CSLI Publications

This Volume provides a general overview of Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG), the synthesis of Berkeley Construction Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar that emerged from a decade of interactions between Ivan Sag, Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay and Laura Michaelis. The papers collected here also demonstrate the analytic value of SBCG for a variety of linguistic problems—some old chestnuts, others untouched by ‘mainstream’ theories.
Order this book.

Annie Zaenen's broad influence on the field of linguistics ranges from details of lexical representation to the architecture of formal linguistic theories. The fifteen contributed papers in this volume reflect three major themes from her research: Mapping from arguments to syntax; Views on syntax; Semantics and beyond.

For many of us, the presidential election of 2000 was a wake-up call. The controversy following the vote count led to demands for election reform. But the new voting systems that were subsequently introduced to the market have serious security flaws, and many are confusing and difficult to use. Moreover, legislation has not kept up with the constantly evolving voting technology, leaving little to no legal recourse when votes are improperly counted. How did we come to acquire the complex technology we now depend on to count votes? Douglas Jones and Barbara Simons probe this question, along with public policy and regulatory issues raised by our voting technologies. Broken Ballots is a thorough and incisive analysis of the current voting climate that approaches American elections from technological, legal, and historical perspectives. The authors examine the ways in which Americans vote today, gauging how inaccurate, unreliable, and insecure our voting systems are. An important book for election administrators, political scientists, and students of government and technology policy, Broken Ballots is also a vital tool for any voting American.
Order this book.

In this volume John Perry develops his “reflexive-referential” account of indexicals, demonstratives, proper names, and other fragments of language. On issues of meaning and reference, the philosophy of language in the twentieth century was shaped by two competing traditions, descriptivist and referentialist. The referentialist tradition holds that indexicals, demonstratives, and proper names contribute content that involves individuals without identifying conditions on them. In contrast, the descriptivist tradition holds that referential content does not explain all of the identifying conditions conveyed by names, demonstratives, and indexicals. Perry's theory, borrowing ideas from both traditions as well as from Burks and Reichenbach, diagnoses the problems as stemming from a fixation on a certain kind of content, coined “referential” or “fully incremental” content. 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.
Order this book.

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 nineteenth Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, which was held at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, in November 2009. The papers cover a broad range of topics in Japanese/Korean linguistics, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics.
Order this book.

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.
Order this book.

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.
Order this book.

Based on an exhaustive search of published sources and the author's firsthand fieldwork, Concreteness in Grammar explores the role of phonological form in the noun class systems of the Arapesh languages spoken in Papua New Guinea. Linguists have long known that from plays a critical role alongside semantics in the classification of lexical items. In Arapesh, virtually every possible final ending of a noun is represented in the paradigm of noun class and agreement markers, reflecting an interpenetraion of sound structure and grammar that many would disallow as wildly unconstrained. In this book, Lise Dobrin describes these formal patterns in order to reveal their naturalness and elegance, establishing their place in a typology of noun class systems and drawing out their significance for theories of grammatical architecture. A rigorous study of an endangered language, Concreteness in Grammar revisits the definition of a morpheme and looks at unusual language patterns to reveal the naturalness of grammar.
Order this book.

The philosopher Patrick Suppes has developed a unique and influential approach to studying the foundations of science—he combines an understanding of the main principles of scientific theories in axiomatic terms and formal models with a hands-on approach. While moving the study of the philosophy of science out of the parlor and into the lab, he often comes up with original results from the psychology of learning to the theory of measurement and quantum mechanics. This book searches for a common thread in Suppes's multifaceted work through a series of conversations with the man himself and illuminates many of the more challenging aspects of his philosophy.
Order this book.

This book completes the series of volumes that contain archival forms of the papers that Donald Knuth has written during a period of more than fifty years. The first few chapters contain material that "slipped through the cracks" and did not appear in any of the previous eight volumes. The last few chapters contain complete lists of everything that he ever published, together with finding aids by which individual items can readily be located. In the middle are several chapters of "table talk" that provide background for the entire collection; these chapters are transcriptions of informal lunchtime conversations that were recorded fifteen years ago. And everything is followed by the main reason for this book's existence, namely, a comprehensive index to all nine volumes of this series.
Order this book.

As one of the world's most eminent living philosophers, John Perry has covered a remarkable breadth of subjects in his published work, including semantics, indexicality, self-knowledge, personal identity, and consciousness. Looking particularly at the way in which he deals with issues of self, communication, and reality, this volume is organized in seven chapters that highlight a different aspect of Perry's work on the intersection of these subjects. A fundamental work for students and scholars, Identity, Language, and Mind explores questions that are not only essential in understanding Perry's writings, but also contemporary philosophy as a whole.
Order this book.

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.
Order this book.

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.
Order this book.

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.
Order this book.

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.
Order this book.

The revised and expanded edition of Relevant Linguistics provides a straightforward, accessible introduction to the basics of English phonetics, phonology, morphology, morphophonology, and syntax for education students and all non-linguistics majors.
Order this book.

The second edition of Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction expands and improves on a truly unique introductory syntax textbook. Like the first edition, it focuses on the development of precisely formulated grammars whose empirical predictions can be directly tested.
Order this book.