Readings in Japanese Natural Language Processing surveys a wide range of texts that explore Japanese morphology and syntactic analysis, discourse, and natural language process applications. Presenting such techniques in a manner accessible to those with little or no familiarity with Japanese, these carefully selected papers will broaden the scope of our study of Japanese linguistic phenomena, making this collection indispensable in the field.

The twenty-five papers in this volume present current analyses of a variety of data and, more significantly, illustrate the various analytical tools available to linguists in the quest for deeper comprehension of the puzzles, questions, and problems they confront in natural language. The distinguished authors collected here explore interactions between linguistic structure and sound patterns across a diverse set of languages. The integrating theme of the volume is the influence of K. P. Mohanan’s philosophy of inquiry, derived not only from his rich body of diverse work but also from the fresh perspectives and intellectual vitality that he has shared with colleagues and students in a career spanning over three decades.

Referentialism has underappreciated consequences for our understanding of the ways in which mind, language, and world relate to one another. In exploring these consequences, this book defends a version of referentialism about names, demonstratives, and indexicals, in a manner appropriate for scholars and students in philosophy or the cognitive sciences.

To demonstrate his view, Kenneth A. Taylor offers original and provocative accounts of a wide variety of semantic, pragmatic, and psychological phenomena, such as empty names, propositional attitude contexts, the nature of concepts, and the ultimate source and nature of normativity.

Reflection, the capacity to represent our ideas and to make them the object of our own thoughts, has for many centuries been recognized as a key mark of human intelligence. The very success and extension of reflective ideas in logic and computer science underscores the need for conceptual foundations.

This book proposes a general theory of reflective logics and reflective declarative programming languages. This theory provides a conceptual foundation for judging the extent to which a computational system is reflective. Manuel Clavel presents a proof of the reflective nature of rewriting logic and provides examples of the potential for reflective programming in a number of novel computer applications. These applications are implemented in Maude, a reflective programming language and environment based on rewriting logic that can define, represent and execute a breadth of logics, languages and models of computation. A general method to easily build theorem-proving tools in Maude is also proposed and illustrated. The book goes on to promote the notion of a "universal theory" that can simulate the deductions of all representable theories within any given logic.

This revised and expanded edition of Paul W. Justice's popular text provides a straightforward, accessible introduction to the basics of linguistics for education students and all non-linguistics majors, covering the essentials of phonetics, phonology, morphology, morpho-phonology, and syntax. While this overview is accessible to any student, Justice's text will be of particular use in teacher training programs, many of which now expose trainees to these topics in order to cope with rising linguistic diversity in classrooms.

Each chapter of Relevant Linguistics leads students through descriptive analysis, helps them grasp linguistic concepts, and provides them with the reference materials necessary for their own teaching. This second edition contains more exercises as well as expanded and clarified explanations of the issues discussed in the first edition. Also included are more references to areas such as the history of English and semantics.

Throughout history, religion has been the primary tool used by human societies to understand the inexplicable and the powerful. Religion and Adaptation examines how this role of religion affects the development of human society and individual identity.

The volume uses a wide variety of ethnographic and historical sources to support its analysis, beginning with two detailed case studies of the religions practiced by Navajo Indians and Arab villagers. An intriguing comparison of these two systems of faith reveals the difficulty of finding one definition of religion. William Adams explores this problem of definition, suggesting that religion and science actually share the role of providing logical explanations in human society. In subsequent chapters, he considers the development of religious systems, the growth of religious consciousness in the individual, and the dynamics of religious change. The book ultimately aims to be a purely empirical study that probes the reasons for the existence of religion and its role as a moral and stabilizing force in human societies.

How can computers distinguish the coherent from the unintelligible, recognize new information in a sentence, or draw inferences from a natural language passage? Computational semantics is an exciting new field that seeks answers to these questions, and this volume is the first textbook wholly devoted to this growing subdiscipline. The book explains the underlying theoretical issues and fundamental techniques for computing semantic representations for fragments of natural language. This volume will be an essential text for computer scientists, linguists, and anyone interested in the development of computational semantics.

Drawing from a wide range of perspectives in the analysis of grammatical structures, the papers collected in this book are unified not by linguistic subfield, but by the investigative method they employ in revealing grammatical patterns. Revealing Structure explores this style of investigation across phonology, morphology, and syntax. Dedicated to celebrated linguist Larry Hyman, author of such books as A Theory of Phonological Weight, this volume also features data from diverse languages—with a special emphasis on the languages of Africa—making it unique among existing linguistics collections.