This volume considers and examines some of the phenomena that have led languages to be considered 'ergative'. Languages considered 'ergative' have only been sparsely studied, and many fundamental questions in their analysis seem at best incompletely answered. This volume fills that void by focussing on some of the basic issues: when ergativity should be analyzed as syntactic or morphological; whether languages can be divided into two classes of syntactically and morphologically ergative languages, and if so where the division should be drawn; and whether ergative arguments are always core roles or not. Christopher Manning's codification of syntactic approaches to dealing with ergative languages is based on a hypothesis he terms the 'Inverse Grammatical Relations hypothesis.' This hypothesis adopts a framework that decouples prominence at the levels of grammatical relations and argument structure. The result is two notions of subject: grammatical subject and argument structure subject and a uniform analysis of syntactically ergative and Philippine languages. These language groups, the syntactically ergative and Philippine languages, allow an inverse mapping in the prominence of the two highest terms between argument structure and grammatical relations. A level of argument structure is shown to be particularly well motivated by the examination of syntactically ergative languages. A study of Inuit, Tagalog, and Dyirbal shows that constraints on imperative addressee and controllee selection, antecendent of anaphors, and the controller of certain adverbial clauses are universally sensitive to argument structure. Thus, these phenomena are always accusative or neutral, explaining why passive agents and causes can generally bind reflexives. However, constraints on relativization, topicalization, focussing or questioning, specificity or wide scope, coreferential omission in coordination, etc. are shown to be universally sensitive to grammatical relations. Examining just these phenomena, which are sensitive to grammatical relations, it becomes evident that many languages are indeed syntactically ergative, and so must be countenanced by linguistic theory. This volume combines good scholarship with innovative ideas into an important work that will appeal to a wide range of linguists and scholars.

Conceived by Johan van Benthem and Yde Venema, arrow logic started as an attempt to give a general account of the logic of transitions. The generality of the approach provided a wide application area ranging from philosophy to computer science. The book gives a comprehensive survey of logical research within and around arrow logic. Since the natural operations on transitions include composition, inverse and identity, their logic, arrow logic can be studied from two different perspectives, and by two (complementary) methodologies: modal logic and the algebra of relations. Some of the results in this volume can be interpreted as price tags. They show what the prices of desirable properties, such as decidability, (finite) axiomatisability, Craig interpolation property, Beth definability etc. are in terms of semantic properties of the logic. The research program of arrow logic has considerably broadened in the last couple of years and recently also covers the enterprise to explore the border between decidable and undecidable versions of other applied logics. The content of this volume reflects this broadening. The editors included a number of papers which are in the spirit of this generalised research program.

In this thoroughly revised version of 1992 Stanford dissertation, the author presents an extensive discussion of Japanese complex predicates. A broad range of constructions and predicates are discussed, which include predicative complement constructions, light verbs, causative predicates, desiderative predicates, syntactic and lexical compound verbs, and complex motion predicates. A number of new interesting facts are uncovered, and a detailed syntactic and semantic analyses are presented. On the basis of the analyses, the author argues that the notion 'word' must be relativized to at least three different senses: morphological, grammatical (functional), and semantic; and that this observation can be insightfully captured in the theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar. Previous proposals for each type of predicate that involve such mechanisms as argument transfer, incorporation, restructuring, etc. are thoroughly reviewed. Concrete proposals on the constraints on semantic wordhood are also made (an issue rarely discussed in the literature), drawing insights from cognitive linguistics.

John McCarthy's influence in computer science ranges from the invention of LISP and time-sharing to the coining of the term AI and the founding of the AI laboratory at Stanford University. One of the foremost figures in computer sciences, McCarthy has written papers which are widely referenced and stand as milestones of development over a wide range of topics. In this collection of reviews, McCarthy staunchly defends the importance of Artificial Intelligence research against its attackers; this book gathers McCarthy's reviews of books which discuss and criticise the future of AI. Here, McCarthy explores the larger questions associated with AI, such as the question of the nature of intelligence, of the acquisition and application of knowledge, and the question of the politics behind this research.

Because Japanese and Korean are typologically quite similar, a linguistic phenomenon in one language often has a counterpart in the other. The annual Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference provides a forum for presenting research that will deepen our understanding of these two languages, especially through comparative study. The papers in this volume are from the eighteenth Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, which was held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2008. The papers cover a broad range of topics in Japanese/Korean linguistics, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics.

This volume examines the behavior of clitics both in Italian and in certain southern Italian dialects in order to show that, even within a single language, clitics exhibit different properties. Monachesi argues against the existence of a special class 'clitics' whose elements exhibit variable behavior. Instead, she decomposes and assimilates their properties to those of well established categories. Motivations are thus provided for treating Italian object clitics as affixes. It is shown that both their morphosyntactic and their phonological behavior argue in favor of this assumption. Under this view, a lexicalist analysis is proposed which takes into account the phonological, morphological, and syntactic properties of Italian clitics.

Logic and Representation brings together a collection of essays, written over a period of ten years, that apply formal logic and the notion of explicit representation of knowledge to a variety of problems in artificial intelligence, natural language semantics, and the philosophy of mind and language. Particular attention is paid to modeling and reasoning about knowledge and belief, including reasoning about one's own beliefs, and the semantics of sentences about knowledge and belief. Robert C. Moore begins by exploring the role of logic in artificial intelligence, considering logic as an analytical tool., as a basis for reasoning systems, and as a programming language. He then looks at various logical analyses of propositional attitudes, including possible-world models, syntactic models, and models based on Russellian propositions. Next Moore examines autoepistemic logic, a logic for modeling reasoning about one's own beliefs. Rounding out the volume is a section on the semantics of natural language, including a survey of problems in semantic representation; a detailed study of the relations among events, situations, and adverbs; and a presentation of a unification-based approach to semantic interpretation. Robert C. Moore is principal scientist of the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International.

The fields of logic, linguistics and computer science are intimately related, and modern research has uncovered a wide range of connections. This collection focuses on work that is based on the unifying concept of information. This collection of nineteen papers covers subjects such as channel theory, presupposition and constraints, the modeling of discourse, and belief. They were all presented at the 1996 Conference on Information-Theoretic Approaches to Logic, Language, Information, and Computation.

Muskens radically simplifies Montague Semantics and generalises the theory by basing it on a partial higher order logic resulting in a theory which combines important aspects of Montague Semantics and Situation Semantics. Richard Montague formulated the revolutionary insight that we can understand the concept of meaning in ordinary languages much in the same way as we understand the semantics of logical languages. Unfortunately, he formalised his idea in an unnecessarily complex way. The present work does away with unnecessary complexities, obtains a streamlined version of the theory, shows how partialising the theory automatically provides us with the most central concepts of Situation Semantics, and offers a simple logical treatment of propositional attitude verbs, perception verbs and proper names.