LINGUIST List 6.1383

Tue Oct 10 1995

Books: NLP, Cognitive Science, Phonetics&Phonology

Editor for this issue: Ljuba Veselinova <lveselinemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. ,

NLP
Bod, Rens ENRICHING LINGUISTICS WITH STATISTICS: PERFORMANCE MODELS OF
NATURAL LANGUAGE 1995 148 pp., 90-74795-36-6/Pb, Academische Pers,
Amsterdam. For a copy at cost price ($12), contact: illcfwi.uva.nl
The book motivates a statistical enrichment of linguistics from
a cognitive point of view. It then argues for a linguistic performance
model which employs a very large language corpus, that stands for a
person's past language experience, in which each sentence is annotated
with its appropriate (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) analysis. An
analysis of a new sentence can be constructed out of combinations of
partial analyses that occur in the corpus. By combining the relative
frequencies of these partial analyses, the model is able to select from
all possible analyses of a sentence the analysis which is actually
perceived by a person. The book deals with six different realizations of
performance models, and goes into their formal, computational and
experimental aspects.
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
/O Nuall/ain, Se/an THE SEARCH FOR MIND
 USA: Ablex, 1995
 US $49-50 (cloth), US $24-50 (paper) ISBN 1-56750-138-9 (cloth),
 ISBN 1-56750-138-7 (paper)
 Distributed by Ablex (1-201-767-8450)
 The degree to which Cognitive Science as currently
conceived can aspire to be the science of mind is a difficult issue.
"The Search for Mind" proposes a radical new integrated approach
to Cognitive Science.
PHONETICS & PHONOLOGY
Hung, Henrietta J.; The Rhythmic and Prosodic Organization of Edge
	Constituents: An Optimality-Theoretic Account; 178 pp.; Prepaid
	US$24.00 + 3.50 p&h (US)/5.00 (CAN)/5.50 (Other). IULC Publications,
	720 E. Atwater Ave., Bloomington IN 47401. <iulcindiana.edu> For
	other titles, see our Web page at http://ezinfo.ucs.indiana.edu/~iulc/
This book addresses the phenomenon traditionally known as
Extrametricality, whereby a final constituent is sometimes excluded for
the purposes of determining the location of stress. Couched within the
framework of Optimality Theory, the analysis suggests that final stress
is non-rhythmic, and that depending on the position occupied by such a
constraint in the hierarchy of a given grammar, different effects will be
observed, one of these being Extrametricality. Following examination of
several languages exhibiting this phenomenon, a typological analysis is
given.