The event analysis of action sentences seems to be at odds with plausible (Davidsonian) views about how to count actions. If Booth pulled a certain trigger, and thereby shot Lincoln, there is good reason for identifying Booths' action of pulling the trigger with his action of shooting Lincoln; but given truth conditions of certain sentences involving adjuncts, the event analysis requires that the pulling and the shooting be distinct events. So I propose that event sortals like 'shooting' and 'pulling' are (...) true of complex events that have actions (and various effects of actions) as parts. Combining this view with some facts about so-called causative verbs, I then argue that paradigmatic actions are best viewed as tryings, where tryings are taken to be intentionally characterized events that typically cause peripheral bodily motions. The proposal turns on a certain conception of what it is to be the Agent of an event; and I conclude by elaborating this conception in the context of some recent discussions about the relation of thematic roles to grammatical categories. (shrink)

The article focuses on representing different forms of non-adjunctive inference as sub-Kripkean systems of classical modal logic, where the inference from □A and □B to □A ∧ B fails. In particular we prove a completeness result showing that the modal system that Schotch and Jennings derive from a form of non-adjunctive inference in (Schotch and Jennings, 1980) is a classical system strictly stronger than EMN and weaker than K (following the notation for classical modalities presented in Chellas, 1980). The unified (...) semantical characterization in terms of neighborhoods permits comparisons between different forms of non-adjunctive inference. For example, we show that the non-adjunctive logic proposed in (Schotch and Jennings, 1980) is not adequate in general for representing the logic of high probability operators. An alternative interpretation of the forcing relation of Schotch and Jennings is derived from the proposed unified semantics and utilized in order to propose a more fine-grained measure of epistemic coherence than the one presented in (Schotch and Jennings, 1980). Finally we propose a syntactic translation of the purely implicative part of Jaśkowski's system D₂ into a classical system preserving all the theorems (and non-theorems) explicilty mentioned in (Jaśkowski, 1969). The translation method can be used in order to develop epistemic semantics for a larger class of non-adjunctive (discursive) logics than the ones historically investigated by Jaśkowski. (shrink)

The rule of adjunction is intuitively appealing and uncontroversial for deductive inference, but in situations where information can be uncertain, the rule is neither needed nor wanted for rational acceptance, as illustrated by the lottery paradox. Practical certainty is the acceptance of statements whose chances of error are smaller than a prescribed threshold parameter, when evaluated against an evidential corpus. We examine the failure of adjunction in relation to the threshold parameter for practical certainty, with an eye towards reinstating the (...) rule of adjunction in some restricted forms, by observing the conditions under which the overall chance of error of the joint statements can be variously bounded. (shrink)

The comprehension of anaphoric relations may be guided not only by discourse, but also syntactic information. In the literature on online processing, however, the focus has been on audible pronouns and descriptions whose reference is resolved mainly on the former. This paper examines one relation that both lacks overt exponence, and relies almost exclusively on syntax for its resolution: adjunct control, or the dependency between the null subject of a non-finite adjunct and its antecedent in sentences such as Mickey talked (...) to Minnie before ___ eating. Using visual world eyetracking, we compare the time course of interpreting this null subject and overt pronouns (Mickey talked to Minnie before he ate). We show that when control structures are highly frequent, listeners are just as quick to resolve reference in either case. When control structures are less frequent, reference resolution based on structural information still occurs upon hearing the non-finite verb, but more slowly, especially when unaided by structural and referential predictions. This may be due to increased difficulty in recognizing that a referential dependency is necessary. These results indicate that in at least some contexts, referential expressions whose resolution depends on very different sources of information can be resolved approximately equally rapidly, and that the speed of interpretation is largely independent of whether or not the dependency is cued by an overt referring expression. (shrink)

Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness (2018) and (2020) argue that adjuncts are not exploited. We are sympathetic to some of their points. We agree, for example, that certain ways in which adjuncts are compared to sweatshop workers are offensive. For, as Brennan and Magness point out, there are many respects in which adjuncts are much better off than sweatshop workers. However, we show that the core insights of their paper are compatible with the view that adjuncts are exploited. Furthermore, their (...) more general views about exploitation expressed in Cracks in the Ivory Tower actually lend support to the claim that adjuncts are exploited. (shrink)

We offer a proof of the duality theorem for finitely presented MV-algebras and rational polyhedra, a folklore and yet fundamental result. Our approach develops first a general dual adjunction between MV-algebras and subspaces of Tychonoff cubes, endowed with the transformations that are definable in the language of MV-algebras. We then show that this dual adjunction restricts to a duality between semisimple MV-algebras and closed subspaces of Tychonoff cubes. The duality theorem for finitely presented objects is obtained by a further specialisation. (...) Our treatment is aimed at showing exactly which parts of the basic theory of MV-algebras are needed in order to establish these results, with an eye towards future generalisations. (shrink)

The adoption question asks whether there are logical rules that cannot be adopted if one does not already infer in accordance with them. Several philosophers, most famously Saul Kripke and Romina Padró, agree that there are such rules. Accordingly, they agree that there is an adoption problem. However, there is disagreement over which rules are unadoptable. In particular, while most agree that if there is an adoption problem, modus ponens and universal instantiation are in its scope, many would exclude adjunction (...) from the list. In this paper, I argue that adjunction is in the scope of the adoption problem. Then I show that the most straightforward counterargument against adjunction being in the scope of the problem, which tries to reformulate the adjunction rule into a more palatable one, does not work. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed across the language sciences that some semantic participant information is lexically encoded in the representation of verbs and some is not. In this paper, we propose that semantic obligatoriness and verb class specificity are criteria which influence whether semantic information is lexically encoded. We present a comprehensive survey of the English verbal lexicon, a sentence continuation study, and an on-line sentence processing study which confirm that both factors play a role in the lexical encoding of participant (...) information. (shrink)

The distinction between COMPLEMENTS and ADJUNCTS has a long tradition in grammatical theory, and it is also included in some way or other in most current formal linguistic theories. But it is a highly vexed distinction for several reasons, one of which is that no diagnostic criteria have emerged that will reliably distinguish adjuncts from complements in all cases — too many examples seem to fall into the crack between the two categories, no matter how theorists wrestle with them.

A driving force behind the evolution of the stakeholder concept is the potential of negative outcomes for an organization as the result of conflict between that organization and its stakeholders. Where conflict does arise between an organization and stakeholder how might it be resolved in a manner compatible with stakeholder theory? Applying feminist ethical theory as a theoretical basis for stakeholder theory, mediation provides an appropriate process for resolving such disputes in comparison to traditional adversarial strategies. This paper discusses the (...) attributes of mediation, and its potential benefits as a method to resolve disputes between businesses and their stakeholders. (shrink)

In one approach to classifying island phenomena, there is a group that answers to the following description. ADJUNCT ISLAND CONDITION If an XP is in an adjunct position, nothing may move out of it. In the influential approach to this condition in Huang, “adjunct” position is defined in terms that reference argument structure and its reflection in phrasemarker geometry. This definition groups together subject phrases and modifying phrases, contrasting them with phrases in “complement” position. The subsequent bounding theories in Lasnik (...) and Saito and Chomsky build on this basic idea, but attempt to spread it to a wide variety of island effects, including those characterized by early versions of Chomsky’s Subjacency condition. Central to their approaches is the notion of “lexical governor,” which is responsible for making the complement/non-complement cut — only phrases that are governed by a suitably lexical Xo are “complements,” and the island conditions are defined, then, over all the others. This part of the system has fallen into disuse partly, I suspect, because characterizing the “lexical” versus “non-lexical” distinction never found itself grounded in something more general, and partly because it became unwieldy in the increasing richness of post-Pollock representations of phrase-markers. This paper adopts the view that there is an island condition like that in, which groups together subjects and adjuncts, but it does not attempt to define these phrases on the basis of a “lexical governor.” Instead, let us adopt a characterization of “adjunct” that is wholly geometric: An adjunct is a phrase whose sister is also a phrase and whose mother is not its projection. This will put together “subject” phrases and modifier phrases under the standard assumption that these are both necessarily sisters to phrases rather than heads. Thus it will single out the boxed phrases in. (shrink)

Quantificational arguments can take scope outside of temporal adjunct clauses, in an apparent violation of locality restrictions: the sentence few secretaries cried after each executive resigned allows the quantificational NP each executive to take scope above few secretaries. I show how this scope relation is the result of local operations: the adjunct clause is a temporal generalized quantifier which takes scope over the main clause (Pratt and Francez, Linguistic and Philosophy 24(2), 187–222. [2001]), and within the adjunct clause, the quantificational (...) argument takes scope above the implicit determiner which forms the temporal generalized quantifier. The paper explores various relations among quantificational arguments across clause boundaries, including temporal clauses that are modified internally by a temporal adverbial and temporal clauses with embedded sentential complements. (shrink)

Suicidal men feel the need to be self-reliant and that they cannot find another way out of relationship or socioeconomic issues. Suicide prevention is of crucial importance worldwide. The much higher rate of suicide in men engenders action. The prelude is a subjective experience that can be very isolating and severely distressing. Men may not realize a change in their thinking and behaviors, which makes it more difficult to seek and get help, thereby interrupting a “downward spiral”. Stoicism often prevents (...) men from admitting to their personal struggle. The lack of “quality” connections and “non-tailored” therapies has led to a high number of men “walking out” on traditional clinical approaches. But there are complicated relationships in motivations and formative behaviors of suicide with regards to emotional state, psychiatric disorders, interpersonal life events and suicidal behavior method selection. Middle-aged and older men have alternated as the most at-risk of suicide. There is no one solution that applies to all men, but digital tools may be of assistance. Digital interventions require higher levels of effectiveness for distress and suicidality but self-guided approaches may be the most suitable for men especially where linked with an integrated online suicide prevention platform. Furthermore, technology-enabled models of care offer promise to advance appropriate linking to mental health services through better and faster understanding of the specific needs of individuals and the type and level of suicidality experienced. Long-term evidence for suicidality and its evaluation may benefit from progressing human computer-interaction and providing impetus for an eminent integrated digital platform. (shrink)

Self-conflict is a feature of most women’s lives, particularly as we struggle to balance the demands of work and family. Theories of autonomy that rest on a notion of a coherent self treat self-conflict as incompatible with autonomy; therefore, women who suffer self-conflict fail to act autonomously. Though autonomy and self-conflict can be accommodated by conceiving of autonomy as a matter of degree relative to a context of choice, this result sanctions a political system that forces the prioritization of one (...) context over another. Yet choices in one context often compromise choices in another context, creating a situation where acting autonomously simultaneously diminishes autonomy. Given that autonomous choice justifies political liberalism, it is unjust that choices are set against one another in this way. Consequently, the burden on liberal governments to address the structural sources of self-conflict is far greater than is often supposed. (shrink)

This study investigates processing of interrogative filler-gap dependencies in which the filler integration site or gap is not directly subcategorized by the verb. This is the case when the wh-filler is a structural adjunct such as how or when rather than subject or object. Two self-paced reading experiments in English and Slovenian provide converging cross-linguistic evidence that wh-adjuncts elicit a kind of memory storage cost similar to that previously shown in the literature for wh-arguments. Experiment 1 investigates the storage costs (...) elicited by the adjunct when in Slovenian, and Experiment 2 the storage costs elicited by how quickly and why in English. The results support the class of theories of storage costs based on the metric in terms of incomplete phrase structure rules or incomplete syntactic head predictions. We also demonstrate that the endpoint of the storage cost for a wh-adjunct filler provides valuable processing evidence for its base structural position, the identification of which remains a murky issue in current grammatical research. (shrink)

chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Goals In this book I will explore the syntactic and semantic properties of movement and adjunction in natural language, ...

An elementary theory of concatenation,QT+, is introduced and used to establish mutual interpretability of Robinson arithmetic, Minimal Predicative Set Theory, quantifier-free part of Kirby’s finitary set theory, and Adjunctive Set Theory, with or without extensionality. The most basic arithmetic and simplest set theory thus turn out to be variants of string theory.

In this work, we treat the interpretation of tense in adjunct clauses in English and Russian (relative clauses, before/after/when-clauses) with a future matrix verb. The main findings of our paper are the following: 1. English has a simultaneous reading in Present adjuncts embedded under will. Russian Present adjuncts under budet or the synthetic perfective future can only have a deictic interpretation. This follows from our SOT parameter. 2. The syntax of Russian temporal adjunct clauses (do/posle togo kak…) shows overt parts (...) that had to be stipulated for English as covert in earlier papers. We present a neat and straightforward analysis of Russian temporal adjuncts. Contrary to Russian, English has Present under Future in before-clauses. It would be nice to relate this feature to the SOT parameter, but the construction seems to be an idiosyncrasy in the domain of subordinate tense. (shrink)

mHealth refers to the rapidly evolving use of mobile devices for health care treatment purposes, particularly the use of apps and texting as adjuncts to psychotherapy. Although there is currently an extensive literature on issues related to telehealth, to date little guidance has been developed to help professionals function ethically in the rapidly emerging area of mHealth. This article identifies the major ethical considerations that need attention and proposes several recommendations to address mHealth use as an adjunct to psychotherapy, including (...) the pressing need for relevant American Psychological Association practice guidelines to assist mental health providers in the ethical implementation of mHealth. (shrink)

American universities rely upon a large workforce of adjunct faculty—contract workers who receive low pay, no benefits, and no job security. Many news sources, magazines, and activists claim that adjuncts are exploited and should receive better pay and treatment. This paper never affirms nor denies that adjuncts are exploited. Instead, we show that any attempt to provide a significantly better deal faces unpleasant constraints and trade-offs. “Adjunct justice” would cost universities somewhere between an additional $15–50 billion per year. At most, (...) universities can provide justice for a minority of adjuncts at the expense of the majority, as well as at the expense of poor students. Universities may indeed be exploiting adjuncts, but they cannot rectify this mistake without significant moral costs. (shrink)

Unlike adjunct wh’s-in-situ, argument wh’s-in-situ do not seem to be subject to island constraints in Chinese and other East Asian languages. This difference in island sensitivity between argument and adjunct wh’s-in-situ is known as argument–adjunct asymmetry in the theoretical literature. Recently, this long-established asymmetry is challenged by a formal judgment study. It was claimed in the study that this asymmetry is an illusion and both argument and adjunct wh’s-in-situ are subject to island constraints. The present study demonstrates that such a (...) claim is not convincing because it is based on problematic experimental design. We designed two experiments to test the island effects on Chinese wh’s-in-situ. The results reaffirm that the argument–adjunct asymmetry in Chinese wh’s-in-situ is indeed present, contrary to the findings of previous formal judgment study, and they also corroborate our assumption that when object wh’s-in-situ like shénme ‘what’ are located inside a relative clause, they are subject to a pragmatic constraint, suggesting that the VP in the relative clause tends to describe the prominent/salient feature of the relativized nominal head. (shrink)

Rosen's modelling relations constitute a conceptual schema for the understanding of the bidirectional process of correspondence between natural systems and formal symbolic systems. The notion of formal systems used in this study refers to information structures constructed as algebraic rings of observable attributes of natural systems, in which the notion of observable signifies a physical attribute that, in principle, can be measured. Due to the fact that modelling relations are bidirectional by construction, they admit a precise categorical formulation in terms (...) of the category-theoretic syntactic language of adjoint functors, representing the inverse processes of information encoding/decoding via adjunctions. As an application, we construct a topological modelling schema of complex systems. The crucial distinguishing requirement between simple and complex systems in this schema is reflected with respect to their rings of observables by the property of global commutativity. The global information structure representing the behaviour of a complex system is modelled functorially in terms of its spectrum functor. An exact modelling relation is obtained by means of a complex encoding/decoding adjunction restricted to an equivalence between the category of complex information structures and the category of sheaves over a base category of partial or local information carriers equipped with an appropriate topology. (shrink)

This article presents a qualitative case study that explores how faculty and administrators at one community college conceptualized and experienced academic community within their institution and how that conceptualization helped shape the part-time faculty work environment. Using a combined framework of academic community and care ethics, this study utilizes data from 55 interviews with full-time and part-time faculty and administrative leaders from a large community college. Findings from this study indicate that defining membership, a sense of belonging, and shared mission (...) and goals are key components to their understanding of academic community. From these three components, the study found that when participants included adjunct faculty as members of their academic community, they also reported a sense of responsibility or obligation to supporting them. (shrink)

In their controversial 2016 paper in this journal, Brennan and Magness argue that fair pay for part-time, adjunct faculty would be unaffordable for most colleges and universities and would harm students as well as many adjunct faculty members. In this critique, I show that their cost estimates fail to take account of the potential benefits of fair pay for adjunct faculty and are based on implausible assumptions. I propose that pay per course for new adjunct faculty members should be tied (...) to pay per course for new full-time non-tenure track instructors or to pay per course for new assistant professors. That framework for adjunct faculty justice yields an aggregate cost range of $18.5–$27.9 billion, one-third to one-half lower than the range computed by Brennan and Magness. Its opportunity cost would not be borne by students since students and faculty are complements, not substitutes, in the educational process. Instead it could be financed by reducing spending on non-educational purposes. Current adjunct faculty members would be protected from job displacement in this justice framework. The real obstacle to achieving justice for adjunct faculty is the priorities of university administrators, not budget constraints or opportunity costs. (shrink)

We develop a category theoretical scheme for the comprehension of the information structure associated with a complex system, in terms of families of partial or local information carriers. The scheme is based on the existence of a categorical adjunction, that provides a theoretical platform for the descriptive analysis of the complex system as a process of functorial information communication.

We characterize the category of Sambin’s positive topologies as the result of the Grothendieck construction applied to a doctrine over the category Loc of locales. We then construct an adjunction between the category of positive topologies and that of topological spaces Top, and show that the well-known adjunction between Top and Loc factors through the constructed adjunction.