I argue that Grice's account of particularized conversational implicatures makes successful implicatures miraculous. Successful conversational implicatures satisfy three conditions. The first is Calculability, that implicatures are able to be calculated. The second is Grasped Content, that the hearer work out the implicature as intended by the speaker. The third is Inferential Path Sameness, that the speaker and hearer work out the implicated proposition from the similar reasons. Many implicatures satisfying these conditions in the actual world fail to do so in a wide range of nearby possible worlds. Operationalizing ‘miraculous communication’ by the modal interpretation of lucky outcomes, communication by particularized implicatures is miraculous.

Carbapenem resistance mechanisms were investigated in 32 imipenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa clinical isolates recovered from hospitalised children. Sequence analysis revealed that 31 of the isolates had an insertion sequence element ISRP10 disrupting the porin gene oprD, demonstrating that ISRP10 inactivation of oprD conferred imipenem resistance in the majority of the isolates. Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) was used to discriminate the isolates. In total, 11 sequence types (STs) were identified including 3 novel STs, and 68.3% (28/41) of the tested strains were characterised as clone ST253. In combination with random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) analysis, the imipenem-resistant isolates displayed a relatively high degree of genetic variability and were unlikely associated with nosocomial infections.

The problem of documentation of technical material in general and programming languages in particular is rapidly being recognized as one of major importance. An implementor could not do his job without adequate documentation, while for the user the convenience that a problem-oriented language offers depends in large part on the effectiveness of its manuMs. Without adequate documentation, a programming language would be nearly useless to all but the select group of the initiated, and even these would have considerable difficulty if the system were large or complex. In the normal usage within the programming field, documentation can be said to include all the written material needed to support the various interests of users, implementors, managers, teachers, salesmen, etc. More specifically then, programming language documentation may include all or some of the following types of information: formal language definitions (in syntactic form), informal language definitions, reference manuals, primers, users' guides giving programming techniques and hints for eftieieney, self-teaching manuals for the languages, bulletins, publicity releases, flowcharts for compilers, coding for compilers, and operating manuals for compilers. Obviously, some of tbis material is overlapping both in purpose and in content. I t is well-recognized by now that updating and maintaining a program is a never-ending task. What is perhaps less obvious is the fact that the maintenance and updating are usually a more severe problem for the documentation than for the program. In particular, it is fairly simple to make a necessary change in a line of code; it is usually a major task to see that all people concerned are notified and all documents properly changed.

schoolboy studying his first foreign language sometimes asks: “Why do they say it that way?” Often the reply is: “Because that’s the way it is in the language. Don’t ask why, just learn it.” As a matter of fact in many cases nobody knows the answer to such a question. Recently, however, a possible answer to some of the questions as to why language is the way it is has come from an unsuspected quarter: research on the mechanical translation of languages by electronic computer. As long as we keep to our native tongue and are not obliged to explain its quirks to others, we rarely appreciate just how complicated language is. It appears that even widely different languages are complicated to much the same extent. The usefulness of some of the complications is clear. Word order or case endings frequently serve to indicate whether a phrase is playing the role of a subject, an object or something else. But then there is a seemingly endless catalogue of other complications with no apparent utility, and the traditional grammar book does little to point out the reason for these complications. Faced with the many complexities of language, about the best a grammar or language textbook can do is to justify certain usages “as a matter of euphony” and to condemn others as “awkward” or “stylistically poor.” Such vague explanations are of little help to the student who has not yet developed a feeling for the language. They are almost useless to someone who is trying to analyze a language rigorously, with a view to mechanical translation. Why, for instance, do we say “He called her up” but not “He called up her,” when we can say both “He called the girl up” and “He called up the girl”? Why do we have two ways of saying the same thing, for example, “He gave the girl the candy” and “He gave the candy to the girl”? Also we have “The woodsman chopped down the tree” and “The tree was chopped down by the woodsman,” where the passive sentence appears to have the same meaning as the active one. Other anomalies concern the placement of modifiers. Adjectives generally precede the noun, but relative clauses follow. We say “a worn-out car” and “a car that is worn out.” Some modifiers are actually split, part going before the noun and part after: “too worn-out a car to drive,” “a more priceless possession than jewels” and “the best friend in the world.” The list could fill a volume. It is remarkable that the human brain can cope with such a vast catalogue of complications. It sometimes seems as though language is just about as complex as it can be without making it impossible for an average individual to learn it in his preadult years. One would expect that a simpler language would have a utilitarian advantage. A basic puzzle is why English and other Western languages employ four major parts of speech: verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs. It can be shown by means of logical notation schemes that two parts of speech and a single rule for word order could provide, in principle, an artificial language as expressive as English. Why, then, is English so complicated? The usual explanation for the four main parts of speech does not stand up to careful examination. It is not invariably true that verbs express actions or states of being, that nouns are the names of persons, places or things, and so on. That is, even if one knows the semantic class of the thing referred to, one cannot invariably determine the correct part of speech to use. A given concept may at different times be referred to by different parts of speech: “They projected the pictures very clearly”; “The projection of the pictures was very clear”; “They were very clearly projected pictures.” Our main schoolboy question, therefore, is whether all these complications serve a useful function in the language or whether they are sheer dead weight. It is this question that research in mechanical translation may have elucidated. An answer to the question would do more than satisfy our curiosity. In view of all the complications of language, it seems almost too much to hope that we will ever be able to program machines to handle human language adequately unless we can achieve a deeper understanding of how and why languages operate.

article Free AccessCOMIT as an IR language Author: Victor H. Yngve Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CambridgeView Profile Authors Info & Claims Communications of the ACMVolume 5Issue 1Jan. 1962 pp 19–28https://doi.org/10.1145/366243.366720Published:01 January 1962Publication History 9citation318DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations9Total Downloads318Last 12 Months32Last 6 weeks5 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

IN the paper "A Framework for Syntactic Translation",1 it was proposed that a translation routine could be divided into six logically separate parts. There was a horizontal division into three steps: sentence analysis, transfer of structure, and sentence synthesis; and there was a vertical division into the operational parts, or routines proper, and the parts that contained all the necessary knowledge of the structures of the languages involved and their interrelation. It was hoped that to divide is to conquer. In the work reported here we are concerned with just two of the six parts of a translation routine the sentence-synthesis routine and the grammar, which is eventually to contain as complete a set of rules for English sentence structure as possible. Of the various possible forms for writing a grammar, the generative2 form seems to have the most to recommend it. A generative grammar is a grammar written in a manner analogous to a deductive system. Its main advantage is that it offers a relatively easy method of dealing with the difficult problems posed by the multiple function of words and constructions. It also seems plausible that a generative type of grammar is not necessarily confined in its use to a sentence synthesis routine, but could be used equally well with a sentence recognition routine.3 A number of forms of generative grammar have been explored. The original transformational type of grammar has been abandoned because it cannot be mechanized by a finite device, because of the difficulty of assigning a phrase structure to the result of a transformation, and for several other lesser technical reasons.

Cover title. Reprint from Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol.104, no.5.