LINGUIST List 13.195

Thu Jan 24 2002

Books: Syntax/Grammar

Editor for this issue: Richard John Harvey <richardlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Christine Sosa, Syntax/Grammar: Coherence, Reference and the Theory of Grammar

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the availability of:

COHERENCE, REFERENCE, AND THE THEORY OF GRAMMAR:

Andrew Kehler (UC San Diego) ;
paper ISBN: 1-57586-216-6, $22.95,
cloth ISBN: 1-57586-215-8, $64.95,
231 pages.
CSLI Publications 2002.
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu 
email: pubscsli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736 (U.S. & Canada only) or
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search feature
to locate the book, then order).

Book description:

A natural language discourse is not just an arbitrary sequence of
utterances; a discourse must also exhibit coherence. Despite its
centrality to discourse interpretation, coherence rarely plays a role
in theories of linguistic phenomena that operate across clause
boundaries.

In this book, Kehler provides an analysis of coherence relationships
rooted in three types of 'connection among ideas' first articulated by
the philosopher David Hume: Resemblance, Cause-Effect, and
Contiguity. Kehler then shows how these relationships affect the
distribution of a diverse set of linguistic phenomena, including verb
phrase ellipsis, gapping, extraction from coordinate structures,
pronominal reference, and tense. In each of these areas, Kehler
demonstrates how the constraints imposed by linguistic form interact
with those imposed by the process of establishing coherence to explain
data that have eluded previous analyses. This book will be of
interest to researchers working in syntax, semantics, pragmatics,
discourse, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive
science, and philosophy of language.


Praise for "Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar":

"Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar is one of the most 
original books on discourse phenomena to be published in the last 
twenty-five years. In this work, Andrew Kehler argues persuasively 
that an adequate account of what look to be intrasentential, even 
purely syntactic, phenomena cannot be obtained except from a 
trans-sentential and inferential perspective. A truly surprising and 
important work!"
-David Israel, AI Center, SRI International

"This book is an extremely valuable contribution to our understanding 
of the interactions between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It 
will be a revelation for formal linguists who have overlooked the 
relevance of coherence relations among sentences in a discourse for a 
variety of syntactic and semantic patterns, for cognitive and 
functional linguists in search of a lucidly presented formal model 
for complex discourse patterns, and for computational linguists in 
search of a sensible and intuitive way of understanding discourse and 
coherence."
-Mary Dalrymple, Xerox PARC