Squibs and short discussions

These squibs are not meant for publication or at least not yet. This means that I have not checked the literature and so some things might in fact not be new. These squibs are public, use them for your purposes but give credit where due.
  1. "Counter Free Regular Languages are Not Learnable". UCLA, April 2007. (In a discussion with András Kornai he suggested that natural languages are regular and have the property that if a word can be repeated 4 times it can be repeated an indefinite number of times. He thought that perhaps such languages are learnable. Unfortunately this is not the case as I show here.)
  2. "On Independent Pumpability". UCLA, October 2005. (Shows that the property of independent k+1-pumpability is strictly stronger than independent k-pumpability. Ogden's Lemma only guarantees independent 1-pumpability.)
  3. "On Scope and C-command". UCLA, 2005. (On the connection between scopus in logic and c-command. Also discusses how c-command relationship can disambiguate the sentences.)
  4. "Some Remarks on Zipf's Laws". UCLA, 2005. (Incomplete. Shows that probabilistic context free grammars generate Zipf-distributions as long as they are not ambiguous. This also applies to regular languages that are not thin (term defined in the paper).)
  5. "On Strings, Bracelets and Bracketings". UCLA, October 2004. (A simple proof that the number of binary branching trees of a string equals the Catalan number of its length. Does not need generating functions. Martin Aigner claims that the proof is known (and I think the same) but have not found anything.)
  6. "The Frege Map is Not Function Application". FU Berlin, 2986. (Manuscript of a lecture held at an ESSLLI workshop at the university of Barcelona. Under the impression of works by Kees Vermeulen and Albert Visser I argued against type theoretic semantics. I still agree with the viewpoint.)
  7. "Case at the Syntax Semantics Interface". My own thoughts on the topic why do we have cases. Unpublished because the arguments can meanwhile be found elsewhere.)
  8. "On the Connection between Hierarchy and Order", FU Berlin, 1995. Kayne's book The Antisymmetry of Syntax created a hype in syntax circles. In these notes I ask what relevance his thesis has for generative syntax. This turned into the paper "Adjunction Structures and Syntactic Domains".
Marcus Kracht
Last changed: Mi Sep 02 2008 15:00:00 CET