front cover of Bantu Applicative Constructions
Bantu Applicative Constructions
Sara Pacchiarotti
CSLI, 2019
This book addresses various shortcomings in definitions of “applicative” when compared to what is actually found across languages and proposes a four-way distinction among applicative constructions, especially relevant to Bantu, a large family of languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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front cover of Bantu Historical Linguistics
Bantu Historical Linguistics
Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives
Edited by Jean-Marie Hombert and Larry M. Hyman
CSLI, 1999
This collection brings together most of the world's leading Bantuists, as well as some of the most promising younger scholars interested in the history, comparison, and description of Bantu languages. The Bantu languages, numbering as many as 500, have been at the center of cutting-edge theoretical research in phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Besides the issues of classification and internal sub-grouping, this volume treats historical and comparative aspects of many of the significant typological features for which this language group is known: vowel height harmony, noun classes, elaborate tense-aspect systems, etc. The result is a compilation that provides the most up-to-date understanding of these and other issues that will be of interest not only to Bantuists and historical linguists, but also to those interested in the phonological, morphological and semantic issues arising within these highly agglutinative Bantu languages.
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front cover of Basic Color Terms
Basic Color Terms
Their Universality and Evolution
Brent Berlin and Paul Kay
CSLI, 1999

The work reported in this monograph was begun in the winter of 1967 in a graduate seminar at Berkeley. Many of the basic data were gathered by members of the seminar and the theoretical framework presented here was initially developed in the context of the seminar discussions.

Much has been discovered since1969, the date of original publication, regarding the psychophysical and neurophysical determinants of universal, cross-linguistic constraints on the shape of basic color lexicons, and something, albeit less, can now also be said with some confidence regarding the constraining effects of these language-independent processes of color perception and conceptualization on the direction of evolution of basic color term lexicons.

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Beyond Alternations
Laura A. Michaelis and Josef Ruppenhofer
CSLI, 2001
Beyond Alternations provides a unified account of the semantic effects of the German applicative ("be-") construction. Using natural data from a variety
of corpora, the authors propose that this pattern is inherently meaningful and that its meaning provides the basis for creative extensions.
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Beyond Grammar
An Experience-Based Theory of Language
Rens Bod
CSLI, 1998
During the last few years, a new approach to language processing has started to emerge, which has become known under the name of "Data Oriented Parsing" or "DOP". This approach embodies the assumption that human language comprehension and production works with representations of concrete past language experiences, rather than with abstract grammatical rules. The models that instantiate this approach therefore maintain corpora of linguistic representations of previously occurring utterances. New utterance-representations are constructed by freely combining partial structures from the corpus. A probability model is used to choose from the collection of different structures of different sizes those that make up the most appropriate representation of an utterance. In this book, DOP models for several kinds of linguistic representations are developed, ranging from tree representations, compositional semantic representations, attribute-value representations, and dialogue representations. These models are studied from a formal, linguistic and computational perspective and are tested with available language corpora. The main outcome of these tests suggests that the productive units of natural language cannot be defined in terms of a minimal set of rules (or constraints or principles), as is usually attempted in linguistic theory, but need to be defined in terms of a large, redundant set of previously experienced structures with virtually no restriction on their size and complexity. I will argue that this outcome has important consequences for linguistic theory, leading to a new notion of language competence. In particular, it means that the knowledge of a speaker/hearer cannot be understood as a grammar, but as a statistical ensemble of language experiences that changes slightly every time a new utterance is processed.
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front cover of Binary Tense
Binary Tense
Henk J. Verkuyl
CSLI, 2008
Despite shortcomings in Reichenbach’s model of tense, it has been the standard introduction for most linguists working on English, German, and Dutch since 1947. Binary Tense surpasses that model by reviving ideas that preceded it by almost a century. Instead of the 3×3 matrix used in the standard model, Henk J. Verkuyl presents a 2×2×2 approach that can be applied to a wider variety of languages, including Chinese, Georgian, and Spanish. This binary approach sheds light on the difference between imperfect and imperfective, the matching of tenses in complex sentences, and many other aspects of linguistics.
 
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front cover of Bricks and Mortar
Bricks and Mortar
The Making of a Real Education at the Stanford Online High School
Jeffrey Scarborough and Raymond Ravaglia
CSLI, 2014
The rise of online learning is rapidly transforming how and what teachers teach, and even who—or what—teachers are. In the midst of these changes, the characteristics that have historically defined a high-quality education are easily lost. Not only content knowledge, but also ways of thinking and habits of mind are the hallmarks of the well-educated individual, and these latter qualities are not so easily acquired online. Or are they?

This volume shows how a group of online-learning believers built the best high school in the world without laying a single brick: the Stanford Online High School (SOHS). By chronicling SOHS’s distinctive approach to curriculum, gifted education, and school community over SOHS’s first seven years, Bricks and Mortar makes the case that the dynamic use of technology and the best traditional methodologies in education are not, in fact, mutually exclusive. Indeed, while SOHS has redefined what is possible online, a great education is ultimately the product of an interactive community of teachers and students.
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front cover of Broken Ballots
Broken Ballots
Will Your Vote Count?
Douglas E. Jones and Barbara Simons
CSLI, 2012

For many of us, the presidential election of 2000 was a wake-up call. The controversy following the vote count led to demands for election reform. But the new voting systems that were subsequently introduced to the market have serious security flaws, and many are confusing and difficult to use. Moreover, legislation has not kept up with the constantly evolving voting technology, leaving little to no legal recourse when votes are improperly counted. How did we come to acquire the complex technology we now depend on to count votes?  Douglas Jones and Barbara Simons probe this question, along with public policy and regulatory issues raised by our voting technologies.  Broken Ballots is a thorough and incisive analysis of the current voting climate that approaches American elections from technological, legal, and historical perspectives.  The authors examine the ways in which Americans vote today, gauging how inaccurate, unreliable, and insecure our voting systems are. An important book for election administrators, political scientists, and students of government and technology policy, Broken Ballots is also a vital tool for any voting American.

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