Search results for ""Centre for the Study of Language Information""

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.

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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.

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This volume collects landmark research in a burgeoning field of visual analytics for linguistics, called LingVis. Combining linguistic data and linguistically oriented research questions with techniques and methodologies developed in the computer science fields of visual analytics and information visualization, LingVis is motivated by the growing need within linguistic research for dealing with large amounts of complex, multidimensional data sets. An innovative exploration into the future of LingVis in the digital age, this foundational book both provides a representation of the current state of the field and communicates its new possibilities for addressing complex linguistic questions across the larger linguistic community.

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Japanese and Korean are typologically similar, with linguistic phenomena in one often having counterparts in the other. The Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference provides a forum for research, particularly through comparative study, on both languages. The papers in this volume are from the twenty-fourth conference, which was held at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. They include essays on the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics of both languages. Such comparative studies deepen our understanding of both languages and will be a useful reference for students and scholars in either field.

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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.

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Mathematical Structures in Languages introduces a number of mathematical concepts that are of interest to the working linguist. The areas covered include basic set theory and logic, formal languages and automata, trees, partial orders, lattices, Boolean structure, generalized quantifier theory, and linguistic invariants, the last drawing on Edward L. Keenan and Edward Stabler's Bare Grammar: A Study of Language Invariants, also published by CSLI Publications. Ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics, this book contains numerous exercises and will be a valuable resource for courses on mathematical topics in linguistics. The product of many years of teaching, Mathematic Structures in Languages is very much a book to be read and learned from.

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Bertrand Russell, the recipient of the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one of the most distinguished, influential, and prolific philosophers of the twentieth century. Acquaintance, Knowledge, and Logic brings together ten new essays on Russell's best-known work, The Problems of Philosophy. These essays, by some of the foremost scholars of his life and works, reexamine Russell's famous distinction between "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description," his developing views about our knowledge of physical reality, and his views about our knowledge of logic, mathematics, and other abstract matters. In addition, this volume includes an editors' introduction, which summarizes Russell's influential book, presents new biographical details about how and why Russell wrote it, and highlights its continued significance for contemporary philosophy.

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By relating grammar to cognitive architecture, John T Hale shows how incremental parsing works in models of perceptual processing and how specific learning rules might lead to frequency-sensitive preferences. Along the way, Hale reconsiders garden-pathing, the parallel/serial distinction, and information-theoretical complexity metrics, such as surprisal. This book is a must for cognitive scientists of language.

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In this companion volume to Bricks and Mortar, Jeffrey Scarborough and Raymond Ravaglia present a series of essays written by senior instructors and division heads at the Stanford Online High School (SOHS). These essays discuss the challenges of teaching particular disciplines, accomplishing particular pedagogical objectives, and fostering the habits of mind characteristic of students who have received deep education in a given discipline. Perspectives from the Disciplines also examines how SOHS' student relationships are in many ways deeper and more intimate than those found in traditional secondary schools.

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Donald E. Knuth's seminal publications have earned him a loyal following among scholars and computer scientists, and his award-winning textbooks have become classics that are often given credit for shaping the field of computer science. In this volume, he explains and comments on the changes he has made to his work over the last twenty years in response to new technologies and the evolving understanding of key concepts in computer science. His commentary is supplemented by a full bibliography of his works and a number of interviews with Knuth himself, which shed light on his professional life and publications as well as provide interesting biographical details. A giant in the field of computer science, Knuth has assembled materials that offer a full portrait of both the scientist and the man. The final volume of a series of his collected papers, "Companion to the Papers of Donald Knuth" is essential for the Knuth completist.

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This book offers a long-awaited unified and precise treatise on construction-based grammar. The approach to grammar presented here is the union of Berkeley Construction Grammar, as represented by the early work of Charles J. Fillmore and Paul Kay, with construction HPSG as pioneered by Ivan Sag, Carl Pollard, and others. The presentation of this theory in a detailed chapter by Sag presents the full outlines of a new approach to grammar. It reflects the confluence of two separate, although converging, traditions, and constitutes a novel synthesis.

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This book presents a sequence of interviews between Dikran Karagueuzian and prolific fiction writer John L'Heureux that investigate the nature of writing fiction and the writer's need to write. This conversation includes a discussion of contemporary fiction, its virtues and vices, and its distinguished practitioners, along with a personal perspective on writing novels as opposed to short stories. "Karagueuzian and L'Heureux" also explore L'Heureux's years as director of 'The Stanford Writing Program', detailing his relationship with some of his better-known students, and offering insight into what can and can't be taught in a creative writing program.

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What is the relationship between words and reality? Which are the best ways to convince or persuade other people? Besides philosophy and grammar, ancient Greeks developed rhetoric to answer these questions. The twentieth century brought the birth of semantics and pragmatics for a systematic study of linguistic meaning and linguistic acts. "Meaning, Intentions, and Argumentation" brings together the work of leading contemporary scholars approaching those issues from various perspectives - from the old disciplines of philosophy and rhetoric to the newest thinking on semantics and pragmatics - to illuminate crucial aspects of meaning, communication, argumentation, and persuasion.

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Similar words for similar concepts turn up in many widely scattered languages. Some linguists say this is chance while others claim that many if not all of the world's languages descend from a single prehistoric language. Yet neither position has been analyzed or supported with statistics. Computerized statistical techniques can be used to help determine whether or not words in different languages have ancestral connections. These techniques are explained and broken down to provide the necessary principles for those linguists with no background in statistics. This methodology measures the probabilistic significance of sound correspondences between short word lists. Many rules of thumb used to obviate chance resemblance are shown to decrease the power of quantitive testing. The procedures presented here are straightforward, but the author also presents the extensive linguistic work needed to produce word lists that will not yield nonsensical results. Examples analyze 200 words in eight languages.

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The use of diagrams in logic and geometry has encountered resistence throughout the years. For a proof to be valid in geometry it must not rely on the graphical properties of a diagram. In logic the teaching of proofs depends on the sentenial representations, ideas formed as natural language sentences such as "if A is true and B is true...". No serious formal proof system is based on diagrams. This text explores the reasons why structured graphics have been ignored in modern formal theories of axiomatic systems. The effects of historical forces on the evolution of diagrammatically-based systems of inference in logic and geometry are explored, from antiquity to the early 20th-century work of David Hilbert. From this exploration emerges an understanding that the present negative attitudes towards the use of diagrams in logic and geometry owe more to implicit appeals to their history and philosophical background than to any technical incompatibility with modern theories of logical systems.

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This volume traces the work and thinking of Charles Fillmore throughout his 30 year career. It is a collection which reflects his desire to make sense of the workings of language in a way that keeps in mind questions of language form, language use and conventions linking form, meaning and practice. Papers include: "The position and embedding of transformations in a grammar"; "Towards a modern theory of case"; "The case of case"; "Types of lexical information"; "Subjects, speakers and roles"; "Verbs of judging"; "On generativity"; "The case for case reopened"; "Topics in lexical semantics"; "On the organization of semantic information in the lexicon"; "Innocence"; "Towards a descriptive framework for spatial deixis"; "Monitoring the reading process"; "Some thoughts on the boundaries and components of linguistics"; "Frames and the semantics of understanding"; "Linguistics as a tool for discourse analysis"; "Pragmatically controlled zero anaphora"; "Grammatical construction theory and the familiar dichotomies"; "Clause connectives in Japanese and related mysteries"; "Constituency vs dependancy"; Humour in academic discourse".

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Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzle of Non-Existence contains 13 important new papers concerning the semantic and metaphysical issues arising from empty names, existence, and the nature of fiction. The contributors, some of the most important researchers working in these fields, develop and defend new positions on these matters and offer important new criticisms of the existing approaches. The book contains a comprehensive introductory essay by the editors which provides a survey of the philosophical issues concerning empty names, the various responses to these issues, and the literature to date. The book will be of special interest to philosophers of language and to those interested in metaphysics and the nature of fiction.

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Donald Knuth's influence in computer science ranges from the invention of methods for translating and defining programming languages to the creation of the TeX and METAFONT systems for desktop publishing. His award-winning textbooks have become classics; his scientific papers are widely referenced and stand as milestones of development over a wide range of topics. The present volume, which is the fourth in a series of his collected works, is devoted to an important subfield of Computer Science that Knuth founded in the 1960s and still considers his main life's work. This field, to which he gave the name Analysis of Algorithms, deals with quantitative studies of computer techniques, leading to methods for understanding and predicting the efficiency of computer programs. More than 30 of the papers that helped to shape this field are reprinted and updated in the present collection, together with historical material that has not previously been published.

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Wagiman is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken by about ten people in the top end of the Northern Territory. It possesses an unusual open class of words which Wilson calls 'coverbs'. Coverbs are responsible for conveying a wide range of mostly verbal and adjectival meanings. They are most frequently paired with an inflecting verb from a closed class to form a complex predicate: the coverb and inflecting verb jointly determine the verbal semantics and argument structure of the clause. This book provides a descriptive and analytical account of the behaviour of coverbs in Wagiman, especially their role in complex predicate formation. The author seeks to discover what governs which pairings of coverbs and inflecting verbs are possible, and how the meaning of the whole can be derived from the meanings of the parts. Wilson pursues a formal account of Wagiman complex predicates within Lexical Functional Grammar, seeing complex predicate formation as the fusion of Lexical Conceptual Structures.

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This handbook develops a methodology for writing and testing wide coverage, maintainable grammars. Parallel grammars for English, French, and German using Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) as a framework are used as an example. Parallel grammars are grammars with similar coverage in different languages which explore how similarly one can treat various phenomena cross-linguistically. This issue of the parallelism of the analyses is a central concern in maximizing portability and extendability of the analyses to other grammars and languages. For the grammar writer, this handbook provides a useful guide to the range of constructions to be considered in a wide-coverage grammar and the theoretical and practical issues which their implementation gives rise to. The interaction between theory and implementation is discussed, including the implementation of new theoretical developments in LFG such as coordination via distribution, functional uncertainty, and a featural analysis of auxiliaries.

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This introduction is concerned with the semantics of natural languages. The text examines what issues semantics, as a theory of meaning, should address: determining what the meanings of words of the language are and how to semantically combine elements of a language to build up complex meanings. Logical languages are then developed as formal metalanguages to natural language. Subsequent chapters address propositional logic, the syntax and semantics of (first-order) predicate logic as an extension of propositional logic, and generalized quantifier theory. Going beyond extensional theory, de Swart relativizes the interpretation of expressions to times to account for verbal tense, time adverbials, and temporal connectives, and introduces possible worlds to modal intensions, modal adverbs, and modal auxiliaries.

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Linguistic Databases explores the increasing use of databases in linguistics. The enormous potential in linguistic data - billions of utterances and messages daily - has been difficult to exploit. Many linguists have had to concentrate on introspective data with its inevitable blinders toward frequency, variation, and naturalness. Applications of linguistics have been handicapped. This volume explores the potential advantages of database applications to linguistics. Included in this volume are reports on database activities in phonetics, phonology, lexicography and syntax, comparative grammar, second-language acquisition, linguistic fieldwork, and language pathology. The book presents the specialized problems of multi-media (especially audio) and multi-lingual texts, including those in exotic writing systems. Implemented solutions are also discussed. The opportunities to use existing, minimally structured text repositories are presented.

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According to popular wisdom, humans never relate to a computer or a television program in the same way they relate to another human being. Or do they? The psychological and sociological complexities of the relationship could be greater than you think. In an extraordinary revision of received wisdom, Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass demonstrate convincingly in The Media Equation that interactions with computers, television, and new communication technologies are identical to real social relationships and to the navigation of real physical spaces. Using everyday language, the authors explain their novel ideas in a way that will engage general readers with an interest in cutting-edge research at the intersection of psychology, communication and computer technology. The result is an accessible summary of exciting ideas for modern times. As Bill Gates says, '(they) ... have shown us some amazing things'.

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This volume presents the author's view of the scope of linguistic description, insofar as the field of linguistics touches on questions of the meanings of sentences. Fillmore takes the subject matter of linguistics, in its grammatical, semantic and pragmatic sub-divisions, to include the full catalogue of knowledge which the speakers of a language can be said to possess about the structure of the sentences in their language, and their knowledge about the appropriate use of these sentences. In the author's view, the special explanatory task of linguistics is to discover the principles which underlie such knowledge. Fillmore chooses to study the range of information which the speakers of a language possess about the sentences in their language by thoroughly examining one simple English sentence.

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Sets out the basic theory of normal modal and temporal propositional logics; applies this theory to logics of discrete (integer), dense (rational), and continuous (real) time, to the temporal logic of henceforth, next, and until, and to the propositional dynamic logic of regular programs.

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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.

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This volume brings together papers from the Eleventh Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language Conference, held in Vancouver in May 2012. Cognitive studies of linguistics have begun to examine the interaction between language and other modes of communication, namely gesture, music, and visual images. Focusing on the interaction between creativity, cognition, and language, the contributors explore topics as diverse as metaphor theory, construction grammar, blending theory, and cognitive grammar. The interrelation of embodied cognition and language will be of interest not only to linguists, but to writers, artists, and academics from a range of fields.

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In this volume John Perry develops his "reflexive-referential" account of indexicals, demonstratives, and proper names. For this new edition, Perry has added a preface and two chapters on the distinction between semantics and pragmatics and on attitude reports. He reveals a coherent and structured family of contents-from reflexive contents that place conditions on their actual utterance to fully incremental contents that place conditions only on the objects of reference-reconciling the legitimate insights of both the referentialist and descriptivist traditions.

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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.

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Mathematicians at every level use diagrams to prove theorems. Mathematical Reasoning with Diagrams investigates the possibilities of mechanizing this sort of diagrammatic reasoning in a formal computer proof system, even offering a semi-automatic formal proof system—called Diamond—which allows users to prove arithmetical theorems using diagrams.

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Linguistic distinctions between the notions of a phrase, a word and their components are challenged by so-called particle verbs in German and similar features in other languages. Particle verbs look like single words, yet are typically assembled from word-like fragments that together behave more like components of a phrase than a word. Particle verbs have previously been analyzed as morphological objects or as phrasal constructions, but neither approach fits cleanly within its chosen framwork. The resolution presented in this book, is that particle verbs should be seen as lexicalized phrasal constructions. Emphasizing morphological and sytactic testability, over 100 colloquial examples are shown to break the rules of previous approaches while remaining consistent to the book's proposition. Preverb constructions (PVCs) are introduced and diagrammed to help distinguish particle verbs from similar constructions, and to demonstrate how structural and morphological factors have been misidentified in the past. All this reveals the roles of listedness and non-transparency in word formation and clarifies the conclusion that particle verbs do not form a definable class of words.

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This book presents an attempt to develop a theory of knowledge and a philosophy of mind using ideas derived from the mathematical theory of communication developed by Claude Shannon. Information is seen as an objective commodity defined by the dependency relations between distinct events. Knowledge is then analyzed as information caused belief. Perception is the delivery of information in analog form (experience) for conceptual utilization by cognitive mechanisms. The final chapters attempt to develop a theory of meaning (or belief content) by viewing meaning as a certain kind of information-carrying role.

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This book presents a new approach to the field of natural language syntax.

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This textbook/software package covers first-order language in a method appropriate for a wide range of courses, from first logic courses for undergraduates (philosophy, mathematics, and computer science) to a first graduate logic course. The accompanying online grading service instantly grades solutions to hundreds of computer exercises. The second edition of "Language, Proof and Logic" represents a major expansion and revision of the original package and includes applications for mobile devices, additional exercises, a dedicated website, and increased software compatibility and support.

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