On syntactic concept of Phase

I’ve been reading this holidays a little book in .pdf: Estudios de lingüística de la Universidad de Alicante nº 15 where Erundina Garcerán has made an study about the concept of Phase. Actually, Strong Phase. I think it’s a very nice study with an important part of explanations and based on the Minimalist Program. Maybe now I’m ready to read a famous Chomsky’s article: On Phase. I’ll try it!

Since Chomsky (1998 & 1999) introduced the concept of Strong Phase and Weak Phase, it’s been an important theme of discussion. In resume, a Strong Phase has an [EPP] (Extended Principle of Projection) who assures the position of the syntactic subject and its requirement like an External Argument. The conclusions of E. Garcerán are: i) There is only a Strong Phase when a syntactic subject is the External Argument of a predicative verb; ii) Only ST-SV and SC-ST can be Strong Phases.

Multilingual dictionary based on universal words

It’s been developed by researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing. The system is based on the famous lexical database WordNet built at Princeton’s Cognitive Science Laboratory. The key is the concept of universal word: an English language word disambiguate with equivalents in any other language.

“This is a breakthrough for multilingualism” explains the website. It seems to be a precise method, because it can reach a 88% of reliability and accuracy.This system is being used at the same School to build a multilingual thesaurus Spanish, English and Russian. Despite of this first phase, the method will be adapted to other languages.

For more information: UPMPress.