In this paper. I argue that the modality contained in declarative sentences is heterogeneolls by nature. and its indiscernible treatment evoked pardoxical behaviors of individuals in modal contexts. The diflkult~r is avoided by cla5sifying the modality in two kinds from a normative point of vin\``: 1) modality in a traditinal sense. which is a freedom under a certain convention. and 2) multi-modality which stems from the difference of conventions. The former is tl``eated in the traditional modal logic. but the latter kind of modality which typically appears in belief sentences is captured in another framework called multi톗odel. This solution deeply concerns the ontology of individuals. therefore the existential presupposition of individuals. too. So. I further propose its treatment hy llleans of a kind of three-valued semantics.

We analyze number agreement in English in the version of Situa-tion Semantics I put forth in [1]. We propose two theoretical notions, agreement target situations and relevance of situations. We propose that structural constraints shift the former in a way governed by the latter. Our analysis shows that number agreement reflects our knowl-edge about the structure of the world and the speaker``s interests in the discourse.

Comprehension is determined by the content of memory. The verbalized concepts reflect the information that is in the focus of attention. Mental models of text must be formed in order to achieve coherence in language understanding. Constructing a mental model requires continual interaction between the text and the reader``s linguistic, pragmatic, and world knowledge. In this article, a connectionist framework is proposed for the formation of mental models that occurs during comprehension. A unification and spreading activation model are used to simulate the processes. The system is tested using children``s stories. Results attest the validity of the model. Thus, our design contributes to the formation of a durable and functional mental representation of the text information.

A three layer back propagation neural net is set up to study the functional dependency between the semantic class of a bisyllabic Chinese word and that of its two constituent Chinese characters. Simulations were performed using a three-layer back-propagation neural net with various combination of inputs. The inputs are (1) semantic classes of the constituent characters, (2) Entropy of the characters and (3) semantic strength! 1 ] of the characters. Our simulations show that we can obtain the meaning class of a bisyllabic word from the meaning classes of its two constituent characters to an accuracy of 81% by taking the semantic classes and semantic strength of the characters as input. This research establishes the dependency between the meaning class of a Chinese compound word and that of its two constituent characters.

This paper proposes two revisions to the Lexical Mapping Theory as part of UG and accounts for dative shift and the interaction between dative shift and passive in Chinese and English. The overall strategy is to maximize the universality of the Lexical Mapping Theory by allowing only morpholexical operations to be language-specific.

German is a language with a relatively free word order. During the last few years considerable efforts have been made in all syntactic frameworks to explain so-called scrambling phenomena. In the following paper, I deal with some tough cases of German word order which cannot be described by assuming flat sentence structures or word order domains. The phenomena discussed are PP complements of nouns and adjec?tives, which can appear separated from their heads in the German Mittelfeld, and stranded prepositions. The similarity to fronting of these elements is used to explain these phenomena by a generalized version of the head-filler schema used in the standard HPSG framework.

We argue that both Russellian and Heimian and Heimian definites exist in nat-ural languages. Our account captures both the commonality and difference between the two. Further, we suggest that the Russel-lian/Heimian distinction extends to indefinites too.