A natural language discourse is more than an arbitrary sequence of utterances; a discourse exhibits coherence. Despite its centrality to discourse interpretation, coherence rarely plays a role in theories of linguistic phenomena that apply across utterances.

In this book, Andrew Kehler provides an analysis of coherence relationships between utterances that is rooted in three types of 'connection among ideas' first articulated by the philosopher David Hume—Resemblance, Cause or Effect, and Contiguity. Kehler then shows how these relationships affect the distribution of a variety of linguistic phenomena, including verb phrase ellipsis, gapping, extraction from coordinate structures, tense, and pronominal reference. In each of these areas, Kehler demonstrates how the constraints imposed by linguistic form interact with those imposed by the process of establishing coherence to explain data that has eluded previous analyses. his book will be of interest to researchers from the broad spectrum of disciplines from which discourse is studied, as well as those working in syntax, semantics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and philosophy of language.

Following high hopes and subsequent disillusionment in the late 1980s, the past decade of work in language engineering has seen a dramatic increase in the power and sophistication of statistical approaches to natural language processing, along with a growing recognition that these methods alone cannot meet the full range of demands for applications of NLP. While statistical methods, often described as 'shallow' processing techniques, can bring real advantages in robustness and efficiency, they do not provide the precise, reliable representations of meaning which more conventional symbolic grammars can supply for natural language. A consistent, fine-grained mapping between form and meaning is of critical importance in some NLP applications, including machine translation, speech prosthesis, and automated email response. Recent advances in grammar development and processing implementations offer hope of meeting these demands for precision.

This volume provides an update on the state of the art in the development and application of broad-coverage declarative grammars built on sound linguistic foundations - the 'deep' processing paradigm - and presents several aspects of an international research effort to produce comprehensive, re-usable grammars and efficient technology for parsing and generating with such grammars.

In this book, Almerindo E. Ojeda offers a unique perspective on linguistics by discussing developing computer programs that will assign particular sounds to particular meanings and, conversely, particular meanings to particular sounds. Since these assignments are to operate efficiently over unbounded domains of sound and sense, they can begin to model the two fundamental modalities of human language—speaking and hearing. The computational approach adopted in this book is motivated by our struggle with one of the key problems of contemporary linguistics—figuring out how it is that language emerges from the brain.

Described by the New York Times as a visionary “pioneer in computerized learning,” Patrick Suppes (1922-2014) and his many collaborators at Stanford University conducted research on the development, commercialization, and use of computers in education from 1963 to 2013. Computers in Education synthesizes this wealth of scholarship into a single succinct volume that highlights the profound interconnections of technology in education. By capturing the great breadth and depth of this research, this book offers an accessible introduction to Suppes’s striking work.

This collection of papers is the outcome of the first Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language conference (CSDL) held at the University of Califronia, San Diego in October 1995.  CSDL was organized with the intention of bringing together researchers from both "cognitive" and "functional" approaches to linguistics.  The papers in this volume span a variety of topics, but there is a common thread running through them: the claim that semantics and discourse properties are fundamental to our understanding of language.

A wealth of research has been conducted on the various linguistic phenomena found in Germanic languages. But these studies were restricted by their use of only one theoretical perspective to analyze one particular language. Inspired by the need to expand the research base of Germanic languages while broadening the empirical coverage of constraint-based linguistic approaches, a handful of researchers are employing various constraint-based theoretical perspectives to study multiple Germanic languages.

This volume begins with an introduction to the recent research performed on Germanic syntax using constraint-based frameworks. It then goes on to investigate the linguistic phenomena found in the grammar of the German and Danish languages. Using such approaches as Lexical-Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, contributors shed a different light on theoretical issues addressed by past studies, including semi-free word order, partial front phenomena, and complex predicate formation. While alternative approaches have assumed that meaning (semantics) is dependent on form (syntax), various analyses presented in this volume explore the idea that both form and meaning are equally constitutive for grammatical descriptions.

This volume is devoted to the syntax and semantics of various languages, studied with models based on constraints. Both French and international linguists present their work in tribute to Danièle Godard, emeritus research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in France, a member of the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle at Université Paris Diderot, and a specialist in the syntax and semantics of French and Romance languages.

This volume collects leading-edge work on the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, including contributions from Eve Clark, Paul Kiparsky, Stanley Peters, Dag Westerstahl, and Arnold Zwicky. The research covers a number of languages—English, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and Quechua—and phenomena, including adverbial modification, classifiers, constructional meaning, control phenomena, evidentiality, events semantics, focus, presupposition, and quantification. This is an essential volume for anyone interested in the latest developments in the study of meaning.

Providing a unified solution within the frameworks of Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics, Hans Boas develops an account of resultative constructions in English by grouping them in two classes: conventionalized and non-conventionalized. The usage-based model used here proposes that each particular sense of a verb constitutes a conventionalized mini-construction, which is crucial information for the licensing of arguments. In contrast, verbs in non-conventionalized resultative constructions can acquire a novel meaning and thereby a new syntactic frame. English and German resultatives are compared to illustrate the distinct lexical polysemy networks of English and German verbs.

The Acquisition of Constructions is the culmination of new research into constructions of grammar in languages as diverse as Cantonese, English, French, German, Mandarin, Thai, and Tzeltal. The contributors, all noted scholars in the field of construction grammar, investigate the acquisition of constructions—that is, the consistent patterns for combining words and phrases within a language—in children, from the first and most rudimentary gesture combinations to the production of larger syntactic constructions and complex clauses. Timely and comprehensive, it will be a superb resource for scholars of syntax.