Abstract. Although the observation of grammaticality judgements is well acknowledged, their formal representation faces problems of different kinds: linguistic, psycholinguistic, logical, computational. In this paper we focus on addressing some of the logical and computational aspects, relegating the linguistic and psycholinguistic ones in the parameter space. We introduce a model-theoretic interpretation of Property Grammars, which lets us formulate numerical accounts of grammaticality judgements. Such a representation allows for both clear-cut binary judgements, and graded judgements. We discriminate between problems of Intersective Gradience (i.e., concerned with choosing the syntactic category of a model among a set of candidates) and problems of Subsective Gradience (i.e., concerned with estimating the degree of grammatical acceptability of a model). Intersective Gradience is addressed as an optimisation problem, while Subsective Gradience is addressed as an approximation problem.

Abstract. This paper is concerned with the question of quantifying gradient degrees of acceptability by introducing the notion of Density in the context of constructional constraint language processing. We first present here our framework for language processing, where all linguistic knowledge is represented by means of constraints. The grammar itself is a constraint system. A constraint is a relation among categories, which encodes a linguistic property. But in contrast to more traditional constraint-based approaches, a constraint can hold and be assessed independently from the structure. In this context, we then introduce the notion of density, based on proportions of satisfied and violated linguistic properties. Our intuition is that density can be used as a means to measure fuzzy notions such as syntactic complexity or as a criterion to identify gradient levels of acceptability. We present and discuss early experimental results concerning density.

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The object of this article is to present design charts that facilitate the design of a series of parallel drainage spurs in association with a drainage ditch used in cut slopes. The hypotheses, the operating instructions, and the field of utilization are fully detailed.The two needed dimensions are the depth and spacing of the drainage spurs.The design charts are of two main types:–simple dimensioning charts: providing information on possible combinations of depth and spacing that give the quantitative effect wished by the designer, such as lowering the level of the water table or increasing the safety factor;–optimization charts: proposing an estimation of the solution that minimizes the depth of the spurs per linear metre of slope, and subsequently the volume of the draining material.This article results from theoretical and experimental research carried out over several years. We have been using a composite analog model that allows the simulation of free-surface three-dimensional flows. Key words: drainage, cut slopes, slope stability, drainage spur, analog model, three-dimensional.

In this paper, we propose that grammar error detection be disambiguated in generating the connected parse(s) of optimal merit for the full input utterance, in overcoming the cheapest error. The detected error(s) are described as violated grammatical constraints in a framework for Model-Theoretic Syntax (MTS). We present a parsing algorithm for MTS, which only relies on a grammar of well-formedness, in that the process does not require any extragrammatical resources, additional rules for constraint relaxation or error handling, or any recovery process.