In our multimedia age, text description presents many conceptual problems: texts, as cultural objects, cannot be interpreted without descriptions of genre, communicative conditions, and language, which positivist approaches have proved unable to provide. "Semantics for Descriptions" addresses itself as much to linguists as to computer scientists, arguing that rational hermeneutics can offer better descriptive methods by allowing the theoretical and practical conditions of text interpretation to be defined.

With unusual structural characteristics, Finnish and Saami offer interesting challenges to linguistic theories formulated around more popular languages. Grammatically, for instance, languages in the Finnic and Saami group utilize extensive systems of case inflection on nouns to signal a broad variety of relations that in almost all other languages require additional words. Phonologically, as another example, the phenomenon of "consonant gradation" is of particular interest to linguists.
This volume is the first to examine the phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics of Finnic and...

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...

What kinds of words can exist in natural languages? How are sentences constructed? What is the relationship between a word and the sentence in which it appears? How do language learners figure all this out? Presenting over a decade of original research, "Words and Structures" collects four influential papers that address the theory of words, the structure of sentences, and the relationship between the two. Jane Grimshaw sheds new light on the fundamental questions of the nature of word meanings, sentence structure, and language acquisition. Those interested in the puzzles of language learning...

While neuroscientists garner success in identifying brain regions and in analyzing individual neurons, ground is still being broken at the intermediate scale of understanding how neurons combine to encode information. This book proposes a method of representing information in a computer that would be suited for modeling the brain's methods of processing information.

Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs) are introduced here to model how the brain distributes each piece of information among thousands of neurons. It had been previously thought that the grammatical structure of a...

This collection presents papers in memory of Steven G. Lapointe, a distinguished professor of linguistics at the University of California, Davis, at the time of his death in 1999. Lapointe's work on morphology and its connection to other linguistic subfields was the basis of a workshop held at UC Davis in 2000. This selection of papers from that workshop discusses the relationship of morphology to phonology, syntax, and semantics, as well as the details of modern morphological theory forming a natural continuation of the intellectual developments in Lapointe et al.'s "Morphology and Its...

From Pythagoras's harmonic sequence to Einstein's theory of relativity, geometric models of position, proximity, ratio, and the underlying properties of physical space have provided us with powerful ideas and accurate scientific tools. Currently, similar geometric models are being applied to another type of space the conceptual space of information and meaning, where the contributions of Pythagoras and Einstein are a part of the landscape itself. The rich geometry of conceptual space can be glimpsed, for instance, in internet documents: while the documents themselves define a structure of...

An anthology of previously unpublished essays from some of the most outstanding scholars working in philosophy, mathematics, and computer science today, "Self-Reference" reexamines the latest theories of self-reference, including those that attempt to explain and resolve the semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes. With a thorough introduction that contextualizes the subject for students, this book will be important reading for anyone interested in the general area of self-reference and philosophy.

This anthology of essays from the inventor of literate programming is a survey of Donald Knuth's papers on computer science. Donald Knuth's influence in computer science ranges from the invention of literate programming to the development of the TeX programming language. One of the foremost figures in the field of mathematical sciences, his papers are widely referenced and stand as milestones of development over a wide range of topics. This collection focuses on Professor Knuth's published science papers that serve as accessible surveys of their subject matter. It includes articles on the...

"Tarski s World" is an innovative and exciting method of introducing students to the language of first-order logic. Using the courseware package, students quickly master the meanings of connectives and qualifiers and soon become fluent in the symbolic language at the core of modern logic. The program allows students to build three-dimensional worlds and then describe them in first-order logic. The program, compatible with Macintosh and PC formats, also contains a unique and effective corrective tool in the form of a game, which methodically leads students back through their errors if they...