This book broadens our concept of reasoning and rationality to allow for a more pluralistic and situational view of human thinking as a practical activity. Drawing on contributors across disciplines including philosophy, economics, psychology, statistics, computer science, engineering, and physics, Reasoning, Rationality, and Probability argues that the search for strong theories should leave room for the construction of context-sensitive conceptual tools. Both science and everyday life, the authors argue, are too complex and multifaceted to be forced into ready-made schemata.
Order this book.

Here is an innovative and enjoyable way to introduce students to the language of first-order logic. Tarski's World is intended as a supplement to a standard logic text or for use by anyone who wants to learn symbolic reasoning.

This package contains over one-hundred exercises from very basic to highly sophisticated. For the first time, with this edition, students have access to an Internet-based grading service called the Grade Grinder, which provides students with accurate and timely feedback on their work whenever they need it, day or night. A web-based interface allows instructors to manage assignments and grades for their classes.
Order this book.

This volume reflects the interests and honors the influence of Joan Bresnan's two decades of foundational work on Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). This comprehensive buffet includes contributions by leading linguists on language typology, synchronic variation, language change, constituent structure, function identification, subject condition, control, complex predicates, NP internal structure, wh-constructions, syntactic features, and lexical issues. Featuring an impressive range of empirical and theoretical research, this collection covers more than a dozen spoken languages as well as American Sign Language.
Order this book.

As 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 Fifteenth Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, which was held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. These articles cover a broad range of topics in Japanese/Korean linguistics, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, acquisition, and grammaticalization.

These studies, often comparative, deepen our understanding of both Japanese and Korean, and provide a useful reference for students and scholars in either field.
Order this book.

This volume collects papers that are at the cutting edge of research in computational as well as theoretical linguistics. As all of the papers represent research areas in which Ronald M. Kaplan has made foundational contributions, the papers in the volume represent a tribute to the vital role he has played in the development of computational linguistic research and linguistic theory, particularly within Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG).
Order this book.

Not limited to merely mathematics, probability has a rich and controversial philosophical aspect. Philosophical Introduction to Probability showcases lesser-known philosophical notions of probability and explores the debate over their interpretations. Galavotti traces the history of probability and its mathematical properties and then discusses various philosophical positions on probability, including Pierre Simon de Laplace's “classical” interpretation of probability, the frequency interpretation of Richard von Mises, the subjectivism of Frank Ramsey and Bruno de Finettit, and the logical interpretation proposed by John Maynard Keynes.
Order this book.

Here is the first textbook wholly devoted to computational semantics. A central question is how to represent meaning in ways usable by computers. Furthermore, can computers distinguish coherent from incoherent utterances, recognize new information in a sentence, or even draw inferences from a natural language passage? After the underlying theoretical issues are thoroughly introduced, complete implementations are presented of various fundamental techniques for computing semantic representations for fragments of natural language and for performing inference with the results.
Order this book.

What is it to have visual intuition? Can we obtain geometrical knowledge by using visual reasoning? And if we can, is this because we have a faculty of intuition?

This book addresses these questions. It shows how mainstream philosophers since Leibniz have wrongly ignored visual reasoning as a source of knowledge; and how even basic geometrical reasoning that uses diagrams can be explained without using any appeal to a faculty of intuition.
Order this book.

Here is an anthology of previously unpublished essays on self-reference from some of the most outstanding scholars in philosophy, mathematics, and computer science.

This volume is accessible to students and compelling for scholars as it reexamines the latest theories of self-reference, including those that attempt to explain and resolve the semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes.
Order this book.

Construction grammar offers a new framework in which to consider the consistent patterns for combining words and phrases within a language. Yet what counts as a construction as a child acquires language? How do children identify constructions? How are constructions linked to the acquisition of words and word meanings?

This volume covers a broad range of research on construction acquisition by children in a variety of languages, from the earliest rudimentary gesture combinations to the production of larger syntactic constructions and complex clauses.
Order this book.

This volume is a reissue of Papers in Lexical Functional Grammar, originally published in 1983 and out of print for years.

The papers herein deserve renewed access as they contain foundational ideas about the interaction between syntax and lexical semantics that remain highly relevant for current linguistic thinking. Written by contributors whose relevance in the field has withstood the test of time, the topics covered include Italian unaccusatives, Malayalam causatives, derived nominals, resultatives, and non-nominative subjects in Icelandic. The papers are concerned with how and where lexical semantic information should be represented and its interaction with the syntax. All of the papers advocate a representation that allows operations on predicate-argument relations and grammatical relations to be independent of structural configurations.
Order this book.

Regulus is an Open Source toolkit for construction of spoken command grammars, which has been developed since 2001 by a consortium whose main partners have been NASA Ames, the University of Geneva, and Fluency Voice Technology. Grammar development with Regulus is carried out using example-based methods and reusable grammar resources, which reduces the level of expertise needed and makes the process more automated. The Regulus approach is effective for building command grammars even at initial stages of a project when there may be little or no domain data available. Regulus has been used to build command grammars for several major projects. Among these are NASA's Clarissa, which in 2005 became the first spoken dialogue system to be deployed in space, and MedSLT, an Open Source medical speech translator developed at Geneva University.
Order this book.

Deriving the correct meanings of such colloquial expressions as “I am parked out back” requires a unique interaction of knowledge about the world with a person's natural language tools. In this volume, Markus Egg examines how natural language rules and knowledge of the world work together to produce correct understandings of expressions that cannot be fully understood through literal reading. An in-depth and exciting work on semantics and natural language, this volume will be essential reading for scholars in computational linguistics.
Order this book.

This volume presents a series of state-of-the-art papers on current issues in formal semantics and pragmatics by a series of highly distinguished leading scholars whose own thinking and research has been directly influenced by the work of Barbara H. Partee. Focusing on issues that surround the semantics of quantification and reference in natural language, this collection of papers provides both an overview of topics in current research in formal approaches to meaning and a discussion of the origins of that research in Partee's own highly influential writings. Topics include the fundamental issues of compositionality and information structure, the analysis of tense and aspect, the issue of de dicto and de re meanings, and the nature of noun phrase meanings—names, indefinites, and English any. These contributions reflect both the wide range and the fertility of the basic problems addressed in Partee's work.
Order this book.

This volume is a reissue of Papers in Lexical Functional Grammar, originally published in 1983 and out of print for years.

The papers herein deserve renewed access as they contain foundational ideas about the interaction between syntax and lexical semantics that remain highly relevant for current linguistic thinking. Written by contributors whose relevance in the field has withstood the test of time, the topics covered include Italian unaccusatives, Malayalam causatives, derived nominals, resultatives, and non-nominative subjects in Icelandic. The papers are concerned with how and where lexical semantic information should be represented and its interaction with the syntax. All of the papers advocate a representation that allows operations on predicate-argument relations and grammatical relations to be independent of structural configurations.
Order this book.

The classical logic of Frege and Russell dominated formal logic in the 20th century. But a new type of weak relevant logic may prove itself to be better equipped to present new solutions to persisting paradoxes.

Universal Logic conceptualizes a new weak quantified relevant logic where the main inference connective is understood as `meaning containment'. This logic is intended to analyze naïve set/class theories. The volume begins with an overview of classical logic and relevant logic, and discusses the limitations of both types of logic in analyzing certain paradoxes. A summary on the history of logic segues into the author's introduction of his new logic modeled on the properties of set-theoretic containment. This book is the first to demonstrate how the main set-theoretic and semantic paradoxes can be solved in a systematic way, which is conceptualized independently of the paradoxes themselves.
Order this book.

This volume examines Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a response to some of Frege's and Russell's logical problems. In analyzing the tractarian conditions for the possibility of language, María Cerezo explains the three main theories of the proposition in Tractatus: the truth-functions theory, the picture theory, and the theory of expression. Cerezo shows that Wittgenstein initially separates the account of the structure of a proposition from the explanation of its expression. However, contrary to his intention, the combination of these theories creates new difficulties, since the requirements of each theory cannot be fully respected by the others. Cerezo also shows that Wittgenstein might have been somehow aware of these tensions.
Order this book.

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 Structure 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, but dissatisfied with current theories and models will find this an indispensable volume on the subject.
Order this book.

From the earliest applications in astronomy, music, and biology, to the design of today's user interfaces and search engines, geometric insights have provided powerful tools and accurate scientific predictions. In Geometry and Meaning, these threads are gathered together and told as a single evolving story. Mathematical models from ancient times to the present are described for the general reader, together with the stories behind their discovery, and their applications in the new and vibrant field of natural language processing. As well as a historical survey, Geometry and Meaning presents startling new research to the scientific public for the first time.
Order this book.

Semantic theory in linguistics cannot retain its traditional purity, free of pragmatic contextual considerations. Agreement with the preceding claim, generally shared by this volume's contributors, provides the setting for a presentation of various provocative approaches toward a precise definition of pragmatics along with a reconciliation of pragmatics with semantics. Here is a collection of leading-edge work that examines the semantics/pragmatics dispute in terms of phenomena such as indexicals, proper names, conventional and conversational implicatures, procedural meaning, and semantic underdetermination.
Order this book.

The strict separation of syntax and morphology along with the rejection of derivational operations in structural syntax are two of several principles in contemporary lexicalist theories. The syntactic theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) recognizes that this separation between syntax and morphology applies only to a structural domain but also that both are equal, interacting, and competing contributors in a functional domain. This book discusses the role of morphology in LFG, reintroducing two seminal papers on the impact of the development of LFG on morphology, while presenting new papers on current morphological issues.
Order this book.

Here are thirty-five original essays bringing together work at the crossroads of linguistics, psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, and related fields. These contributions apply a range of methodologies and perspectives to the problem of the relation of language to human culture and cognition, with an emphasis on how language is produced and understood in context. Topics considered include human categorization, cognitive and cultural models, embodiment, and the experiential basis of categories and conceptual structures, lexical and constructional semantics, and the distribution and formal properties of linguistic elements and constructions in a wide variety of languages. Some perspectives and methodologies represented among the papers are corpus-based methodologies, discourse analysis, language acquisition, contrastive analysis, psycholinguistic experimentation, and language change and grammaticalization.
Order this book.