Rooted in Gricean tradition, this book concentrates on game- and decision-theoretic (GDT) approaches to the foundations of pragmatics. An Introduction to GDT, with an overview of GDT pragmatics research to date and its relation to semantics and to Gricean pragmatics is followed by contributions offering a high-level survey of current GDT pragmatics and the field of its applications, demonstrating that this approach provides a sound basis for synchronic and diachronic explanations of language use.

Can language change be modelled as an evolutionary process? Can notions like variation, selection and competition be fruitfully applied to facts of language development? This volume offers a rich spectrum of ways to elucidate these questions, confronting studies from the perspective of historical and creole linguistics with research in Artificial Intelligence and mathematical modelling of language change.

Contains a selection of papers presented at the 10th and 11th Meeting of the Association for Mathematics of Language, held in Los Angeles, CA, USA in July 2007 and in Bielefeld, Germany, in August 2009. This title reflects a range of theoretical topics relating to language and computation.

ThisbookdiscusseshowTypeLogicalGrammarcanbemodi?edinsuch awaythatasystematictreatmentofanaphoraphenomenabecomesp- sible without giving up the general architecture of this framework. By Type Logical Grammar, I mean the version of Categorial Grammar that arose out of the work of Lambek, 1958 and Lambek, 1961. There Ca- gorial types are analyzed as formulae of a logical calculus. In particular, the Categorial slashes are interpreted as forms of constructive impli- tion in the sense of Intuitionistic Logic. Such a theory of grammar is per se attractive for a formal linguist who is interested in...

Ernst Specker has made decisive contributions towards shaping direc tions in topology, algebra, mathematical logic, combinatorics and algorith mic over the last 40 years. We have derived great pleasure from marking his seventieth birthday by editing the majority of his scientific publications, and thus making his work available in a unified form to the mathematical community. In order to convey an idea of the richness of his personality, we have also included one of his sermons. Of course, the publication of these Selecta can pay tribute only to the writings of Ernst Specker. It cannot...