CSLI Publications

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Knowledge and Representation Albert Newen, Andreas Bartels, and Eva-Maria Jung

This compilation of cutting-edge philosophical and scientific research comprises a survey of recent neuroscientific research on representational systems in animals and humans. Representational systems provide their owners with useful information about their environment and are shaped by the special informational needs of the organism with respect to its environment. In this volume, the authors address the long-standing dispute about the usefulness of the notion of representation in the study of behavior systems and offer a fresh perspective on representational systems that combines philosophical insights and experimental experience.
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Selected Papers on Fun and Games Donald E. Knuth

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 that are often given credit for shaping the field; his scientific papers are widely referenced and stand as milestones of development over a wide variety of topics. The present volume, which is the eighth and final book in his series of collected papers, is the one that he has saved up for dessert: It's a potpourri devoted to recreational aspects of mathematics and computer science, filled with the works that gave him most pleasure during his 50-year career. Here you'll find puzzles, paradoxes, and appealing patterns: visual, numerical, and musical.
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Grammatical Framework: Programming with Multilingual Grammars Aarne Ranta

Grammatical Framework is a programming language designed for writing grammars, which has the capability of addressing several languages in parallel. This thorough introduction demonstrates how to write grammars in Grammatical Framework and use them in applications such as tourist phrasebooks, spoken dialogue systems, and natural language interfaces. The examples and exercises presented here address several languages, and the readers are shown how to look at their own languages from the computational perspective.
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Language from a Cognitive Perspective: Grammar, Usage, and Processing (Studies in honor of Tom Wasow) Edited by Emily M. Bender & Jennifer E. Arnold

This book is a collection of papers on language processing, usage, and grammar, written in honor of Tom Wasow to commemorate his career on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Tom is a professor of linguistics and philosophy. But more accurately, he is a renaissance academic, having done work that connects with many different disciplines, including formal linguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and philosophy. Appropriately, this book reflects the diversity of Tom's research and interests, including topics from multiple branches of linguistics and human information processing. These papers are written with minimal background assumed, so they can be used as teaching materials for beginning scholars. As such, this volume is a tribute to what is perhaps Tom's most lasting contribution to the field—the mentorship and inspiration he provided to his students and collaborators, many of whom have contributed to this volume.
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Conversations with John L'Heureux Introduction by Tobias Wolff

These conversations between John L'Heureux and Dikran Karagueuzian investigate the nature of writing fiction and the writer's need to write. They begin with a discussion of contemporary fiction, its virtues and vices and its distinguished practitioners. And from there to writing novels as opposed to short stories and on to the social life of the writer and the private life of L'Heureux. And finally they explore L'Heureux's years as Director of the Stanford Writing Program and his relationship with some of his better known students: Ron Hansen, Allan Gurganus, Tobias Wollf, Harriet Doerr, Kathryn Harrison, Alice Hoffman, Stephanie Vaughn, David Henry Hwang, Jeffrey Eugenides, ZZ Packer, Bo Caldwell among others... with a glance cast at what can and can't be taught in a creative writing program.
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World Color Survey by Paul Kay, Brent Berlin, Luisa Maffi, William R. Merrifield, and Richard S. Cook

The 1969 publication of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's Basic Color Terms proved explosive and controversial. Contrary to the then-popular doctrine of random language variation, Berlin and Kay's multilingual study of color nomenclature indicated a cross-cultural and almost universal pattern in the selection of colors that received abstract names in each language. The ensuing debate helped reform the views of anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists alike.

After four decades in print, Basic Color Terms now has a sequel: in this book, Kay, Berlin, Luisa Maffi, William R. Merrifield, and Richard S. Cook authoritatively extend the original survey, studying 110 additional unwritten languages in detail and in situ. The results are presented even more clearly than before, with charts showing the overall palette of color terms within each language as well as the levels of agreement among speakers. The raw data are also available online.
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Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Vol. 18 William McClure and Marcel den Dikken

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.
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Empirical and Experimental Methods in Cognitive/Functional Research Sally Rice and John Newman

This book consists of selected papers from the seventh meeting of the Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language Conference, held at the University of Alberta in October 2004. The papers fall into five main categories, reflecting the cognitive and functional orientation of the conference: reciprocity between lexis and syntax, semantic factors affecting form patterning, grammaticalization of basic verbs, form/ meaning pairings in discourse, and experimental investigations of language/mind and language/use interactions. In addition, a plenary paper by Nick Evans on complex events, propositional overlay, and the special status of reciprocal clauses is included.
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Let's Speak Twi: A Proficiency Course in Akan Language and Culture Adams Bodomo, Charles Marfo and Lauren Hall-Lew

Let's Speak Twi is an introductory textbook for those seeking proficiency in Akan/Twi, the most widely used and understood native language of Ghana. This book is a systematic introduction to Akan and Ghanaian culture through the language learning process. Included are exercises and activities that require active participation on the part of the learner. The book also serves as a useful companion for academics and others embarking on fieldtrips to Ghana and neighboring countries where Twi is spoken.
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Layers of Aspect Patricia Cabredo Hofherr and Brenda Laca

The eight articles in this volume reexamine the syntactic and semantic analyses of aspect that have been proposed mainly on the basis of aspectual expressions in English. The authors contrast expressions sharing an analogous morpho-syntactic make-up and some core distributional and semantic properties, drawing on a wide range of new empirical data from languages as diverse as Syrian Arabic, Urdu, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, and German. The papers address four aspect-related problems in particular: the grammatical and semantic constraints on the different readings of the present perfect, the semantic and syntactic analysis of auxiliaries, the impact of adverbial expressions on the aspectual properties of the sentence, and morphology-semantics mapping.
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Language, Proof and Logic (second edition) Dave Barker-Plummer, Jon Barwise and John Etchemendy

This textbook/software package is a self-contained introduction to the basic concepts of logic: language, truth, argument, consequence, proof and counterexample. No prior study of logic is assumed, and, it is appropriate for introductory and second courses in logic. The unique on-line grading service almost instantly grades solutions to hundred of computer exercises. It is specially devised to be used by philosophy instructors in a way that is useful to undergraduates of philosophy, computer science, mathematics, and linguistics.
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Syntactic Theory, 2nd edition: A Formal Introduction by Ivan A. Sag, Thomas Wasow, and Emily M. Bender.

Relevant Linguistics, 2nd Edition, Revised and Expanded: An Introduction to the Structure and Use of English for Teachers by Paul Justice.