front cover of Language and Sexuality
Language and Sexuality
Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice
Kathryn Campbell-Kibler
CSLI, 2001
Language and Sexuality explores the question of how linguistic practices and ideologies relate to sexuality and sexual identity, opening with a discussion of the emerging field of "queer linguistics" and moving from theory into practice with case studies of language use in a wide variety of cultural settings. The resulting volume combines the perspectives of the field's top scholars with exciting new research to present new ideas on the ways in which language use intersects with sexual identity.
[more]

front cover of Grammatical Interfaces in HPSG
Grammatical Interfaces in HPSG
Ronnie Cann
CSLI, 2001
This collection of recent work in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar focuses on interfaces between different grammatical components; its fifteen papers explore interface phenomena such as auxiliary contraction in English, analysis of illocutionary force in HPSG, syntactic and semantic aspects of Korean relative clause formation, negation in Welsh, and several others.
[more]

front cover of Language and Grammar
Language and Grammar
Studies in Mathematical Linguistics and Natural Language
Claudia Casadio
CSLI, 2004
The application of logic to grammar is a fundamental issue in philosophy and has been investigated by such renowned philosophers as Leibniz, Bolzano, Frege, and Husserl. Language and Grammar examines categorial grammars and type-logical grammars, two linguistic theories that play a significant role in this area of study yet have been overshadowed until recently. The prominent scholars contributing to this volume also explore the impact of the Lambek program on linguistics and logical grammar, producing, ultimately, an exciting and important resource that demonstrates how type-logical grammars are promising future models of reasoning and computation.
[more]

front cover of Studies in Weak Arithmetics, Volume 3
Studies in Weak Arithmetics, Volume 3
Patrick Cegielski
CSLI, 2013
The field of weak arithmetics is an application of logical methods to number theory that was developed by mathematicians, philosophers, and theoretical computer scientists. This third volume in the weak arithmetics collection contains nine substantive papers based on lectures delivered during the two last meetings of the conference series Journées sur les Arithmétiques, held in 2014 at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and in 2015 at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
[more]

front cover of The Possibility of Language
The Possibility of Language
Internal Tensions in Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Maria Cerezo
CSLI, 2003
In this volume, Maria Cerezo examines Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a response to some of Frege's and Russel's logical problems. In analyzing the tractarian conditions for the possibility of language, she explains the two main theories of the proposition in Tractatus: the truth-functions theory and the picture theory. Cerezo shows that Wittgenstein initially separates the account of the structure of a proposition from the explanation of its expression. However, contrary to his intention, the combination of these theories creates new difficulties, since the requirements of each theory cannot be fully respected by the others. Cerezo also argues that Wittgenstein's theory of language cannot be fully understood unless attention is paid to his theory of expression and his doctrine of projection by the metaphysical subject.
[more]

front cover of Conversation and Community
Conversation and Community
Chat in a Virtual World
Lynn Cherny
CSLI, 1999
Conversation and Community is an examination of the speech community in an Internet 'virtual community'. Based on ethnographic research on a community of users of a MUD, or 'multi-user dimension', the book describes a close-knit community united in features of their language use, shared history, and relationships to other online communities. The author invokes the notion of register, or the variety of speech adapted to the communication situation, in her discussion of how users overcome the limitations of the typed, text medium and exploit its affordances for comfortable communication. Routines, conventional vocabulary and abbreviations, syntactic and semantic phenomena, and special turn-taking and repair strategies distinguish the MUD community's register. Because the MUD is programmable, commands may be added which reflect, alter, or reinforce the linguistic practices and culture of the community; competent speakers must also know the commands that produce the correct linguistic forms.
[more]

front cover of Optimizing Structure in Context
Optimizing Structure in Context
Scrambling and Information Structure
Hye-Won Choi
CSLI, 1999
This book examines the scrambling phenomena in German and Korean from the perspective that different ordering possibilities are motivated and constrained by interactions among syntactic, semantic, and discourse principles. Using Optimality Theory, Optimizing Structure in Context demonstrates how these principles from different modules of grammar interact and thus resolve conflicts among themselves to yield the most optimal output, that is, a sentence with a particular word order, in a given semantic and discoursal context. This way, it explains various meaning-related effects associated with scrambling such as definiteness effect and focus effect. While developing constraints in the discourse domain, it also proposes a new model of information structure based on basic discourse features. By expanding the core idea of constraint interaction in Optimality Theory to interactions 'between' modules of grammar as well as 'between', this book provides a model of interface theory.
[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 2
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 2
Patricia Clancy
CSLI, 1993
Japanese and Korean are typologically quite similar, so a linguitic phenomenon in one language often has a counterpart in the other. The papers in this voulme are intended to further collective and collaborative research in both languages. The contributors discuss aspects of language acquisition, discourse, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonology, morphology, typology, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. The papers were presented at the Southern California Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference in September 1991. Contributors to this volume are Patricia M. Clancy, SeikoYamaguchi Fujii, Shoichi Iwasaki, Kyu-hyun Kim, Yoshiko Matsumoto, Shigeko Okamoto, Sung-Ock S. Sohn, Kyung- Hee Suh, Eunjoo Han, Jongho Jun, Ongmi Kang, David James Silva, Noriko Akasuka, Shoji Azuma, Sooja Choi, Bruce L. Derwing, Yeo Bom Yoon, Sook Whan Cho, Tsuyoshi Ono, Hiroko Yamashita, Laurie Stowe, Mineharu Nakayama, Ruriko Kawashima, Masanori Nakamaura, Shin Watanbe, Dong-In Cho, Stanley Dubinsky, Hiroto Hoshi, Yasua Ishii, Hisatsugu Kitahara, Masatoshi Koizumi, Jae Hong Lee, Sookhee Lee, Young-Suk Lee, and Shigeo Tonoike. Patricia Clancy is associate profressor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Acquisition of Japanese.
[more]

front cover of Constructions in Acquisition
Constructions in Acquisition
Eve V. Clark
CSLI, 2006
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.
[more]

front cover of Reflection in Rewriting Logic
Reflection in Rewriting Logic
Metalogical Foundations and Metaprogramming Applications
Manuel Clavel
CSLI, 2000
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.
[more]

front cover of Think Generic!
Think Generic!
The Meaning and Use of Generic Sentences
Ariel Cohen
CSLI, 1999
Our knowledge about the world is often expressed by generic sentences, yet their meanings are far from clear. This book provides answers to central problems concerning generics: what do they mean? Which factors affect their interpretation? How can one reason with generics? Cohen proposes that the meanings of generics are probability judgments, and shows how this view accounts for many of their puzzling properties, including lawlikeness. Generics are evaluated with respect to alternatives. Cohen argues that alternatives are induced by the kind as well as by the predicated property, and thus provides a uniform account of the varied interpretations of generics. He studies the formal properties of alternatives and provides a compositional account of their derivation by focus and presupposition. Cohen uses his semantics of generics to provide a formal characterization of adequate default reasoning, and proves some desirable results of this formalism.
[more]

front cover of Linguistics and Computation
Linguistics and Computation
Jennifer S. Cole
CSLI, 1995
This volume is a collection covering the diverse areas of psycholinguistics, syntax, computational linguistics and phonology. Abney's paper on Chunks provides an interesting new approach to phrase structure, motivated by psycholinguist data, something that is rarely done. Berwick and Fong provide a history of computational implementations of (Chomskyan) Transformational Grammar. Cole's phonology paper, arguing from Chamorro and English stress that cyclicity is not needed in phonology, is also preceded by a one-and-a-half-page introduction on why this is relevant to computation. Coleman's contribution summarises work on computational phonology and describes the York Talk speech synthesis system. Hirschberg and Sproat's paper describes a system they have written to assign pitch accent to unrestricted text in an RT&T text-to-speech system. This is very much applied natural language processing, but their system represents a more thorough-going attempt at doing this well than has been previously attempted, and this appears to be the first write-up of this work. Johnson and Moss introduce Stratified Feature Grammar, a formal model of language, inspired by Relational Grammar but formalised by using and extending tools developed in the unification grammar community. Finally, Nakazawa extends further Tomita's work so that computer science LR parsing methods can be applied to natural language grammars, here feature-based grammars.
[more]

front cover of Perspectives in Phonology
Perspectives in Phonology
Jennifer S. Cole
CSLI, 1997
Subject: Linguistics; Grammar--Phonology
[more]

front cover of Tokens of Meaning
Tokens of Meaning
Papers in Honor of Lauri Karttunen
Cleo Condoravdi
CSLI, 2019
Lauri Karttunen has done groundbreaking work in theoretical and computational linguistics. The papers in this volume present new, state-of-the-art work building on his numerous contributions. The first part includes papers on formal semantics, the focus of Karttunen's early career to which he has returned in recent years. The second part provides a natural extension of his semantic work: the formal analysis of meaning and reasoning and the integration of the lexical and ontological components to enable reasoning by computational systems. The third part focuses on syntactic analyses, including the structure of non-finite clauses and sentence embedding predicates and factivity. The final part of the volume deals with finite state methods and grammars, reflecting Karttunen's extensive contributions to finite state theory and technology and its application to natural language.
[more]

front cover of Situation Theory and Its Applications, Volume 1
Situation Theory and Its Applications, Volume 1
Robin Cooper
CSLI, 1990
Situation Theory grew out of attempts by Jon Barwise in the late 1970s to provide semantics for "naked-infinitive" perceptual reports such as 'Claire saw Jon run'. Barwise's intuition was that Claire didn't just see Jon, an individual, but Jon doing something, a situation. Situations are individuals having properties and standing in relations. A theory of situations would allow us to study and compare various types of situations or situation-like entities, such as facts, events and scenes. One of the central themes of situation theory is that a theory of meaning and reference should be set within a general theory of information, one moreover that is rich enough to do justice to perception, communication and thought. By now many people have contributed to the development and application of situation theory, constrained by the need to account for certain kinds of semantic phenomena, and by the need to give a rigorous mathematical account of the principles of information that underwrite the theory. This volume presents work that evolved out of the First Conference on Situation Theory and Its Applications held by CSLI at Asilomar, California, in March 1989. The nineteen papers included here fall into three categories. Those in Part I explore logical and mathematical issues that arise within situation theory. The papers in Part II connect situation theory with other approaches to logical issues, while those in Part III apply various version of situation theory to a number of linguistic issues.
[more]

front cover of Implementing Typed Feature Structure Grammars
Implementing Typed Feature Structure Grammars
Ann Copestake
CSLI, 2001
Much of the work in modern formal linguistics is concerned with creating mathematically precise accounts of human languages—accounts that are particularly useful in research involving language processing with computers. Implementing Typed Feature Structure Grammars provides a student-level introduction to the most popular approach to this issue, and includes software that allows users to experiment with modeling different aspects of language.
[more]

front cover of Handbook of French Semantics
Handbook of French Semantics
Francis Corblin
CSLI, 2003
This book focuses on the semantic particularities of the French language, covering five empirical themes: determiners, adverbs, tense and aspect, negation, and information structure. The specialists contributing here—including general linguists in France and French linguists in the Netherlands—take formal approaches to semantics and its interface with syntax and pragmatics, highlighting meaning in its relation to both structure and use. Their results should be of particular interest to French and Romance linguists who want to study French from a formal semantic perspective and to general linguists who are interested in cross-linguistic semantics.
[more]

front cover of Foundations and Methods from Mathematics to Neuroscience
Foundations and Methods from Mathematics to Neuroscience
Essays Inspired by Patrick Suppes
Colleen E. Crangle
CSLI, 2014
During his long and continuing scholarly career, Patrick Suppes has contributed significantly both to the sciences and to scientific philosophies. In this volume, an international group of Suppes’s colleagues, collaborators, and students seeks to build upon Suppes’s insights. Each of their essays is accompanied by a response from Suppes himself, which together create a uniquely engaging dialogue. Suppes and his peers explore a diverse array of topics including the relationship between science and philosophy; the philosophy of physics; problems in the foundations of mathematics; theory of measurement, decision theory, and probability; the foundations of economics and political theory; psychology, language, and the philosophy of language; Suppes’s most recent research in neurobiology; and the alignment (or misalignment) of method and policy.
[more]

front cover of Language and Learning for Robots
Language and Learning for Robots
Colleen Crangle
CSLI, 1994
Robot technology will find wide-scale use only when a robotic device can be given commands and taught new tasks in a natural language. How could a robot understand instructions expressed in English? How could a robot learn from instructions? Crangle and Suppes begin to answer these questions through a theoretical approach to language and learning for robots and by experimental work with robots.

The authors develop the notion of an instructable robot—one which derives its intelligence in part from interaction with humans. Since verbal interaction with a robot requires a natural language semantics, the authors propose a natural-model semantics which they then apply to the interpretation of robot commands. Two experimental projects are described which provide natural-language interfaces to robotic aids for the physically disabled. The authors discuss the specific challenges posed by the interpretation of "stop" commands and the interpretation of spatial prepositions.

The authors also examine the use of explicit verbal instruction to teach a robot new procedures, propose ways a robot can learn from corrective commands containing qualitative spatial expressions, and discuss the machine-learning of a natural language use to instruct a robot in the performance of simple physical tasks. Two chapters focus on probabilistic techniques in learning.
[more]

front cover of Logic Colloquium '92
Logic Colloquium '92
Lazlo Csirmaz
CSLI, 1995
Logic Colloquium '92, the European Summer Meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic, was held in Veszpre;m, Hungary, in August 1992. Two of the main themes of the event were algebraic logic, and axiomatisability and decidability of logical systems. The present volume contains a selection of papers that grew out of invited and contributed talks on these themes. Most of the papers have a strong interdisciplinary flavour as they investigate logical properties of formal systems by studying algebraic properties of corresponding classes of algebras, or vice versa. The remaining papers focus on connected areas from model theory and the combination of logics. This is a useful and timely volume on algebraic logic and related areas, with contributions by leading people in the field.
[more]

front cover of Studies in Weak Arithmetics, Volume 1
Studies in Weak Arithmetics, Volume 1
Patrick Cégielski
CSLI, 2009

The field of weak arithmetics is an application of logical methods to number theory that was developed by mathematicians, philosophers, and theoretical computer scientists. In this volume, after a general presentation of weak arithmetics, the following topics are studied: the properties of integers of a real closed field equipped with exponentiation; conservation results for the induction schema restricted to first-order formulas with a finite number of alternations of quantifiers; a survey on a class of tools called pebble games; the fact that the reals e and pi have approximations expressed by first-order formulas using bounded quantifiers; properties of infinite pictures depending on the universe of sets used; a language that simulates in a sufficiently nice manner all  algorithms of a certain restricted class; the logical complexity of the axiom of infinity in some variants of set theory without the axiom of  foundation; and the complexity to determine whether a trace is included in another one.

[more]

front cover of Studies in Weak Arithmetics, Volume 2
Studies in Weak Arithmetics, Volume 2
Patrick Cégielski
CSLI, 2013
The field of weak arithmetics is an application of logical methods to number theory that was developed by mathematicians, philosophers, and theoretical computer scientists. New Studies in Weak Arithmetics is dedicated to late Australian mathematician Alan Robert Woods (1953-2011), whose seminal thesis is published here for the first time. This volume also contains the unpublished but significant thesis of Hamid Lesan (1951-2006) as well as other original papers on topics addressed in Woods’s thesis and life’s work that were first presented at the 31st Journées sur les Arithmétiques Faibles meeting held in Samos, Greece, in 2012.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter