006)´s parser) and f-structure conversion. As a test set, we randomly selected 100 sentences from TüBa-D/Z which we annotated using a scheme very close to that of the TiGer Dependency Bank (Forst et al., 2004). In the next section, we sketch dependency analysis, the underlying theory of our input representations, and introduce four different representations of coordination. We also describe Weighted Constraint Dependency Grammar (WCDG), the dependency parsing formalism that we use in our experiments. Section 3 characterises the conversion of dependencies to f-structures. Our evaluation is presented in section 4, and finally, section 5 summarises our results and gives an overview of problems remaining to be solved.
Using a qualitative analysis of disagreements from a referentially annotated newspaper corpus, we show that, in coreference annotation, vague referents are prone to greater disagreement. We show how potentially problematic cases can be dealt with in a way that is practical even for larger-scale annotation, considering a real-world example from newspaper text.
In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of a wide range of features for their usefulness in the resolution of nominal coreference, both as hard constraints (i.e. completely removing elements from the list of possible candidates) as well as soft constraints (where a cumulation of violations of soft constraints will make it less likely that a candidate is chosen as the antecedent). We present a state of the art system based on such constraints and weights estimated with a maximum entropy model, using lexical information to resolve cases of coreferent bridging.
In recent years, research in parsing has extended in several new directions. One of these directions is concerned with parsing languages other than English. Treebanks have become available for many European languages, but also for Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese. However, it was shown that parsing results on these treebanks depend on the types of treebank annotations used. Another direction in parsing research is the development of dependency parsers. Dependency parsing profits from the non-hierarchical nature of dependency relations, thus lexical information can be included in the parsing process in a much more natural way. Especially machine learning based approaches are very successful (cf. e.g.). The results achieved by these dependency parsers are very competitive although comparisons are difficult because of the differences in annotation. For English, the Penn Treebank has been converted to dependencies. For this version, Nivre et al. report an accuracy rate of 86.3%, as compared to an F-score of 92.1 for Charniaks parser. The Penn Chinese Treebank is also available in a constituent and a dependency representations. The best results reported for parsing experiments with this treebank give an F-score of 81.8 for the constituent version and 79.8% accuracy for the dependency version. The general trend in comparisons between constituent and dependency parsers is that the dependency parser performs slightly worse than the constituent parser. The only exception occurs for German, where F-scores for constituent plus grammatical function parses range between 51.4 and 75.3, depending on the treebank, NEGRA or TüBa-D/Z. The dependency parser based on a converted version of Tüba-D/Z, in contrast, reached an accuracy of 83.4%, i.e. 12 percent points better than the best constituent analysis including grammatical functions.