Squibs

The squibs are not intended for publication, or not yet. I am not certain whether or not things I say are new, so beware. You are free to use them, but do check whether this is original work, and if so, please give credit.
  1. "On Independent Pumpability". Manuscript, UCLA, October 2005. (Shows that the existence of k+1 independent pumpable pairs is stronger than the existence of k pumpable pairs. Ogden's Lemma guarantees the existence of just one pumpable pair.)
  2. "On Scope and C-command". Manuscript, UCLA, 2005. (Some notes on the connections between scope in predicate logic and c-command and how the c-command relation between the words of the surface string can disambiguate the sentence.)
  3. "Some Remarks on Zipf's Laws". Manuscript, UCLA, 2005. (It shows you that most probabilistic context free grammars generate a Zipf distribution for frequencies if they are unambiguous. It holds good all regular languages on condition that they are not "sparse".)
  4. "On Strings, Bracelets and Bracketings", Manuscript, UCLA, October 2004. (An easy proof that the number of bracketings is given by the Catalan numbers. Uses no recursion and no generating functions.)
Marcus Kracht
Last Modified: Mon Oct 17 2005 10:00:00