LINGUIST List 11.2669

Sat Dec 9 2000

Books: Corpus/CompLing, Phono/Morpho, Lang Acquisition

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomilinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Paul Peranteau, Corpus/Comp Ling: Abduction, Belief and Context in Dialogue
2. Paul Peranteau, Phonology/Morphology: Sound Mutations by D. P. Banksira
3. Paul Peranteau, 1st Lang Acquisition: The Acquisition of Direct Object Scrambling...

John Benjamins Publishing announces this new work in natural language 
processing:

Abduction, Belief and Context in Dialogue.
Studies in computational pragmatics.
Harry BUNT (Tilburg University) and William BLACK (UMIST, Manchester) (eds.)
Natural Language Processing 1
US & Canada: 1 55619 794 2 / USD 90.00 (Hardcover)
Rest of world: 90 272 4983 0 / NLG 180.00 (Hardcover)

Language is always generated and interpreted in a certain context, and
the semantic, syntactic, and lexical properties of linguistic
expressions reflect this. Interactive language understanding systems,
such as language-based dialogue systems, therefore have to apply
contextual information to interpret their inputs and to generate
appropriate outputs, but are in practice very poor at this. This book
contains a number of studies in Computational Pragmatics, the newly
emerging field of study of how contextual information can be
effectively brought to bear in language understanding and
generation. The various chapters center around the conceptual, formal
and computational modeling of context in general, of the relevant
beliefs of dialogue participants in particular, and of the reasoning
that may be applied to relate linguistic phenomena to aspects of the
dialogue context. These issues are discussed both from a theoretical
point of view and in relation to their roles in prototypical language
understanding systems.

Contributions by: Jens Allwood; Robert-Jan Beun; Harry Bunt; David Carter; 
 Ahmed Guessoum and John Gallagher; Elizabeth Hinkelman and
 Stephen Spackman; Ralph Meyer; Philip Neal; Jon Oberlander 
 and Alex Lascarides; Allan Ramsay; Gisela Redeker; 
 G�rard Sabah; Martin Taylor and Daid Waugh; Elias Thijsse.



			John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Offices:	Philadelphia			Amsterdam:
Websites: 	http://www.benjamins.com	http://www.benjamins.nl
E-mail:		servicebenjamins.com		customer.servicesbenjamins.nl
Phone:		+215 836-1200			+31 20 6762325
Fax: 		+215 836-1204			+31 20 6739773

John Benjamins Publishing announces a new work in Phonology and Morphology:

Sound Mutations.
The morphophonology of Chaha.
Degif Petros BANKSIRA (MIT)
US & Canada: 1 55619 859 0 / USD 75.00 (Hardcover)
Rest of world: 90 272 2564 8 / NLG 150.00 (Hardcover)

This monograph, which evolved from the first linguistic dissertation
to be written on Chaha (an Ethiopian Semitic language), is also the
first book to deal exclusively with the phonology and morphology of
the language. It is an exhaustive description and analysis, by a
native speaker, of the sound patterns of this often misdescribed
language and deserves to be the standard reference on the phonology of
Chaha. The book presents a vast amount of new data and it unearths
some fascinating new generalizations about double linking, geminate
devoicing, nasalization of liquid consonants, phonotactic constraints
within morphemes, and palatalization and labialization triggered by
decomposition of a single back high round vowel.

The book also challenges the categorization of Semitic subject affixes
into prefix and suffix sets, instead proposing a novel classification
in which all prefixes and some suffixes form a set that excludes the
remaining suffixes. The generalizations and analyses are significant
not only for the study of Chaha and Semitic languages, but also for
phonological theory in general.



			John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Offices:	Philadelphia			Amsterdam:
Websites: 	http://www.benjamins.com	http://www.benjamins.nl
E-mail:		servicebenjamins.com		customer.servicesbenjamins.nl
Phone:		+215 836-1200			+31 20 6762325
Fax: 		+215 836-1204			+31 20 6739773

John Benjamins Publishing announces the following work in L1 acquisition:


The Acquisition of Direct Object Scrambling and Clitic Placement.
Syntax and pragmatics.
Jeanette C.SCHAEFFER (Ben Gurion University of Negev)
Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 22
US & Canada: 1 55619 840 X / USD 68.00 (Hardcover)
Rest of world: 90 272 2490 0 / NLG 136.00 (Hardcover)

This book offers a new contribution to the debate concerning the "real
time acquisition" of grammar in First Language Acquisition Theory. It
combines detailed and quantitative observations of object placement in
Dutch and Italian child language with an analysis that makes use of
the Modularity Hypothesis. Real time development is explained by the
interaction between two different modules of language, namely syntax
and pragmatics. Children need to build up knowledge of how the world
works, which includes learning that in communicating with someone
else, one must realize that speaker and hearer knowledge are always
independent. Since the syntactic feature referentiality can only be
marked if this (pragmatic) distinction is made, and assuming that
certain types of object placement (such as scrambling and clitic
placement) are motivated by referentiality, it follows that the
relevant syntactic mechanism is dependent on the prior acquisition of
a pragmatic distinction.



			John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Offices:	Philadelphia			Amsterdam:
Websites: 	http://www.benjamins.com	http://www.benjamins.nl
E-mail:		servicebenjamins.com		customer.servicesbenjamins.nl
Phone:		+215 836-1200			+31 20 6762325
Fax: 		+215 836-1204			+31 20 6739773