Robot Structural Forum

[Kenneth]

BOAOChina, April 10 (Xinhua) -- Innovation is "at the heart" of this year's Boao Forum for Asia, with China doing its part by shifting the country's growth from a focus on quantity to that of quality, Leslie Maasdorp, vice president of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB), told Xinhua in an exclusive interview on the sidelines of the bustling summit.

Maasdorp, also the chief financial officer of the NDB and a veteran banker, said that the forum comes at a "very interesting" time for China as this year marks the 40th anniversary of the country's reform and opening-up.

"So it's a good moment to pause, reflect, look at what will be the next phase of growth for China," he said. "How should it be different? What can we learn from the past 40 years? So it's a very interesting inflection point for China and for the region."

He considers China's past four decades a success. "China's lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty," he said, adding that the economy has grown, key infrastructure is being upgraded, and that technology has enabled big e-commerce companies such as Alibaba and Tencent to thrive.

However, the South African national also pointed out some challenges when it comes to China's rapid economic growth, such as environmental sustainability, widening inequality and the need to train and re-train workers for newly emerging industries.

He also elaborated on the NDB's role in both stimulating growth and promoting innovation in the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which form what is known as the BRICS countries.

"We are just one additional cog in the machine of helping the economies grow faster," Maasdorp said. "Our role is to complement government efforts to upgrade infrastructure. But also we want to be more innovative in how we do that."

The NDB, Maasdorp said, is seeking more innovative mechanisms to attract more private sector capital to bring in pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and insurance companies. "Large institutional investors also look at the long term," he said.

In that respect, Maasdorp cited China as a good example. "China has well-developed medium- and long-term infrastructure plans -- five, ten, in some cases twenty-year plans. There's huge value in that kind of long-term planning."

Maasdorp said that the BRICS countries as a whole are now focusing on moving towards more high-quality growth. "It's no longer just about GDP (gross domestic product) growth for the sake of the GDP growth," he said.

According to Maasdorp, BRICS countries are engaging in economic structural reform, of which he said China is a "big proponent," to identify "things we need to do so we can have a long-term, more high-quality growth."

In addition to innovation, Maasdorp mentioned other factors contributing to high-quality growth, such as reducing inequality, retraining more workers, increasing research intensity, promoting entrepreneurship, as well as improving health care and education, which Maasdorp referred to as "social infrastructure."

Human mental operations are capable of generating complex unbounded representations in various human-specific domains like language, arithmetic, music etc. Call it the Generative Mind. It is plausible to suppose that the generative mind consists of some powerful combinatorial devices. It is implausible to suppose that such devices were adopted from pre-hominid species; so a saltation is required for the emergence of each device. As saltation is an unattractive idea for higher cognitive functions, we explore the methodological prospect that a single saltation inserted a singular device for all domains, call it Principle G. However, the generative device of language, Merge, already requires saltation. So, only Merge can be such a general device, if anything. But Merge is widely assumed to be language-specific. We argue that the assumption is untenable. Thus, Merge may be viewed as one possible candidate for Principle G.

On the face of it, such evidence supports a quantificational theory of reciprocity and not a relational theory that assimilates reciprocal sentences to cumulative predication (Langendoen 1988). In the first part of this talk, I will present our relational theory of reciprocity, which is couched in plural dynamic semantics and does solve the scope problem (Haug and Dalrymple 2020). In the second part of the talk, I will survey reciprocal constructions where the scope is (or has been claimed to be) fixed, i.e. only the narrow or the wide scope reading is available. Relevant structures are coordinations with collective VPs, control structures, pronominal antecedents that are obligatorily bound or free, logophoric antecedents and constructions with obligatory scope marking. I show that our theory yields the right predictions for all these structures.

When Bergljot Behrens retires from her post as professor of English and translation studies, she leaves a rich legacy of insight into ways of describing events and of making meaningful connections among them.

Starting with her 1998 dissertation, she has pioneered the comparative method in discourse semantics, showing how pairing up one language with one or more others can offer invaluable clues to meaning distinctions that may otherwise escape notice and to the contextual cues that make us select an interpretation.

Particularly notable are the discoveries of the various modes of event unification that can be conveyed with non-finite structures in a language like English and the findings on coordination at different levels and on explicit markers of event linking in a language like Norwegian.

In this talk I take a closer look at a heritage variety of German called Gottscheerisch, paying particular attention to its imperative structures, which have begun to take on certain Slavic properties.

Building on Mller's (2004, 2018) proposal that the V2-property in Germanic is realized as vP-movement to the left edge of the clause (CP), I show that what may on the surface appear to be assimilation to Slavic-like imperatives is really abstract transfer resulting in the hyper-application of the V2-parameter (i.e., vP-raising) in Gottscheerisch imperatives.

Further, I establish a relationship between information structure and agreement relationship and propose that dative case is a dependent (structural) case in Surati Gujarati. To account for both case alternation and the information structure-agreement relationship in Surati Gujarati I propose an object shift analysis.

Inquisitive Semantics is the brand name for a 10-year old theory seeking to unify the meaning of declaratives and interrogatives, thereby resolving a series of long-standing issues in the semantics of polar and wh questions as well as embedded questions of either sort.

This survey is based on the 2019 book by the same name by the three inventors, Ivano Ciardelli, Jeroen Groenendijk and Floris Roelofsen, but takes a different tack, one more suited to the language-minded than to the logic-minded, starting with facts and introducing theory in response.

Adjectives like "former" belong to a class of modifiers that are called intensional (or opaque, privative, non-subsective etc.), but how does this property come about? Formal semantic accounts tend to assign a complex denotation in one fell swoop, while less formal (syntactic) accounts tend to oversimplify the semantics.

We report the results of a forced-choice acceptability judgment experiment testing the interpretation of quantified subject questions (i.e., matrix subject interrogatives containing a quantifier, e.g. "Which writer read each book?") in Italian. Our specific goal was to investigate the availability of a pair-list interpretation (PL) as opposed to an individual-answer one, as well as the effect of topicalization on the availability of such readings.

Three different types of quantifiers were tested: every, each and at least a. Overall, the results show that a PL interpretation is available for the majority of speakers even in subject questions, contra Chierchia (1993). The different quantifiers however vary greatly both concerning the acceptability of a PL interpretation, and the effect of topicalization, with "every/everyone" being the one quantifier that almost no one accepts under a PL reading if in non-topicalized structures.

In this talk, I refine this claim by investigating different combinations of Foc + WH. I focus in particular on comparing different pragmatic types of foci (Bianchi, Bocci & Cruschina 2015, 2016), as well as different types of interrogative environments.

I conclude that the prohibition against having a narrow lexical focus co-occur with an interrogative operator is by no means absolute, as several different combinations of such elements are perfectly licit.

I then focus specifically on one impossible combination, namely corrective foci + matrix interrogative operators, and argue that such restriction can be captured semantically by resorting to a nested focus analysis along the lines of Constant (2012), together with the understanding that corrective speech acts are only licensed in matrix left peripheries.

CP cartography (Rizzi 1997 et seq.) postulates a universally ordered set of projections in the left periphery of the clause. This allows a principled account of so-called `relaxed V2 languages' like several Old Romance varieties (Beninc 1983) by saying that the latter feature V-to-C movement while lacking strong restrictions on the prefield.

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